Personal and Collective Action to Raise Healthy, Caring, Competent Young People: Defining Reasonable Responsibilities and Expectations for All Adults

Abstract

Multiple and contradictory cultural norms and assumptions about the young and about adults’ relationships with young people build a perceptual bias and create a frame of reference within which adults make decisions about personal and collective actions to benefit young people. We have alluded to adults’ various fears of negative consequences for getting involved as significant barriers to engagement with young people, and we will expand on that theme later. But a genuine norm about behavior operates only if there also are consequences for failing to do that behavior and/or palpable rewards for doing it. From this perspective, there is little predictable negative result most adults would experience for staying unconnected with kids, and little anticipated positive benefit from getting engaged. Public opinion polls suggest that the majority of American adults do support norms such as ″paying one’s fair share or assuming the obligation to help those who have helped you″ (Wolfe, 2000, p. 54). But how fully do such general norms of shared responsibility for others translate to expectations for adult behavior toward the young?