Navigating sources of support and expectations are central to adolescents’ transition to adulthood. For upwardly mobile families in evolving collectivist cultures, expectations are shaped by cultural clashes, gendered norms, and filial piety. Based on focus groups with 40 adolescents (ages 14 to 18; 50% female), this study examined how youth in an urban Sri Lankan setting negotiate diverging cultural pressures, parental expectations, and social comparisons. Adolescents negotiated competing cultural values by selectively complying with family demands, reframing obligations as purposeful, and balancing between personal interests and socially valued careers. Parents’ persistent comparisons and high expectations often left adolescents feeling that no level of success was sufficient. Girls described heightened constraints tied to gendered expectations of obedience and family reputation. These findings illustrate how adolescents in collectivist settings negotiate tensions between tradition and autonomy through strategies that balance family obligation and personal agency.

Increasing global diversity of children and families calls for developmental sciences to incorporate the dynamic interactions of race, ethnicity, culture, and other contextual experiences. However, navigating ecological and cultural theories defies our disciplinary-based training. Promoting interdisciplinary multisector research is necessary. With parenting as a lens, I described my journey toward increasingly interdisciplinary and multisector research. Interactions among ethnicity, community, and socioeconomic status varied by developmental stage and context, resulting in revisiting conceptualizations of parenting. Further, through research-practice partnerships, cultivating a sense of purpose, apart from educational and career goals, emerged as significant for maintaining academic engagement and navigating an unstable and insecure job market. As president of SRCD (2021-2023), I emphasized and catalyzed transdisciplinary, multisector research to support children and families.

Future-oriented self-efficacy and behaviors are essential assets as youth move from the structure of school to more independent pursuits. Given that adolescence is a time for internalizing goals, it is possible that future-oriented efficacy and behaviors grow out of an emerging sense of purpose and are scaffolded by parents, teachers, and school counselors. This study tested the longitudinal relations between parental, teacher, and school counselor support and future-oriented outcomes, with the mediating role of sense of purpose, using a racially and ethnically diverse sample of high school students followed across three years ( n  = 645; 51% female; M age = 15.62 $$ {M}_{\mathrm{age}}=15.62 $$ ). Early support from parents and satisfaction with school counselors, but not positive relationships with teachers, were significantly associated with adolescents' sense of purpose one year later, which then predicted future-oriented self-efficacy and behaviors in the last years of high school. Adolescents' sense of purpose at Time 2 mediated the pathway from the support of parents and school counselors at Time 1 to the outcomes at Time 3. While these associations did not vary by gender or students' intended postsecondary pathways—whether work or college—there were significant mean differences in each subgroup's perception of adult support. Findings suggest the need for parents and counselors to prioritize fostering a sense of purpose and tailoring supportive strategies to meet the needs of students based on their gender and aspirations.

Youth purpose is a critical developmental asset linked to well-being, academic engagement, and vocational success. However, traditional assessments often fail to capture its complexity. This study introduces an innovative qualitative approach that combines semi-structured interviews with visual mapping to help adolescent participants articulate their journey toward purpose development. Thirty-eight diverse high school students participated in creating visual maps to illustrate their personal paths toward finding purpose. Results revealed three salient themes: (1) chronology, with the road map serving as a way to depict purpose development across time, (2) the common shapes of purpose paths, revealing insights into the developmental experience of purpose, and (3) complementary enhancements, with the visual maps enriching the interviews. This approach offers a rich understanding of how meaningful relationships and formative experiences shape adolescents’ purpose development and highlights the potential of visual methods to capture these complex processes. We discuss practical applications for educational and counseling interventions aimed at cultivating youth purpose.

Interpersonal and systemic racism and discrimination persist in our educational system—from primary and secondary institutions through college, despite the forward strides of desegregation, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Black Lives Matter movement. This special topic collection identifies and applies empirically and theoretically grounded conceptualizations of racism to improve our understanding of the experience of racism, interventions to mitigate it, and protective factors. The papers in this collection reflect two themes: 1) racial and religious identities in classrooms, schools, and universities, focusing on how educators mitigate and perpetuate systemic racism, including how White teachers understand the impact of race, how inclusive and antiracism curricula are received and rejected by future educators and clinicians, and the impact of exclusionary social networks in the hiring of teachers of color and 2) school belonging and climate, including documenting that students of color feel less safe, are disproportionately exposed to harsh discipline, question their belonging, and question commitments to diversity. The negative sequelae are concurrent and last into adulthood. In addition, there are several advances in theory and measurement, including assessing gendered and racial biases in teachers’ attributions about students’ abilities, frameworks for mitigating colonial and racialized trauma, and domains of antiracist activism to bring racial justice and equity to schools.

Race, ethnicity, and culture are central to human development and family life. However, early research pathologized these influences on African Americans. Pioneering scholars studying African American families challenged pathology-focused perspectives, laying the foundation for the strengths-focused culturally-anchored research that is now seen in the field. This article revisits this pioneering scholarship, rarely published in peer-reviewed journals, reintegrating them into the discourse on families so that their significance can be understood and recognized. Pioneering scholars offered nuanced theoretical frameworks, identified contextual and within-group variations, developed innovative methods to capture complexities and variation in African Americans' functioning, and presciently recognized researchers' positionality impacting research.

SYNOPSISParenting programs worldwide (and especially in low- and middle-income countries) support parents in their caregiving roles. Parenting programs are popular and prolific, but many outright fail to deliver meaningful effects or eventuate in only small effects. Incomplete consideration and execution of many design features of programs can account for these shortfalls. This article delimits several critical criteria surrounding successful design and evaluation of evidence-based parenting programs. Specific factors include important preliminary questions concerning details of program design, such as whether the topic of the parenting program specifies the aspect(s) of parenting to be encouraged or discouraged and what theory of change underlies the program; program design contents concern subject matter development, sources, and messages; program design components specify the delivery mode, effectiveness, location, and alignment; program design targeting and sampling concern whom the program is addressing, why, and whether the program is designed to be universal or targeted to a specific population; ensuring reliable and valid program measurement; and rigorous experimental standards that encompass evaluating program effectiveness, including randomized control trial or quasi-experimental designs and the selection of control and comparison conditions. Policy makers, program leaders, investigators, and, of course, parents and children all benefit when parenting programs are well designed.Objective.Design.Results.Conclusions.

How parents conceive of their role in their children's education and how researchers and practitioners conceptualize parental involvement are significant for understanding parental involvement in education and its impact on developmental outcomes. Parental involvement in education encompasses families' engagement at school, with teachers, at home, and with their children. Whereas schools are focused on what parents do in relation to schoolwork, parents experience their involvement as integrated into the rest of their parenting ideologies. This special issue considers a full breadth of parental involvement in education from homeschooling to involvement at school. Further, these articles focus on parents' understanding of their role through the lens of their ethnic, racial, and cultural background and how their role evolves across developmental stages-from elementary school to college. Finally, whereas most school-based conceptualizations of parental involvement in education are focused on academic outcomes, the field is challenged to consider a broader range of outcomes and emphasize nonlinear associations between parental involvement in education and developmental outcomes.

Purpose has been defined as an active engagement toward goals that are meaningful to the self (i.e., personal meaningfulness) and contribute to the world beyond the self (BTS). These BTS contributions may reflect the intention to meet a wide range of needs from family financial needs to more macro-level concerns, including social injustices. This study investigates the efficacy of a school-based program called MPOWER expressly designed by the authors to cultivate the BTS aspect of purpose. Previous research suggests that the BTS aspect of purpose has beneficial effects on school engagement, goal-setting abilities and orientations, and ultimately school performance. Ninety-four students participated in this study that utilized a randomized, pre-test-post-test between-subjects design to evaluate MPOWER (52 in MPOWER and 42 in the control group). The ANCOVA results indicated a significant increase in the BTS aspect of purpose among program participants, compared to controls. Moreover, participants had higher post-test levels of general self-efficacy and grade point averages, and decreased performance-approach (e.g., playing to be the best, comparing self to others) and performance-avoidance (e.g., avoiding risks of failure, fear of social consequences) goal orientations. Findings can be used to design programs that aim to cultivate students' intentions to contribute to the world beyond themselves, as well as associated personal benefits (i.e., goal orientations, self-efficacy, academic performance).

Numerous studies have demonstrated a negative relationship between community violence and youth academic achievement, but they have varied in their geographic definition of “community,” especially as it relates to proximity to students’ residences. We extend this by considering the independent relationships between academic achievement and violent events (from 911 dispatches; e.g., gun shots) at the neighborhood (i.e., census tract) and street-block levels. We use data from standardized Math and English Language Arts (ELA) tests from Boston, MA for 2011–2013. Exposure to community violence was partially independent between streets and tracts, with some students living on low-crime streets in high-crime neighborhoods or high-crime streets in low-crime neighborhoods. Initial regression models found that differences in a neighborhood’s violent crime predicted up to a 3% difference in test scores on both Math and ELA tests. Students living on high-crime streets scored an additional 1% lower than neighbors on safer streets. Subsequent models with student-level fixed effects, however, eliminated these relationships, except for the effect of neighborhood-level violence on Math scores. These findings suggest that future work should consider community violence at both geographic scales, but that in this case the impacts were only consistent at the neighborhood level and associations at the street level were seemingly due to spatial segregation of households.

This qualitative descriptive study analyzed the role that natural mentors had in cultivating a sense of purpose and meaning among 38 diverse male and female high school students. The types of mentoring support provided and the students’ perceived experiences of receiving the support were considered in the analysis. Directed content analysis revealed four initial overarching types of supportive actions that were provided by mentors: emotional, instrumental, informational, and appraisal support. The types of support offered were further categorized across three dimensions of perceived support by the mentees: (a) affirmation (e.g., the experience of emotional and appraisal support), (b) cultivation (e.g., the experience of being challenged and obtaining skills), and (c) guidance (e.g., the experience of receiving information and advice). In order for mentees to perceive and accept cultivation and guidance support, they first needed to experience an affirming relationship with their mentors. Findings may inform best practices for mentoring youth toward lives of meaning and purpose.

The Specificity Principle provides a framework for understanding the diversity of human experience in ways that are essential to forwarding developmental science. This special issue exemplifies just some of the ways in which the Specificity Principle can be applied to improve our theory, method, measurement, and application of developmental science to improve human lives. This commentary situates the Specificity Principle within the philosophy of science as it relates to developmental science. Applying the Specificity Principle and embracing the diversity of human experience and individual developmental pathways require that the field of developmental science conduct large scale normative, longitudinal, developmental studies on diverse populations, including ethnic minority subpopulations and those residing in the Global South. Furthermore, with the emerging opportunities for individualized prevention and intervention programs, it is essential that developmental science move away from means and averages and describe human development in all of its specificity.

In the current decade, the U.S. population reached historically high levels of ethnic-racial diversity and reelected the nation's first Black-White biracial President. Simultaneously, scholars also documented significant ethnic-racial inequities in education, increased xenophobia, and a racial climate that revealed deep-seated ethnic-racial tensions. Given this backdrop and acknowledging the significant role that families play in youths' abilities to navigate their social contexts, the current review focused on the literature on families' ethnic-racial socialization efforts with youth from the 2010 decade. Our review of 259 empirical articles revealed that there has been an exponential increase in research on family ethnic-racial socialization in this decade. Furthermore, although it is clear that family ethnic-racial socialization is a robust predictor of youths' adjustment, the associations between socialization and adjustment must be considered with attention to specific socialization strategies, the confluence of strategies used, and the unique contexts within which families' lives are embedded.

Introduction: Growing evidence indicates that identity-based victimization (IBV; e.g., discrimination) is traumatic, and associated with mental health and academic concerns. Youth with multiple stigmatized identities face a higher risk of both victimization and poor mental health. The current study enhances a growing research base on intersectional IBV by examining 1) identity, rather than attribution, 2) a range of IBV experiences, 3) both mental health and academic achievement, 4) the mediating role of discrimination across multiple social identities, and 5) including gender expansive youth within a diverse sample representative of a high school population in the U.S. Methods: A cluster analysis was conducted to provide a nuanced depiction of intersectionality in a diverse sample of high school students (N = 946; ages 14-20, 44% cisgender boys, 53% cisgender girls, 3% gender expansive youth). Outcome and IBV differences across clusters were examined, in addition to the mediation of cluster membership and outcomes by discrimination. Results: Three distinct profiles of identity emerged: LGBTQ Youth (24%), Heterosexual Youth of Color (37%), and Heterosexual White Youth (39%). LGBTQ Youth and Heterosexual Youth of Color experienced the most IBV, and had higher levels of depression, lower wellbeing, and lower GPAs. Finally, discrimination partially mediated the association between identity and outcomes for LGBTQ youth, and fully mediated this association for Heterosexual Youth of Color. Conclusions: The disproportionately of IBV, poor mental health, and lower academic achievement faced by LGBTQ youth and youth with intersecting stigmatized identities suggests that they may benefit from tailored and targeted treatments.

The negative impact of discrimination on adolescent mental health is well established, but less is known about the effects of identity-based bullying (i.e., verbal or physical assaults targeting identity(ies)). The current study examined the impact of identity-based victimization (i.e., everyday discrimination and identity-based bullying) on mental health, and the protective role of teacher–student relationships, in a diverse sample of adolescents. Data from a diverse sample of 9th–12th graders (N = 986, 51% youth of Color, 52% cisgender girls, 22% sexual minorities, 41% free/reduced-price lunch status) in a semi-urban high school were analyzed using structural equation modeling analyses, including moderation and multi-group comparisons. Findings indicated that identity-based victimization is pervasive and negatively associated with mental health. Adolescents with stigmatized identities across sexual orientation, race, and gender faced a higher risk of experiencing identity-based victimization, and mental health challenges. Teacher–student relationships that were positive and autonomy-enhancing had a moderating effect on the association between identity-based victimization and mental health for many adolescents, such that they were not protective for those experiencing more severe victimization (i.e., high discrimination or identity-based bullying). Multigroup analyses indicated significant model fit differences across race and gender. Results suggest that extant school-based supports are not enough to combat the pervasive effects of identity-based victimization. Findings support the examination and implementation of changes in clinical and school-based practice and policy to better support stigmatized and victimized adolescents.