Entries by Jean Rhodes

Rule #1: Don’t minimize the importance of caregivers in mentoring relationships

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by Jean Rhodes Mentoring programs have not always appreciated the vitally important, positive role of caregivers in the success of mentor-youth relationships. In a large, multisite study, researchers found that staff and mentors often viewed mentees’ parents and communities primarily as “negative influences” (Lakind & Eddy, 2015). Such beliefs have a long legacy in youth […]

Five strategies for making stronger connections, backed by research

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by Jean Rhodes Care for some direct, research-based ideas for connecting with others?  I’d recommend a book that distills the essential findings of many studies.  Friend and Foe, by Business Professors Adam Galinsky and Maurice Schweitzer or Columbia and University of Pennsylvania, respectively. Compiled by Eric Barker, the authors provide evidence-based strategies for handling the everyday relationship tensions and difficulties. Some […]

What Poverty Does to the Young Brain

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BY MADELINE OSTRANDER For a growing child, deprivation and stress can become a kind of neurotoxin. The brain’s foundation, frame, and walls are built in the womb. As an embryo grows into a fetus, some of its dividing cells turn into neurons, arranging themselves into layers and forming the first synapses, the organ’s electrical wiring. […]

Back to the future in youth mentoring: Predictions for 2020

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by Jean Rhodes One of the benefits of remaining in the field of youth mentoring for so long is that I can look back over the past 30 years, and see both how much things have changed.  Like many psychologists of my generation, I was not exposed to empirically based therapies during graduate school. By […]

Stuff about oppression

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  acknowledge the role of ongoing racial oppression and the barriers to the pursuit of her dreams (CITE). Indeed, mentors are sometimes advised to avoid engaging in discussions about what might be considered difficult or taboo topics, such as money, politics and religion, or class, race, sexual orientation and culture.  Yet avoiding such topics may […]

The mentoring paradox, and how to solve it

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by Jean Rhodes In a forthcoming book, “Older and wiser: Rethinking youth mentoring for the 21st Century,” (Harvard University Press), I explore why the field of mentoring has remained somewhat decoupled from the more rigorous guidelines of prevention science, and has been granted considerable immunity from the consequences of disappointing findings over the years. Although […]

Trauma informed mentoring: Early trauma exposure raises risk for young women ADHD/self-injury

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by Yasmin Anwar   Exposure to abuse, neglect, or other traumas in childhood and adolescence puts young women with ADHD at a heightened risk of self-injury, a new study shows. The findings indicate that environmental factors can have a significant bearing on the negative psychosocial outcomes of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder—and also raise the question whether […]

Methods Corner: What is an effect size?

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by Adar Ben-Eliyahu, Ph.D. Most studies focus on “statistical significance,” or the probability that certain findings are reflected in the data. To test this, researchers actually propose a “null hypothesis,”  (e.g., mentoring has no effect on self-esteem). If the data show that the null hypothesis has less than a 5% chance of being right, we […]

Mentoring and the New Science of “Wise Interventions”

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  In his influential paper, The New Science of Wise Intervention, Stanford psychologist Gregory Walton argued for the importance of first developing psychologically precise theories of change that target the processes (e.g., maladaptive thoughts, behaviors, feelings, environments) that impede thriving and then developing interventions that efficiently target and alter these processes. Changes in these processes […]