Warmth Is the Engine: What a Global Study of Youth Thriving Tells Us About Mentoring
By Jean Rhodes
A rigorous new study, published in the Journal of Research on Adolescence, has implications for the field of mentoring. In it, psychologist Marc Bornstein and colleagues followed 1,338 adolescents across nine countries, from China to Colombia to Kenya to the United States, tracking their levels of positive youth development (PYD) from age 13 to age 21. Families were recruited from urban areas across the socioeconomic spectrum in each country, data were collected at eight time points over more than a decade, mothers, fathers, and adolescents all served as reporters, and the research team used latent growth curve modeling to separate initial levels of thriving from how those levels changed over time.
The study measured five characteristics of PYD using the well-validated EPOCH instrument, which captures engagement, perseverance, optimism, connectedness, and happiness. These are important outcomes. Perseverance, for example, has been shown to predict educational attainment, college GPA, and military retention above and beyond IQ and conscientiousness. Connectedness in adolescence has been linked in nationally representative U.S. data to reduced suicidal ideation, lower rates of substance misuse, and fewer experiences of violence well into adulthood.
Major Findings: The study’s most consistent finding, holding across all income levels and all nine countries, was that parental warmth is vital. When caregivers were emotionally available, affectionate, and responsive during childhood, young people entered adolescence with stronger foundations for thriving, and that advantage persisted. These results can also apply to other caring adults. In fact, Bornstein and colleagues are explicit that PYD develops from “warm, trusting, and nurturing relationships between youth and caring and competent adults,” a framing that aligns with work in youth mentoring. It reflects a body of developmental science that has consistently shown that what young people most need is genuine emotional investment from a caring adult.
Parental Control: Parental behavioral control, meaning the monitoring and regulation of children’s behavior, had different effects depending on national income level. In lower-middle-income contexts, control was associated with higher initial PYD and positive growth over time. This makes developmental sense. When neighborhoods carry genuine risks, when safety is not a given, a parent who monitors closely and sets firm boundaries is doing something protective. Structure in that context is a form of care. In upper-middle-income contexts, however, higher control was associated with lower initial PYD, suggesting that the same behavior may affect youth differently when external risks are lower and young people have more room to develop autonomy.The kind of structure and oversight a young person needs depends heavily on the contexts they are actually navigating.
As the authors note: “Warmth appears to act as a common protective correlate of adolescent PYD, whereas control appears to constitute a protective correlate in some cultural contexts but a risk correlate in other cultural contexts.”
Background Variables:Notably, adolescent gender produced almost no effects on PYD trajectories. In a field characterized by growing alarm about boys falling behind, the absence of any gender effect on thriving is itself a notable finding . Likewise, parental education, often treated as a reliable proxy for developmental advantage, was unrelated to PYD across the entire sample.
PYD trajectories did differ substantially by country income level. Adolescents in lower-middle-income countries began adolescence with the highest average PYD scores, at 3.50 on a 4-point scale, then declined but showed a decelerating pattern suggesting some recovery. Those in high-income countries began slightly lower at 2.96 and declined steadily at a rate of about one tenth of a scale point per year, with no sign of leveling off. The finding that greater national wealth did not protect young people from declines in thriving across adolescence is consistent with research. Noelle Hurd (2024) has described “skin-deep resilience,” the phenomenon by which striving and high-effort coping in competitive, individualistic environments can exact costs on long-term well-being, even among those who appear to be succeeding.
The bottom line is that, across languages, economies, and cultures, across children of different genders and family configurations and national histories, what most reliably lifts the starting point of young people’s capacity for engagement, perseverance, optimism, connectedness, and happiness is being warmly known by a caring adult. Mentoring, at its best, is an expression of exactly that.
References
Bornstein, M. H., Gorla, L., Rothenberg, W. A., Lansford, J. E., Bacchini, D., Chang, L., Deater-Deckard, K., Fonseca, G., Di Giunta, L., Dodge, K. A., Gurdal, S., Junla, D., Oburu, P., Pastorelli, C., Skinner, A. T., Sorbring, E., Steinberg, L., Uribe Tirado, L. M., Yotanyamaneewong, S., Alampay, L. P., Al-Hassan, S. M., & Lerner, R. M. (2026). Positive youth development from early adolescence to young adulthood in nine countries: Intercepts, trajectories, and associations with parental warmth and behavioral control. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 36, e70189.
Hurd, N. M. (2024). Promoting positive development among racially and ethnically marginalized youth: Advancing a novel model of natural mentoring. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 20, 17.1-17.26.
Spencer, R., Drew, A. L., & Gowdy, G. (2023). Going the distance: A longitudinal qualitative study of formal youth mentoring relationship development. Journal of Community Psychology, 51, 3083-3102.
