Quality of Relationship is Key to Mentoring
by Bonnie Benard

During the last decade a social movement has quietly but rapidly been gaining momentum: the "mentoring" of youth by adult volunteers. Commonly considered a one-on-one relationship between an adult and youth that continues over time and is focused on the youth's development, mentoring's popularity and increasing presence in programs concerned with addressing the needs of youth at risk for educational failure, teen pregnancy, delinquency, and substance abuse requires preventionists to take a closer look at the literature and research on this intervention. Specifically, we need to explore whether planned mentoring is available prevention strategy. In other words, does mentoring promote the healthy development of children and youth? The answer to this question is not a simple yes or no.

A powerful rationale for mentoring emanates from the longitudinal research of Emmy Werner and others who have found that child-adult relationships--that is, natural mentoring, provided not only by parents and grandparents but by neighbors, teachers, and other concerned adults--are a protective factor for youth growing up in stressful family and community environments. Werner and Ruth Smith stated in their seminal study of 700 youth growing up in high-risk environments that the key to effective prevention efforts is to reinforce, within every arena, the natural social bonds--between young and old, between siblings, between friends-- "that give meaning to one's life and a reason for commitment and caring."

Augmenting these rigorous, long-term examinations of life trajectories and outcomes are volumes of case studies, biographies and autobiographies of successful and famous individuals, and anecdotal observations of youths' lives that clearly identify the often pivotal role supportive adults played in the life success of the youth they mentored. For example, Bernard Lefkowitz's book, Tough Change: Growing Up on Your Own in America, is based on interviews with 500 disadvantaged youth, a majority of whom credited their success to the support of a caring adult in their lives. In fact, Public/Private Ventures recently initiated a number of research projects focused on mentoring based on the unintended findings from evaluations over the years of youth job training and apprenticeship programs that the bonds formed between the youths and the adults in the program were often the critical factor in whether the program had an impact on the youths' lives.

These social relationships are not an end in themselves, however, but provide youth with the motivation to access the resources, both internal and external, they need to succeed. Unfortunately, these strong natural ties have been splintered in the last 25 years as more women have entered the workforce, two-earner families have become common and necessary, single-parent families have increased, extended family networks have diminished, and economic bases have shifted. It is clear that the family and the community that traditionally provided social capital for youth are no longer able to do this for a growing percentage of our young people. And the impacts of these societal changes are most severe in the lives of disadvantaged youth.

For young people growing up in poverty, the financial capital is unavailable to purchase quality child care, quality schooling, and quality after-school programs that provide social capital in terms of additional caring adult support. Furthermore, given the exodus of middle-class African American families from inner cities, the children left behind lack the relationships with successful role models that were available to earlier generations.

The key question preventionists must address, then, is, "Can planned mentoring programs create the same positive outcomes as these mentoring relationships that evolved naturally?"

To truly answer this question requires longitudinal impact evaluations of planned mentoring interventions. Erwin Flaxman and Carol Ascher of the Institute for Urban and Minority Education state, "Successful mentoring can really only be measured overtime: by how efficiently the mentees move toward their own educational goals as well as toward career and personal goals that they may not reach for a dozen years or more after they have been mentored." Such evidence does not yet exist. "Unfortunately," Flaxman and Ascher note, "we know verylittle about what mentoring will accomplish, because there is very little research on its effects."

However, the program evaluation research that does exist clearly identifies the quality of the mentoring relationship as the major component in the successful outcomes for youth. Planned mentoring programs can be effective if a relationship between the adult and youth develops that is based on five components: personalized attention and caring, access to resources, positive and high expectations, reciprocity and youth participation, and commitment. As Ron Ferguson explains in his study of community-based programs for African American youth, "Caring relationships that provide affiliation (i.e., belonging) and security are the foundation of what programs provide....Without the affiliation and security of caring relationships, youth hesitate to incur the costs or to take the risks that conventional success requires."

Besides personalized attention and care, the mentoring relationship is intended to provide youth from disadvantaged environments with another form of support: an access to resources- -especially cultural and vocational--that they have systematically been denied. In this role of "ombuds person," broker, or advocate, adults not only can expose and link youth to services and opportunities and social networks, but can model as well as directly instruct the youth in the skills needed to successfully negotiate the bureaucratic intricacies of institutions like schools, colleges, employment agencies, and workplaces.

In addition to providing support to a youth, one of the major functions of a mentor is to convey to a youth the message that he or she can be successful. Herein probably lies the most essential requirement for an effective mentoring relationship: an adult attitude that views youth as resources to be nurtured and not problems to be fixed. Without this positive attitude, one cannot communicate high expectations.

While discussed far less often in the adult-to-youth mentoring literature than that on organizational mentoring, reciprocity is also an essential component in any healthy relationship. That a mentoring relationship is a mutually transforming one was confirmed in a survey of 800 Career Beginnings participants from 16 cities. Not only did at least half the students say mentoring helped them learn to succeed, improve their grades, avoid drugs, increase their regard for people of other races, and improve their relationships with teachers and family, but the adults also reported positive benefits, such as helping them fulfill their own responsibilities, strengthen their family relationships, increase their regard for people of other races, and recognize that they make a difference.

Probably the best way to communicate to a youth the message of positive expectations and to encourage reciprocity is to engage the youth in joint problem solving and decision making on an ongoing basis, thereby creating a truly collaborative relationship. This conveys the message that his or her opinion is listened to, respected, and acted upon. Furthermore, providing the opportunity fora mentored student to become mentor to a younger student (cross-age peer helping) is a powerful strategy for getting a student actively engaged as well as for spreading a caring ethic and reciprocity. For disadvantaged youth, many of whom have systematically been denied the opportunities to participate in a meaningful way in their schools and classrooms, a positive mentoring relationship can fulfill this very basic human need for power and control over one's life through active participation as both a mentee and as a mentor. While caring, high expectations, reciprocity, and youth participation are critical to establishing a viable mentoring relationship, they are all moot unless an adult is willing to make a "sustained personal commitment," in the case of planned mentoring programs, for whatever period of time is designated. By making a time commitment, both the adult and student are also thereby committing themselves to being predictable, available, accessible, and responsive--all antecedents to the development of trust and mutual respect in a relationship.

A real danger exists in "over-selling" mentoring as a prevention strategy. If mentoring diverts attention from the need to address deep-seated social problems noted earlier, then advocating this approach is clearly a means of "copping out"from seeking solutions in the political arena. We must work actively to convince others that money, time, commitment, social policy restructuring, and equitable taxation are necessary to build a society in which all youth are given the opportunity to learn and succeed. As a bumper sticker I recently saw stated, "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance."

EDITOR'S NOTE: For a complete discussion of mentoring programs, Benard's paper, Mentoring Programs for Urban Youth: Handle with Care, is available from the Western Regional Center for Drug-Free Schools and Communities, 101 S.W. Main Street, Suite 500, Portland, OR 97204,(800) 547-6339, ext. 486.In California, call SWRL, (213) 598-7661, or FWL, (415) 565-3000.[From Western Center News, September 1992, Vol.5, No.4]