Youth in Focus is a national collaborative of youth and family development experts. As individual organizations, we have spent decades training youth workers, social workers, teachers, counselors, health workers, law enforcement professionals and parents in how to build effective and respectful relationships with young people — even young people who have issues that make real connection seem unlikely.
After years of training independently, in 2015 we came together for two simple reasons — to consolidate our expertise and bridge the research to practice gap.
A new wave of brain science has created revelatory understandings of precisely what young people need developmentally to succeed. We always knew youth develop their own behaviors largely in response to the behaviors of the adults around them – not just parents, but youth workers, teachers, police officers, and neighbors, too. Now we understand why, and exactly which adult behaviors help and which slow down optimal development. Our training isn’t about guesswork, pie-in-the-sky thinking, or ideology. It’s about science and what we know to be true. We teach easy-to-implement, easy-to-transfer skills based in human biology and behavior.
