Essay: Young adults need social intelligence beyond school-based memory and analysis

Twenty years of research suggests that success once a young adult leaves home for a mission, college, career, or any endeavour beyond the home, will depend largely on their reasoning skills, an aptitude toward resilience, and a responsibility for actions. These skills encompass a social intelligence that goes beyond the school-based memory and analysis skills.  This social intelligence helps young adults capitalize on strengths while correcting or compensating for weaknesses and doing this through a combination of learned analytical, creative and practical skills that teach them to adapt and shape their environments.
But adolescents and young adults may need specialized help. If they’re still in school, they are learning how to handle new demands in their social life including new, intense emotions (both positive and negative), and they’re increasingly feeling that they need to do this without adult advice. One goal is to help them navigate these difficulties before they cause permanent harm to themselves or those they love.
Research shows that young adults can still transform their lives for the better, that they are still malleable. Most available programs today teach skills and invite participants to rehearse those skills over the course of many classroom style lessons—these programs have a poor track record with adolescents (roughly age 14 to 24), even though they work well with children.  Other programs are more focused on climate and environment in order to make the adolescent feel safe, wanted, and accepted, but they tend to fail once the young adult leaves the program.  Life Launch Centers stands out in its effectiveness with adolescents and young adults because of our focus on mindsets.  We harness adolescents’ developmental motivations and aim to make them feel respected by adults and peers and offer them the chance to gain status and admiration in the eyes of people whose opinions they value.
We focus our efforts on trying to help adolescents cope with their difficulties more successfully by improving skills and mindsets.  We offer an inviting and respectful climate that young people want to be a part of. This strategy document explains our model and helps define those terms and the changes that adolescents experience in this critical phase of life.
Alan Oviatt, MBA, ITM is a business development professional working with adolescent developmental psychology at the Arben Consulting Group, LLC
Espra Andrus, LCSW, CDWF from the University of Texas, Arlington reviewed and critiqued a draft of this document.  This document adapts information and arguments presented in papers and research articles listed at the end of this paper.
Business Model
Adolescence is a period of immense learning, exploration, challenge, and opportunity. But it is also a time when behavioral or health problems can begin to manifest themselves or worsen, with negative consequences or harm, that can last long into adulthood. For example, those who are victimized or bullied during adolescence may later become more aggressive and more depressed.⁠1 Extreme discipline in school can drive young people toward delinquency as adolescents and criminal behavior as young adults, even if not inclined to be delinquent in the first place (a phenomenon called the “school-to-prison pipeline”)⁠2. And failing to complete high school on time is a forecast for lower health, wealth, and happiness over a lifetime, even for those who later earn a GED⁠3.
It is additionally apparent that those who successfully launch from home are distinguished, in a large part, by their resilience in the face of humiliations, defeats and setbacks of all kinds. For those who do not have some kind of optimism–learned⁠4 or otherwise–it often seems easier to just let the world go by instead of engaging in it. What we don’t realize when we’re younger is that nearly everyone goes through these periods of stunning defeat or, at the least, uncertainty. The question is not whether you will go through it; but how you will come out of it.  But, for certain, it is not something they must go through alone.
And, just as academic work becomes more demanding and friendships become less secure, the brain’s method of processing these increasingly intense emotions is undergoing a significant transformation⁠5. The onset of adolescence—causes changes in brain structure and hormone activity that can make even minor social difficulties like peer rejection extremely painful and hard to deal with⁠6.  Those same biological changes also create a more acute thrill from risky behavior, especially when it might win peer admiration.⁠7 Lastly, adolescents expect more freedom and independence in their personal decisions like whom they choose to be friends with.⁠8
An effective adolescent and young adult learning program can transform young people’s lives for the better. Effective programs like ours can prevent catastrophic outcomes, such as unwanted pregnancy, arrests for violent crime, dropping out of high school, or death by speeding. They can also encourage greater thriving, including having less stress, better health, and a greater love of learning.⁠9  Improving adolescents’ inner social and emotional lives can spill over into other areas of functioning, because social and emotional life matters so much at this age. Given that an effective program can affect so many different outcomes, it can be very economically efficient.
Needs of the Adolescent
Adolescent maturation leads to increases or changes in the functioning of a number of hormones, including testosterone, estradiol, cortisol, oxytocin, and dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA-S).⁠10 All of these hormones are related to social and emotional functioning, but so far, testosterone has shown the clearest link to what most adolescent programs might typically do right or wrong.
In both males and females, maturation leads to a surge in the production of testosterone. Contrary to popular stereotypes, testosterone isn’t an aggression hormone, and it isn’t purely a sexual-desire hormone. It’s also a status-relevant hormone. When people’s testosterone levels are high, they’re more likely to focus their attention on markers of status and to respond powerfully when their status is on the line.⁠11 For example, one study found that testosterone predicts aggressive behavior when boys have deviant friends but leadership when they don’t— demonstrating how it focuses attention on the criteria for status.⁠12
Along with biological changes, adolescents experience psychosocial changes. Bradford Brown, a developmental psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, wrote in a report for the National Academy of Sciences that adolescents have four developmental tasks:⁠13
1. To stand out: to develop an identity and pursue autonomy;
2. To fit in: to find comfortable affiliations and gain acceptance from peers;
3. To measure up: to develop competence and find ways to achieve, and
4. To take hold: to make commitments to particular goals, activities and beliefs.
When programs honor adolescents’ desire to achieve these tasks—that is, when they respect the kind of person an adolescent needs and wants to be—they can capture adolescents’ motivation to change.