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Six Insights to Support Adolescents’ Fundamental Need to Contribute to Others

Six Insights to Support Adolescents’ Fundamental Need to Contribute to Others

Adolescence is an important time for contributing to others. During the developmental period between childhood and adulthood, we forge our sense of who we are and how we want to contribute to the world. Throughout our adolescent years, our physical, cognitive, and emotional capabilities mature in ways that allow us to contribute to our friends, family, schools, and broader community in deeper, more meaningful ways than when we were younger.

Opportunities to contribute, to reflect on the meaning of our contributions, and to have our contributions recognized can build our autonomy, agency, and identity and support our sense of purpose—the forward-looking feeling that our lives are directed and significant. All of these are important to positive development during adolescence, helping us navigate adversity and set and achieve goals in ways that can impact us into adulthood.

Brain and Behavioral Development Makes Adolescence a Key Period for Contribution

One of the important developmental tasks of our adolescent years is learning who we are and how we can contribute to the world around us. Contribution becomes especially important during our adolescent years—the beginning of puberty, around 9 or 10 years old, initiates a series of interacting changes in our bodies, social lives, and within our brains that make us particularly sensitive to our social environments as we continue to build and refine our cognitive and social abilities.

During adolescence, our sensitivity to social interactions increases and combines with other developmental changes including a growing ability to consider the needs and perspectives of others, motivation to explore and pursue new experiences,6 and a new desire to create meaningful relationships and feel respected by others.

Neural Systems Underlying Contribution

Research has highlighted a network of brain regions that support our emotional and social responses when we contribute to others.

The ventral striatum, which is active in how we process rewards, matures relatively early in adolescence. High levels of activity in the ventral striatum are associated with greater tendency for contributing behavior and a heightened ability to understand the perspectives of others. The temporoparietal junction and the medial prefrontal cortex, which continue to develop into our early 20s, are also involved in contributing to others, supporting cognitive functions such as memory and attention as well as sociability.

Opportunities to Contribute During Adolescence Support Physical and Mental Well-Being While Strengthening Our Communities

Creating opportunities for adolescents to engage with and contribute to the broader community can help foster social and emotional skills, cultivate positive relationships, shape identity, promote civic engagement, and impact well-being across physical, cognitive, social, and emotional domains.

Social and emotional development

Research suggests that contribution, service to others, and other prosocial activities play an important role in adolescents’ social and emotional development. Opportunities to contribute and to see contribution modeled by others can increase young people’s empathy and compassion, two essential skills for building positive and meaningful social relationships. Indeed, adolescents who engage in helping behaviors more frequently tend to have stronger relationships with their peers and are also more likely to be accepted and popular among their peers.

Mental and physical health

Research has linked contributing in adolescence to lower rates of depression as well as to decreases in depressive symptoms over time. For example, one study found that young people tend to experience higher positive moods on days they engage in helping activities. Another study showed that an intervention that assigned youth to perform acts of kindness for others increased positive affect and decreased stress in adolescents who tend to be more altruistic.

Contributing may also support physical health. Volunteering and other forms of contribution have been linked to lower inflammatory markers, cholesterol levels, and body mass index, and may reduce the negative effects of stress on health outcomes.

Adolescents with higher levels of depression show especially strong associations between prosocial (positive or helpful) behavior and positive mood, suggesting that interventions that support contributing might be especially effective for adolescents who are depressed. The positive impact of volunteering on adolescents’ depressive symptoms has even spurred experts to argue that volunteering should be incorporated into existing treatments for adolescent depression.

Social identity formation and belonging

Contributing within a community involves navigating new social environments and working with diverse groups of people towards a common goal. This process can help young people gain a deeper understanding of their role in society. Recognizing (and being recognized for) the impact of their actions on others can help young people feel a sense of purpose and self-efficacy, improve self-esteem, and boost a positive sense of identity.

Contribution can also help youth feel a sense of belonging and connectedness, increasing their motivation to improve society and enhancing their sense of civic responsibility. Research suggests that the skills young people learn from contributing support academic and career success, as contribution has been linked to better academic performance in adolescents. In addition, more civic engagement (including volunteering, voting, and activism) in adolescence is linked to higher income and education level in adulthood.

Educational outcomes

Incorporating contribution into classrooms and school curricula can help support positive development in adolescence. For example, a school-based intervention for middle school students that provides activities, conversations, and lessons about prosocial behavior was shown to increase helping behavior and decrease aggression40 and increase students’ grades by the end of middle school.

INSIGHT: Adolescents with higher levels of depression show especially strong associations between prosocial (positive or helpful) behavior and positive mood, suggesting that interventions that support contributing might be especially effective for adolescents who are depressed. The positive impact of volunteering on adolescents’ depressive symptoms has even spurred experts to argue that volunteering should be incorporated into existing treatments for adolescent depression.

An After-School Approach That Supports Adolescents’ Contributions to Their Community

An after-school program called Youth Empowerment Solutions (YES) was designed to promote middle school students’ positive behaviors despite institutional disadvantages (such as racism) they might have faced. The goals of the program included providing students with opportunities to learn about African history and African-American contributions to U.S. history, and to work to prevent youth violence and make other positive changes in their community. After completing the YES program, the young people involved were more likely to show helping behaviors toward others and less likely to engage in verbal or physical aggression. These benefits continued over the following year and were especially strong for Black youth, highlighting the potential for fostering positive youth development through programs that help youth develop confidence in themselves, think critically about their community, and become involved in community change efforts.

Policy and Program Insight

  1. Values Alignment: Contribution is most impactful when it aligns with a young person’s interests, values, and skills. Conversely, a mismatch between contributing activities and a young person’s interests, values, and skills may lead to stress and negative outcomes.
  2. Agency: Youth should have agency or a role in choosing the type of service, its parameters, and its evaluation.
  3. Impact: Adult facilitators should ensure that the project has a real impact, even if the impact is only on an individual person. Youth will discern if they are simply doing “busy work.”
  4. Reflection: To reap positive developmental impacts from service and attach meaning to the experience, youth should be given opportunities to reflect through discussion, journaling, or other outlets–either individually or with peers.
  5. Challenge: Youth develop a sense of efficacy through opportunities that challenge them to stretch themselves or otherwise extend some effort in attainable ways as they contribute to others.
  6. Connection: Social connections are important for adolescents and can encourage youth to contribute to others. Research has shown that adolescents’ (but not adults’) real-world helping is guided by their friends’ prosocial moral values. And when youth provide emotional support to their family, they are more likely to support their friends the next day, and vice versa.

Additional Resources

The Connecting Adolescent Brain

Fact Sheet

This fact sheet gives an overview of adolescent brain development and explains how access to resources, opportunities, and meaningful relationships during adolescence can build connections within our brains and with the world around us that support us into adulthood.

Brain development during adolescence is fundamentally a story of connections.

Around age 9 or 10, hormonal changes kick off a period of intense learning and development, when brain cells form, strengthen, and streamline connections in response to our experiences more rapidly than in any period of life after early childhood.

Activity increases especially in the brain networks that propel us to explore the world, learn from our mistakes, and connect with others in new ways. In turn, these new experiences prompt our brain cells to connect with other neurons in ways that help us adapt to new events and new information. These neural connections become stronger the more we use them, while unused connections are pruned away, helping the brain become more efficient at acquiring and mastering new skills and new ways of thinking.

This brain-building learning happens through direct experiences in our environments and interactive, responsive relationships—with our families and peers, in our classrooms and neighborhoods, in community activities, and even online. The resources, opportunities, and experiences we as adults provide in and out of school can help young people’s brains build the extensive networks of connections that will manage the complex knowledge and behaviors needed to navigate adulthood.

Learning by Exploring the World Around Us

One of the networks that changes significantly with the increase in hormones and dopamine at the beginning of puberty is the “reward system” in our brain. Heightened activity in this system increases the feeling of reward we get from exploring the world, taking risks, and learning from the results.

Meanwhile, the network of brain regions that make up the “social brain” also changes during adolescence. These changes help us tune into social and emotional cues, like facial expressions or social rejection and approval, and increase our desire to earn respect and contribute to others. It also enables us to learn the nuances of changing social contexts in ways that help prepare us for adult relationships.

The prefrontal cortex (the region of the brain that orchestrates critical thinking and behavioral control) undergoes its most rapid period of development during adolescence. It builds on many other systems within the brain to manage our responses to the flood of new information and intensifying emotions. Engaging with other people and our environment and learning from our successes and our mistakes, known as “action-based learning,” helps shape the prefrontal cortex by strengthening the connections within it and between it and other brain networks. We learn through repeated practice—which includes trying and sometimes failing—what is adaptive and appropriate in different situations and how to guide our behavior accordingly, in ways that equip us to pursue new forward-looking goals.

When adults provide youth with opportunities to try new things, to practice navigating emotions, and to learn from failures along the way, it helps build the brain connections that we all need to grow into healthy, thriving adults.

Policies, Experiences, and Mindsets Shape the Connecting Brain

Although we can continue to learn new skills and behaviors as adults, the adaptability of the brain during adolescence means that these connections are much more likely to form quickly in response to experiences. The extent of these changes make the adolescent years a critical window when investments in the right policies and programs for youth can shape long-term positive development.

Likewise, this makes the adolescent years a time when negative experiences including racism, other forms of discrimination, poverty, or abuse can create steeper hills for young people to climb toward a healthy adulthood. When adults ensure that all young people, especially those who have experienced earlier adversity, have what they need along their journey, they can build the skills and capacities they need to thrive as adults. This includes opportunities to explore and take healthy risks, to connect with and contribute to those around us, to make decisions and learn from the outcomes, to develop a healthy sense of identity, and to rely on support from parents or other caring adults.

Understanding how and why the brain develops during adolescence lets us provide the support young people need to build healthy connections—in their world and within their brains—that will help our youth and our communities thrive.

When Adolescents Contribute to Others it Supports their Well-Being and Their Communities

Fact sheet | Education | Community Engagement | Out-of-School Time

This fact sheet explains how opportunities to contribute to others can build our autonomy, agency, and identity and can support our sense of purpose during adolescence.

Adolescence is a time of remarkable opportunity and growth. In the years between ages 10 and 25, changes in our brains and social environments increase both our ability to contribute to others and the positive feelings we get from kind and helpful behaviors toward others.

When policies and programs support adolescents to find ways to contribute and cultivate their sense of purpose, it leads to healthier, more connected communities.

Adolescence is an important time for contributing to others. During the developmental period between childhood and adulthood, we forge our sense of who we are and how we want to contribute to the world. Throughout our adolescent years, our physical, cognitive, and emotional capabilities mature in ways that allow us to contribute to our friends, family, schools, and broader community in deeper, more meaningful ways than when we were younger.

Opportunities to not only contribute, but to reflect on the meaning of our contributions and to have our contributions recognized, build our autonomy, agency, and identity and can support our sense of purpose—the forward-looking feeling that our lives are directed and significant. All of these are important to positive development during adolescence, helping us navigate adversity and achieve goals throughout adulthood.

Research on adolescent development helps explain how opportunities to contribute to others support well-being.

Brain development during adolescence supports our ability and motivation to contribute to others. The network of areas in our brain that activates in social interactions matures rapidly during our adolescent years, deepening our understanding of the complex feelings, perspectives, and needs of other people. We become better able to determine who needs our help and what kind of help they might need. In addition, brain regions associated with our sensitivity to rewards become more reactive during and after puberty, increasing the positive feelings we get from novel experiences as well as kind and helpful behaviors, such as contributing to others. Connections between these regions also improve during adolescence.

Our social environments—including families and peers—can motivate us to contribute to others. Socially, we become more motivated to find a valued place and role among our peers. Contributing is one way to feel valued: studies have shown that students who are helpful, cooperative, and sharing tend to be more appreciated and liked than those who use fear or intimidation to gain status. Young people from families and communities where contributing is a particular value seem to feel more of a sense of reward when helping.,

The right support can help young people who have been marginalized. Being marginalized as a result of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or religion can also motivate adolescents toward a sense of purpose to help others in their families, schools, or communities through activism or civic engagement. Family engagement, adult role models, connections through religious or other community groups, and support to process our experiences can all help young people cultivate a positive sense of purpose.

Contributing to others provides adolescents the experiences they need to succeed as adults. Supporting friends and family builds the intimacy we need to form positive, long-lasting relationships in adulthood. Seeing that our actions can have a positive effect on the world can help us build a sense of autonomy, agency, and identity. Contributing to others also supports a sense of meaning and purpose, which are associated with greater emotional well-being, academic success, and resilience, all of which can be powerful assets as we navigate adversity and achieve goals throughout adulthood.

The opportunity to reflect on the experience of volunteering might be essential to ensuring positive developmental impacts from the activity. Reflecting on service we perform during our adolescent years—which can take place through journaling, art, essay writing, or group discussion—can help us consider the broader impacts of our contribution and attach meaning to the experience.

​​➢ Provide opportunities for young people to make meaningful contributions to their social groups and communities. Programs that support youth to contribute can have positive effects on their mental and physical health, support their academic success, and give them opportunities to explore ways they can be a force for good in our society, now and in the future.

➢ Policies and programs should address inequities in adolescents’ opportunities to make meaningful contributions in their everyday lives by ensuring that all young people have a range of options to contribute and to have their contributions recognized.

➢ Families are typically the first context where youth can contribute to others through common household chores such as cooking or taking care of siblings. Youth from many lower-income, ethnic-minority, and immigrant families play significant instrumental roles in their families, and the value of these contributions and the skills they require should be recognized by colleges and employers.

➢ While helping family is a type of contribution that can benefit youth, time-intensive caregiving can sometimes be a source of stress that negatively impacts mental health. Schools can support caregiving youth by offering flexibility in course schedules, awarding community service hours for their caregiving, and educating teachers and counselors about the experience of these youth. Learn more about how to support caregiving youth here.

➢ Involving middle and high school students in decision making around classroom and school policies like seating arrangements, learning activities, or grading practices has been shown to increase students’ motivation and connection to the school community.

Early Adolescence: A Window of Opportunity for Educators to Support Positive Mental Health

Council Report | Education | Mental Health | Out-of-School Time | Digital Tech

This council report from the National Scientific Council on Adolescence provides research-informed recommendations for middle-school and other early-adolescent educators to help promote mental health.

Early adolescence—roughly ages 10 to 13, or the middle school years—is a unique time in development. During these first few years of adolescence, young people experience accelerated physical changes related to puberty, rapid brain development, changes in self-image, and more intense peer relationships. These changes make young adolescents particularly sensitive to the relationships and experiences around them, creating a window of opportunity to support youth to build positive mental health.

Middle school educators can be a crucial first line in promoting each young person’s well-being. Teachers are not mental health professionals, but the time they spend with their students during this pivotal period of development puts them in a position to help youth build positive mental health and reduce the likelihood that mental health challenges become more severe over time.

This report from the National Scientific Council on Adolescence offers recommendations and resources for educators to support students based on four key areas that are especially important to positive development during early adolescence:


Resources cited in this brief

For more information, visit the resources called out within this brief:

In this online panel discussion, report authors Jennifer Pfeifer, Leslie Leve, Rhonda Boyd, and Joanna Williams, discuss with sleep expert, Ariel A. Williamson, what the research says on how we can effectively promote positive mental health during early adolescence.

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