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What is the Strengths Movement?
The Strengths Movement for youth is an educational and parenting movement that seeks to provide a new paradigm for the ways we educate and raise children.
The core principles of the movement are the following:
• Every child has a unique combination of strengths and when those strengths are nurtured, engaged and challenged, young people have the greatest opportunity to find success and happiness.
• Happiness and personal fulfillment are the result of meaningful work and meaningful relationships. The quickest path to this is a focus on strengths rather than human deficits and weaknesses.
• When teaching and learning is customized for the learner, higher quality work will result than when the environment is standardized.
• When young people are encouraged to work discover and work within their areas of strengths, they are most likely to develop talent.
Why Now?
Our schools are failing to prepare children to thrive in the 21st century. There are many good ideas about how to change that. This movement seeks to unite all those ideas and wrap them in one force field: discovery, development and use of strengths. What is a strength? It is what energizes you, differentiates you, make you feel useful and whole. Strengths combined with direction create a chain of positive and right actions.
Who has a stake in this movement?
Businesses--whose productivity depends upon the talent of the next generation.
Parents and educators, preschool through university--who share responsibility for finding the strengths in the next generation.
Organizations and institutions whose primary focus is working with youth development.
Students-- who have the biggest stake. After all, they are their strengths and it is their future.
What are some of the movement’s goals?
• Provide young people and the adults who are responsible for their upbringing the tools, resources, activities and curriculum needed to discover, develop and use their strengths.
• Help young people to love learning and discover meaningful, sustainable careers.
• Connect the organizations in a community to one another with a focus on learning and strengths.
• Educational policy reform at the national and state level that mandates programs and procedures focused on strengths, the whole child, career development, character development, individualization and multiple measures of achievement.
• Provide solutions for out of school youth to discover their unique paths in life. (Including drop-outs and incarcerated youth.)
• International acceptance of the tenets of the movement.