Mentoring plays vital role in helping young people succeed

Mentoring is a topic that often comes up in discussions of how to inspire young people to achieve in life. Last year, the national president of CIS, Dan Cardinali, wrote a column in which he talked about a groundbreaking new report, “The Mentoring Effect: Young People’s Perspectives on the Outcomes and Availability of Mentoring."

"For the first time ever,” Cardinali said, "researchers surveyed a nationally representative sample of young adults, asking about the difference that mentors had made during their childhood years.”

The study’s findings? Young people with mentors in their lives:

• Set higher educational goals

• Are more likely to attend college

• Are more likely to participate in positive behaviors such as sports, extracurricular activities and volunteer opportunities

• Have higher levels of self-esteem and self-confidence

• Are more resilient when facing setbacks or challenges

"For anyone who works with kids, none of this comes as a major surprise,” Cardinali said. "We have decades' worth of literature showing the difference that mentors can make, but what's new here is the perspective of the young people themselves. Again and again in the pages of this report, we hear the voices of those who benefited from a mentoring relationship. They recognize the value of a mentor in their formative years. They know where they might have been without that relationship, and they almost always intend to 'pay it forward' by becoming mentors themselves."

Click here if you’d like to read “The Mentoring Effect” for yourself.