How can we promote the mental health of children and adolescents? Earlier sections in this volume have provided one answer to this question by reviewing what is known about the treatment and prevention of psychological disorders among youth: anxiety, depression and suicide, substance abuse, eating disorders, and schizophrenia. As valuable as these reviews are, the insights they provide are necessarily incomplete.

Imagine a society in which no young person meets the diagnostic criteria for mental illness, because treatment and prevention have been pervasively and perfectly implemented. No one reports any symptoms of a disorder. All risks have been purged. In such a society, individual suffering due to psychological problems is eliminated, along with staggering societal costs. Such a society is still not a psychological utopia. There are huge differences between a teenager who is not depressed or anxious and one who bounds out of bed in the morning with twinkling eyes; between an adolescent who says no to drugs and one who says yes to meaningful involvement in family, school, and community activities; and between one who costs society little and one who actually benefits it.

The field of mental health has long been one of mental illness negated, but young people who are problem-free are not fully prepared for the business of life, not if skill, talent, character, happiness, engagement, and social involvement are its hallmarks (Pittman, 1991, 2000). As important as it is to reduce or eliminate problems among children and adolescents, it is just as important to help them thrive and form positive connections to the larger world. If asked what they most desire for their children, few parents would say that “falling short of DSM diagnostic criteria” is their primary wish. Rather, parents want their children to be safe, healthy, happy, moral, fully engaged in life, and productive contributors to the communities in which they live (Noddings, 2003). These are the ultimate goals not only of all capable parents but of all viable societies.

So how can we promote the mental health of children and adolescents? In decades of focus on psychopathology, clinical psychology, psychiatry, and allied disciplines have begun the task of improving the lives of young people and the adults they will become. Effective treatment strategies and risk-based prevention programs such as those described earlier in this volume are among our most notable scientific achievements. But they represent a journey just begun. In recent years, these traditional approaches—all based on a disease model in which well-being is defined only by the absence of distress and disorder—have been challenged. Calls have been made for balanced attention to the positive aspects of human development as well as the negative ones.

Several contemporary approaches address people from the positive perspective—e.g., assets-based community development, competence-based primary prevention, the cultural strengths perspective, positive organizational studies, positive psychology, positive youth development, strengths-based social work, and the whole-school reform movement, among others (Maton, Schellenbach, Leadbetter, & Solarz, 2003; Peterson, 2004). These approaches overlap substantially in their basic assumptions about the authenticity of human excellence, meaning that clear distinctions among them are not always possible or even necessary. In the present contribution, we focus on positive youth development because of its explicit concern with how to encourage the well-being of children and adolescents. We also draw on positive psychology because of its interest in the underlying psychological processes leading to well-being and optimal functioning.

We should be explicit that the history of the positive perspective on youth development long predates its explicit recognition as a common viewpoint. Some of the best-known youth programs in the United States—e.g., YWCA of the USA (1851), YMCA of the USA (1855), Boys Clubs (1860) and Girls Clubs of America (1906), Girls Incorporated (1864), American Red Cross (1881), Big Brothers (1903)/Big Sisters (1908) of America, Boy Scouts of America (1910), Camp Fire USA (1910), Girl Scouts of the USA (1912), and 4-H (1914)—were founded a century or more ago to promote the health and character of young people through structured activities (Erickson, 1999). Today's positive perspective is rediscovering and reaffirming the premise of these programs.

More recently setting the stage for the positive perspective on development are humanistic psychology as popularized by Rogers (1951) and Maslow (1970); utopian visions of education such as those of Neill (1960); primary prevention programs based on notions of wellness, sometimes dubbed “promotion programs,” as pioneered by Albee (1982) and Cowen (1994); developmental theories emphasizing person–envionment interactions (e.g., Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Lerner & Kauffman, 1985); work by Bandura (1989) and others on human agency; studies of giftedness, genius, and talent (e.g., Winner, 2000); conceptions of intelligence as multiple (e.g., Gardner, 1983; Sternberg, 1985); and studies of the quality of life among psychiatric patients that went beyond an exclusive focus on symptoms and diseases (e.g., Levitt, Hogan, & Bucosky, 1990).

We should also note that the positive perspective on youth development is still evolving, and there are still gaps in the work. Notably, the positive perspective has been embraced most strongly by social scientists, who by and large have not placed optimal development in its biological context. All acknowledge that physical health, good nutrition, and safety importantly set the stage for positive development, and there is a growing interest in, for example, the ways in which temperament influences positive affect and life satisfaction. But the positive perspective is still detailed largely in terms of environmental and/or purely psychological (cognitive, emotional, and behavioral) influences on development, which makes it challenging to meld this perspective with the increasingly biological approach on disorder taken by psychiatrists and clinical psychologists. As the positive perspective matures, it will need to take into full account the contribution of biogenetic factors.

We stress that there is no incompatibility between a positive approach and one that is informed by biology (cf. Wright, 1994). When we criticize the “disease model,” we do not deny the existence of disorder or the important contribution of biology to disorder. Rather, we are criticizing this model as a global vision of human nature. The positive perspective is the necessary complement to one that focuses on disorder (and vice versa).

Another area in which the positive perspective must expand is the role of culture in defining and determining optimal development. Youth development practitioners have long taken seriously the importance of cultural (i.e., ethnic) differences within the United States, but a great deal of theorizing and research addresses youth development only as it occurs in the United States. The scope of this work must eventually include youth around the world, and we can expect to find both similarities and differences (e.g., Park, Huebner, Laughlin, Valois, & Gilman, 2004).

A third gap, or at least shortcoming, of the positive perspective is that some of its advocates may strike the skeptic as naively enthusiastic. Grim reality seems to be glossed over, and claims seem to be exaggerated beyond available evidence. We have argued elsewhere for the need to be even-handed about being positive (Peterson & Park, 2003) and for the importance of checking theories against the facts of the matter (Peterson & Seligman, 2003). As important as it is for social science to acknowledge and study human excellence, prescription should not override description and explanation. The positive perspective obviously resides in a value-laden domain, but so too does a focus on disease and distress, albeit more subtly. To be taken most seriously, the positive perspective needs to be based on good science. Enough good science already exists to justify continued interest in the positive perspective.

Our goal in the present contribution is to review the positive perspective as it exists today and use it to complement the more problem-oriented disciplines (cf. Larson, 2000; Maton et al., 2003). A balanced view of youth must acknowledge assets along with problems, addressing the good and the bad within youth in tandem, including risk factors and protective factors (Pollard, Hawkins, & Arthur, 1999). We have two working assumptions, each buttressed by some suggestive evidence: