Building Resilience After School for Early Adolescents in Urban Poverty: Open Trial of Leaders @ Play

Abstract

Leaders @ Play is a park after-school program for urban middle school youth designed to leverage recreational activities for social emotional learning. Mental health and park staff co-facilitated sports and games to teach and practice problem solving, emotion regulation, and effective communication. Additional practice occurred during multi-family groups and summer internships as junior camp counselors. We examined feasibility and promise via an open trial (n = 3 parks, 46 youth, 100 % African American, 100 % low-income, 59 % female, M = 13.09 years old). Improvements in social skills and reductions in problem behaviors lend support to after school programs as a space for mental health promotion.

Health Literacy in Schools? A Systematic Review of Health-Related Interventions Aimed at Disadvantaged Adolescents

“…The year of publication ranged from 1996 [59] to 2020 [76], with the majority published in the last decade (n = 35). A total of 22 studies were randomised controlled trials (RCTs) [47,48,51,52,55,58,59,63,67,68,[70][71][72][73][74][75][76][77][78]82,85,86], ten employed pre-test-post-test quasi-experimental designs [49,53,62,[64][65][66]69,79,80,84], four employed a single group pretest-post-test designs [54,56,61,83], three were post-test qualitative evaluations [57,81,87], and the remaining two adopted cross-sectional designs [50,60]. All studies assessed the interventions using quantitative techniques, with the exception of five which employed mixed methods [49,54,69,…”

Five decades of research on urban poverty: Main research communities, core knowledge producers, and emerging thematic areas

“…Empirical evidence indicates that people with low socioeconomic status are at increased risk of experiencing depression (Lorant et al, 2003;Mondi et al, 2017) and at the same time, they are less likely to take advantage of mental health services (Wang et al, 2005). Moreover, poverty disproportionally increases risks and poor outcomes for the urban youth through multiple channels, such as home, school and neighborhood (Cappella et al, 2008;Frazier et al, 2015). Evidence reveals that low-income urban children experience more stressful events compared to their middle-income urban counterparts (Dubow et al, 1991;Attar et al, 1994;Brooks-Gunn et al, 1995;Duncan and Brooks-Gunn, 1999;Murali and Oyebode, 2004).…”

Promoting Nurturing Environments in Afterschool Settings

“…However, it is critical that the afterschool program itself not convey similar socially toxic risks, like exposure to deviant peers or non-supportive adults (Dodge, Dishion, & Lansford, 2007); rather the afterschool setting should also serve as a nurturing context to combat these and other types of risks (Dodge, Dishion, & Lansford, 2007; Mahoney, Stattin, & Lord, 2004). In fact, there has been growing interest in understanding how afterschool settings serve as an ecological context for implementing prevention programming (Frazier et al, 2015; (Smith, Osgood, Oh, & Caldwell, 2017; Tebes et al, 2007). …”

“…Building upon integrative, comprehensive frameworks for promoting psychological flexibility in schools and summer camps (Embry, 2002; Pelham, Greiner, & Gnagy, 1997), recent efforts in afterschool leverage recreational settings to teach socio-emotional competence combined with PAX as a way of fostering a more positive and intentional behavioral environment (Frazier, Dinizulu, Rusch, Boustani, Mehta, & Reitz, 2015). This integrated afterschool strategy, implemented in communities with high-crime and poverty demonstrated some evidence of decreases in problem behavior, and enhanced social skill development across multiple time points.…”