Youth mentoring is a potentially powerful tool for prevention and intervention, but it has garnered little attention from clinical child and adolescent psychologists. For decades, the practice of youth mentoring has out-paced its underlying science, and meta-analytic studies consistently reveal modest outcomes. The field is now at an important crossroads: Continue to endorse traditional, widely used models of mentoring or shift to alternative models that are more in line with the tenets of prevention science. Presented here is a bilateral framework to guide the science and practice of mentoring going forward. Our premise is that mentoring relationships can serve as both means to a targeted end and as a valued end unto itself. We present a functional typology of current mentoring programs (supportive, problem-focused, & transitional) and call for greater specification of both the process and expected outcomes of mentoring. Finally, we argue that efforts to leverage mentoring relationships in service of youth development and the promotion of child and adolescent mental health will likely require disrupting the science, practice, and policy that surrounds youth mentoring.

In this study, we tested a theoretical model of training practices in school-based mentoring by comparing the differences between two mentoring programs on mentor-reported program support, value of training, relationship satisfaction, and plans to continue mentoring. The two mentoring programs that we compared were conducted at the same school and involved similar contexts, structure, and goals but differed in the training approach (i.e. quality, frequency, and duration of training and support). Using a structural equation model, we tested a theory of mentor-reported differences between the studies and found that mentors in the program with enhanced training and support reported more program support, value of training, and plans to continue mentoring, when compared to the program without enhanced training and support. Indirect effects were subsequently analyzed and we found that these differences indirectly contributed to greater relationship satisfaction.

Like many youth development programs, most youth mentoring programs do not have prescribed practices that target specific outcomes. Because the construct of mentoring represents a broad range of potential activities, researchers face a conundrum when making generalizable causal inferences about the effects of this and similar services. On the one hand, researchers cannot make valid experimental inferences if they do not describe what they manipulate. On the other hand, experiments that include prescribed protocols do not generalize to most mentoring programs. In most cases, researchers conducting school-based mentoring program evaluations err on the side of not sufficiently specifying treatment constructs, which limits the field’s ability to make practically or theoretically useful inferences about this service. We discuss this reality in light of the fundamental logic of the experimental design and suggest several possible solutions to this conundrum. Our goal is to empower researchers to adequately specify treatments while still preserving the treatment construct validity of this and similar interventions.