Longitudinal patterns in parents' reports of youth decision-making autonomy from ages 9 to 20 were examined in a study of 201 European American families with two offspring. Multilevel modeling analyses revealed that decision-making autonomy increased gradually across middle childhood and adolescence before rising sharply in late adolescence. Social domain theory was supported by analyses of eight decision types spanning prudential, conventional, personal, and multifaceted domains. Decision making was higher for girls, youth whom parents perceived as easier to supervise, and youth with better educated parents. Firstborns and secondborns had different age-related trajectories of decision-making autonomy. Findings shed light on the developmental trajectories and family processes associated with adolescents' fundamental task of gaining autonomy.Developmental scholars have placed a high priority on understanding autonomy in youth (Baumrind, 1991;Collins, Gleason, & Sesma, 1997;Eccles et al., 1991;Holmbeck, Paikoff, & Brooks-Gunn, 1995;Smetana, Campione-Barr, & Daddis, 2004;Steinberg, 2001). Although autonomy can be defined in terms of behaviors, cognitions, or emotions, behavioral autonomy has been of particular interest (Collins et al., 1997;Hill & Holmbeck, 1987). Because it has long been acknowledged that becoming more autonomous is a central developmental task for adolescents (Erikson, 1968), most research and theorizing on autonomy has focused on adolescence. There is a paucity of longitudinal studies on autonomy across middle childhood and adolescence, however, and little is known about the nature of growth and change in behavioral autonomy as children become adolescents and move toward young adulthood.The first goal of this study was to chart the trajectory of decision making -an indicator of behavioral autonomy -from middle childhood through adolescence using longitudinal data spanning ages 9 to 20 based on European American parents' reports. Everyday decisions about youth activities cut across a variety of social domains, and social domain theory predicts that autonomy levels will differ depending on the domain in question (Smetana, 1995;Turiel, 1998). Thus, a second goal was to examine the trajectories of eight decisionmaking items representing four domains: personal, social-conventional, prudential, and multifaceted. Based on an ecological perspective, the third goal was to examine correlates of decision-making trajectories including child characteristics (e.g., birth order, gender, openness to supervision) and family socioeconomic background.Correspondence concerning this article should be directed to Laura Wray-Lake, Department of Human Development and Family Studies, S-110 Henderson Building, Penn State University, University Park, PA 16802. ldw134@psu.edu. . An earlier version of this paper was presented at a poster at the biennial meeting for the Society for Research on Child Development (2007, March) in Boston, Massachusetts. NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptChild Dev. Author manuscript; a...

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Since the Environmental Movement began, adolescents' views have been largely ignored in studies of public opinion. The article presents a descriptive analysis of trends in the environmental attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of high school seniors from 1976 to 2005 using data from the Monitoring the Future study. Across a range of indicators, environmental concerns of adolescents show increases during the early 1990s and declines across the remainder of the three decades. Declining trends in reports of personal responsibility for the environment, conservation behaviors, and the belief that resources are scarce are particularly noteworthy. Across all years, findings reveal that youth tended to assign responsibility for the environment to the government and consumers rather than accepting personal responsibility. Recent declines in environmental concerns for this nationally representative sample of youth signal the need for a renewed focus on young people's views and call for better environmental education and governmental leadership. Keywords environmental attitudes; environmental behaviors; trends; adolescence; Monitoring the Future; public opinion Since April 22, 1970, the first annual Earth Day in the United States, young people have been growing up in a world where certain proenvironmental behaviors, like recycling, have become normative. For decades, the popular perception has been one of young people taking the lead on growing commitments to making the world cleaner and greener. Though examples of environmental activism by youth abound both globally and within the United States (Flanagan, Syvertsen, & Wray-Lake, 2007;Sirianni, 2006), there have been no studies that document trends in environmental concerns of youth at a national level. Moreover, the severity of the problem of climate change (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC], 2007) and the United States' unmatched resource consumption rate per capita (Venetoulis, Chazan, & Gaudet, 2004) casts doubt on the environmental consciousness of U.S. citizens, young and old © 2009 Sage PublicationsPlease address correspondence to Laura Wray-Lake, Pennsylvania State University, Department of Human Development and Family Studies, 113 South Henderson Building, University Park, PA 16802; ldw134@psu.edu. NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptEnviron Behav. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2010 January 1. Published in final edited form as:Environ Behav. 2010 January 1; 42(1): 61-85. doi:10.1177/0013916509335163. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript alike. As they age, today's young people will inevitably become national and global leaders with responsibility for environmental stewardship and sustainability. Indeed, generational replacement is an irrefutable reason to encourage young people's engagement in civic matters such as environmental issues (Delli Carpini, 2006;Ryder, 1965).The lack of empirical information about young people's changing environmental views calls for an examination of trends in environmental...

Using annual cross-sectional data from Monitoring the Future, the present study examined trends in high school seniors' current and anticipated civic participation and beliefs over a 30-year period. We examined overall trends and patterns based on youths' post-high school educational plans. Findings point to declines in recent cohorts' involvement in conventional and alternative forms of engagement but greater involvement in community service. Regardless of period, the majority of youth said they intended to vote when eligible but few expressed trust in the government or elected officials. All civic indicators showed significant differences based on youths' college aspirations: Youth who planned to graduate from a 4-year college were more civically inclined than their peers with 2-year or no college plans.Adolescents are a barometer for the future of democracy, and over the past two decades, increased attention has been paid to the factors that engage young people in civic action. Yet, the extant work lacks a historical perspective, which is important for understanding the role of younger generations in political change. According to the life course principle of historical embeddedness, the period in which young people come of age is highly relevant to the formation of their civic identities (Elder, 1994;Stewart & McDermott, 2004). Social change occurs when younger cohorts carry these identities forward and replace their elders as voters and civic leaders (Lyons & Alexander, 2000). Thus, studying civic engagement across different historical periods and cohorts reveals the lens through which younger Address correspondence and reprint requests to: Dr. Amy Syvertsen, Search Institute, 615 First Avenue Northeast, Suite 125, Minneapolis, MN 55413. amys@search-institute.org. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Conference on Emerging Adulthood (2007, February) NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript generations view their society and collectively contribute to shaping the body politic (Mannheim, 1952(Mannheim, /1972. With this in mind, the present study examined trends over a 30-year period in U.S. high school seniors' civic behaviors and beliefs. To determine whether these trends differ in relation to adolescents' likely social class trajectories, we compared youths' civic engagement based on their college aspirations. These analyses contribute to debates about whether certain forms of youth civic engagement have fallen out of favor over time, about whether political optimism or cynicism characterizes different generations of youth, and about whether the social class divide in civic engagement has widened.Over the past decade, the conventional wisdom has been that youth have grown cynical about electoral politics, much as the empirical work with adults has suggested (Putnam, 2000). Galston (2002) argued that, in contrast to volunteer work through which young people feel they have an impact, many youth believe that conventional politics is ineffectual, slo...

Social responsibility is a value orientation, rooted in democratic relationships with others and moral principles of care and justice, that motivates certain civic actions. Given its relevance for building stronger relationships and communities, the development of social responsibility within individuals should be a more concerted focus for developmental scholars and youth practitioners. During childhood and adolescence, the developmental roots of individuals' social responsibility lie in the growth of executive function, empathy and emotion regulation, and identity. Efforts to cultivate children and adolescents' social responsibility in the proximal settings of their everyday lives should emphasize modeling prosocial behaviors, communicating concerns for others, and creating opportunities to practice civic skills.