“Mentoring” is in vogue, thanks in part to the Bush administration’s emphasis on volunteerism. (January is National Mentoring Month.) But recent research has found that mentors may leave young people worse off than they found them. Jean Rhodes, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, studied 1,100 children, ages 10 to 14, who were with a mentor through Big Brothers Big Sisters of America or on a waiting list. She describes her findings in Stand by Me: The Risks and Rewards of Mentoring Today’s Youth (Harvard University Press).
Q. What is successful mentoring?
A. The effects of mentoring are smaller than people think. All the kids in the experimental group and the control group showed increases in problem behavior over time. Having a mentor attenuated the trajectory, but it didn’t reverse it. [Children with mentors] are often portrayed as “46 percent less likely” to do XYZ -- that’s 46 percent less likely than the control group.
But if you begin to control for the quality of the relationship, how long it lasts, the level of supervision, the kinds of kids who are recruited into the program, there are much larger effects.
We looked at it in terms of duration. Even though a one-year commitment is made in Big Brothers Big Sisters, only about half of the relationships lasted that long. Kids in relationships that lasted 12 months were actually doing quite a bit better than the control group. We saw some reversals of the trajectory, some positive effects. But the kids whose matches lasted less than six months were worse off than the control group.
Q. Because having your mentor drop you is upsetting?
A. Yes. Sometimes it’s not; sometimes a child moves, or whatever -- lots of things are associated with termination and also associated with stress that are independent. But often kids in mentoring programs have already suffered a lot. To have one more loss is painful to them.
Q. Why do half of mentoring arrangements dissolve within a few months?
A. There are a lot of reasons. Commercials make it seem easy and as if you’re going to see dramatic change. But teenagers aren’t like that. Often it takes six months for them to offer a shred of appreciation or disclosure. They may not even show up. So it’s frustrating for a lot of busy, working adults.
But other reasons have nothing to do with the mentor. The kid may have started the program for the wrong reasons; as they get older, peer relationships take on greater meaning; sometimes the relationship doesn’t click. ...
People think of mentoring as inexpensive because it relies on volunteers, but in order to really be effective, and even prevent harm, we need to make sure there’s support for the relationship after it’s made.
http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 49, Issue 20, Page A12
