Afterschool youth development programs (including, arts, leadership, and STEM programs) are significant learning contexts for adolescents. Participation in high-quality programs is related to the acquisition of cognitive, social-emotional, and occupational skills. It is notable that youth in programs report high motivation, markedly higher than in school. Furthermore, motivation increases over time and becomes more self-sustained. This chapter draws on our extensive qualitative interview research with youth and staff to examine questions about how programs – using a project-based learning model – facilitate high and sustained motivation. We find, first, that effective programs create an interpersonal environment of belonging and safety that allows youth to engage in high-functioning relationships, and that projects facilitate motivation because youth experience agency, increasing competency and comradery in their work. Second, although projects periodically confront youth with difficult challenges, which are sometimes overwhelming and can disrupt motivation, youth are typically resilient, and experienced leaders have well-developed strategies for helping youth navigate and learn from these experiences. Third, youth develop sustained motivation because they develop personal connections to program goals and learn techniques to regulate and preempt situations that disrupt motivation. Some youth report learning strategies to help them sustain motivation in the complex, open-ended work of projects.

The chapters in this volume have presented a panoramic view of adolescents in a global perspective. They draw attention to the diversity of contexts in which young people are growing up today, preparing themselves to assume adult roles in the years to come. The contrasts between regions are striking and at times startling. The likelihood of an adolescent girl being enrolled in secondary school is as low as 5–10 percent in many African countries but is virtually 100 percent in Japan and some European countries (United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund 1997; UNICEF). Equally striking, however, can be the similarities across large geographic and cultural distances. In many ways, the lives of middle-class youth in India, Southeast Asia, and Europe have more in common with each other than they do with those of poor youth in their own countries.

The portraits of adolescence presented here are important both in their own right – as a reflection of the well-being of a substantial segment of the population – and as a portent of the future of society. The nation that neglects to provide for its youth will see the costs of that neglect in the years that follow. The nation that equips and energizes its youth is likely to reap compounded benefits as these youth enter adulthood and take over the reigns of society as parents, workers, and leaders.

This volume is the result of a 3-year enterprise sponsored jointly by the Society for Research on Adolescence and the International Society for the Study of Behavioral Development. The Study Group on Adolescence in the 21st Century brought together an international set of scholars to consider possible life scenarios for adolescents over the next 30 to 50 years. With primary support from the W. T. Grant Foundation, the study group was chaired by Reed W. Larson, with Jeylan T. Mortimer and B. Bradford Brown playing a collaborative role in organizing the study group's activities.

To assist the study group in its work, 2 sets of papers were commissioned. For the set represented in this volume, each scholar was asked to describe current conditions and near-future possibilities for adolescents in a particular nation or region of the world. Mindful of the diversity of experiences among adolescents in their regions, the authors were asked to provide empirically based analyses of the transformation from childhood to adulthood with regard to a standard set of issues and social contexts that affect adolescents' lives. For the other set of commissioned papers, published as a separate volume (Mortimer and Larson 2002), the study group approached a set of experts knowledgeable about external institutions and changes that affect adolescents (e.g., education, health care, the criminal justice system).

A century ago people were intrigued by a new invention, the forerunner of the modern kinescope. By inserting a strip of paper containing a series of pictures into a drum, then spinning the drum while peering through a set of slits around the drum's perimeter, one could watch the pictures on the paper slowly coalesce into a repetitive set of coordinated movements. From the drum's disparate pictures, a single, moving picture appeared before one's eyes.

In many respects, our understanding of adolescence at the outset of the 21st century mimics this instrument of entertainment from Victorian parlors. We spin together the related but distinctive features of life for youth around the world and discern a common image of their movement from childhood into adulthood. At a superficial level the pictures coalesce to give the impression that young people worldwide share the same challenges, interests, and concerns. We speak of the emergence of a “global youth culture” (Schlegel 2000), in which young people – at least in the middle class – wear the same clothing and hair styles, listen to some of the same music, and adopt similar slang expressions. We remark on how the world is “shrinking” by virtue of new technologies (e.g., the Internet) that bring people from far-flung corners of the globe into close contact with each other. We emphasize the commonality of experience among youth as opposing ideologies falter and economic systems begin to meld.

The paths adolescents take from childhood into adulthood are shaped by broad demographic, institutional, and technological forces. In the next century, these societal forces may affect adolescent experience in ways that facilitate and enhance youth's preparation to become healthy adults or in ways that leave youth unprepared, even handicapped, for adulthood. Knowledgeable projections about how adolescent experience and preparation for adulthood are likely to be transformed in the future are vital for shaping agendas for research; for alerting educators, policy makers, and practitioners to new realities; and for formulating thoughtful responses to emerging dilemmas. This volume focuses on key societal phenomena that will influence the experience of adolescence in the future: demographic and economic trends, innovations in information technology, and alterations in key social institutions including those concerned with education, work, health care, and criminal justice.

Some ominous societal changes of the 21st century are addressed. Rapid population growth in some regions of the world induce crowding, environmental degradation, and resource scarcity that jeopardize investment in the next generation. In other regions where populations have stabilized or are shrinking, large aging cohorts compete with smaller and less powerful younger cohorts for resources. Across the world, technological and occupational changes have produced widening income gaps between “information workers” and low skill workers, with strong implications for the resources available to children in the succeeding generation.

Other quite promising societal changes are foreseen in these chapters.

The Society for Research on Adolescence, in collaboration with the International Society for the Study of Behavioral Development, has sponsored a Study Group on Adolescence in the Twenty-First Century. With primary support from the William T. Grant Foundation, the Study Group commissioned the series of chapters included in this volume. Because critical information about the future of adolescence may reside not with adolescent researchers but with scholars knowledgeable about external institutions and changes that affect adolescence, we approached experts on the subjects to write these chapters. The scholars were asked to forecast major trends in their domains of study to promote an understanding of how such trends may influence adolescent development and the transition to adulthood during the next 25 to 50 years. As the kind of preparation adolescents need to enter adulthood is determined by the character of adult roles, the authors address broad societal transformations that affect both adolescent experience and the nature of adult roles for which adolescents will need to prepare themselves. Instead of making specific predictions, they identify key trends and possible scenarios. In addition to this book, the Study Group has produced two other volumes, one that deals with adolescence across regions of the world (Brown, Larson, & Saraswathi, 2002) and another that examines the influence of societal changes on adolescents' competence and well-being in four domains (Larson, Brown, & Mortimer, 2002).

We give special thanks to Suzanne Wilson, who played an invaluable role in coordinating the meetings of the Study Group.