Ask an adult who had a difficult childhood but came through it doing well – who made a difference in their life – and you will usually hear about a person, not a program.
It might be a track coach who kept encouraging them until he lost his voice. It might be an aunt who gave them a place to stay. Or it might be someone who noticed they were struggling and continued to care even after the first few months had passed.
Researchers heard this answer so often that they decided to study it more closely. What they found was more specific than the usual message about having someone who cares. They also found something important that people often leave out.
The Most Common Finding in the Literature
The National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, based at Harvard, reviewed decades of work on why some children survive serious hardship intact while others do not. Their summary, published in 2015, states that children who do well despite serious hardship have had at least one stable and committed relationship with a supportive adult.
That adult could be a parent, caregiver, coach, teacher, neighbor, uncle, or even someone who runs a local shop. They do not have to be related to the child. What matters is that they keep showing up.
The same paper makes a point that deserves more attention than it gets. The same report makes another important point. When we treat overcoming hardship as something only a matter of personal grit, the Council notes, failure to succeed looks like a personal defect, and we can end up blaming people when they struggle. Their evidence points the other way. Children who make it through usually have someone who stays beside them.
What Happened When Researchers Tested It
A Philadelphia research group called Public/Private Ventures decided to study this more closely.
In the early 1990s, they followed about 1,000 young people between the ages of ten and sixteen who had applied to Big Brothers Big Sisters. More than 80 percent came from low-income families. About 40 percent came from homes with a history of drug or alcohol problems. Almost all lived with a single parent.
Half of the young people were matched with a volunteer mentor. The other half stayed on a waiting list. The researchers chose the two groups at random, which made the results especially useful. After eighteen months, they checked both groups again.
The matched young people were 46 percent less likely to have started using drugs. They were 27 percent less likely to have started drinking. They were about one-third less likely to have hit someone, and they missed half as many days of school. Their relationships with their own parents had also improved.
The volunteers were not therapists. They met with their young person three or four times a month and did ordinary things together.
The Finding Nobody Quotes
There is an important detail behind those numbers. When all the results were averaged together, the overall effects were small. Later studies of similar programs found fewer significant results. The 1995 study is still the strongest evidence available, but it showed a real effect, not a dramatic transformation.
Ten years on, Jean Grossman and Jean Rhodes went back to the same data with a narrower question. They wanted to know whether the length of these relationships mattered.
Young people whose match lasted a year or longer reported the largest number of improvements. Those who lost a mentor sooner reported progressively fewer. Their next finding is what every volunteer should hear before signing anything. Adolescents whose relationships ended after a very short period reported measurable declines in how they saw themselves, covering their sense of their own worth and their confidence at school.
A later study of school-based matches found a similar pattern. Young people whose relationships continued showed academic improvement. Those whose relationships ended showed no improvement. Even young people who were later given a replacement mentor did worse than those who had not received a mentor at all.
Taken together, these studies point to something uncomfortable: an adult who comes into a child’s life and then disappears can cause more harm than an adult who never came at all.
A twelve-year-old who already believes that adults leave does not need another adult to prove that belief right.
What the Research Asks of an Ordinary Adult
Decide on the Length Before You Decide on the Activity
Most people considering this ask what they should do with a young person. The evidence says the more important question is how long they intend to keep doing it. A year is the figure the data supports. Anyone unable to promise a year is better off waiting until they can.
Choose Whatever You Would Be Doing Anyway
Volunteers in the trial met their young person three or four times a month. They went to games, ate meals, and talked in the car. None of it required training in counselling. These volunteers simply kept showing up.
Expect a Long Stretch of Apparently Nothing
Researchers who study volunteer dropout describe a familiar pattern. Mentors arrive expecting visible progress, then lose heart when a young person seems unchanged after several months. A volunteer is usually helping well before anyone can see it, which is why those who quit early do the damage.
Expect to Be Pushed Away
Young people under the heaviest strain are the most likely to see their match break down. They test people and then withdraw. Volunteers read that as rejection and step back. Volunteers who last sit through it and turn up again the following week.
Where an Interested Person Starts
MENTOR maintains a national directory of programmes and can point you toward organisations near you. Big Brothers Big Sisters runs the community model described in the research above.
Formal programmes cover only part of this. Most of these relationships were never arranged by anybody. They grew out of a classroom, a team, a congregation, or a job. Coaching a season or taking on an apprentice puts you in the same position, with no application form required.
A Book Full of These People
Fred D. Gore grew up in Trenton, New Jersey, during the 1960s and 1970s. He was small for his age and hopeless at every sport he tried. He describes standing on the sidelines for years before a game of tag changed his estimate of himself.
His memoir, How God Made His Story Possible, is largely an account of the people who arrived at the right moment. A track coach who shouted himself hoarse at practice, then spoke quietly to him in the van afterwards and mentioned that most of the others had struggled at first too. A tutor in college who asked him a series of questions, handed him the word dyslexia, then called it a gift while he sat there working out how to feel. A man named Mr. Moore who told him to pray before every race. Gore calls them interventions and writes that others might call them angels.
The book runs to the last weekend of April 1978, when five young men from his team did what nobody had done in a single day, and to the reinvention that made a spectator into a runner. Anyone curious about the ordinary people standing behind an unlikely story will find plenty of them in it.
The Part That Takes a Year
All of this leads to one simple point: a struggling young person may be helped most by an adult who is still there fourteen months later.
That commitment will cost you some evenings and weekends, including plenty of times when you would rather stay home.
But it may also be one of the most valuable things an ordinary person can give a child who is not their own.
Someone stayed long enough for Fred Gore to discover what he could do.
Every adult reading this has the chance to be that person for someone else—if they are willing to still be there next spring.
