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Stephen and Zach interview Dr. Jean E. Rhodes. Youth mentoring is among the most popular forms of volunteering in the world. But does it work? Does mentoring actually help young people succeed? In her new book, Older and Wiser, mentoring expert Jean Rhodes draws on more than thirty years of empirical research to survey the state of the field.
Show Notes
Dr. Jean E. Rhodes
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You can mentor is a podcast about the power of building relationships with kids from hard places in the name of Jesus. Every episode will help you overcome common mentoring obstacles
Speaker 2:and give
Speaker 1:you the confidence you need to invest in the lives of others. You can mentor.
Speaker 3:Youth mentoring is among the most popular forms of volunteering in the world. But does it actually work? Today's episode is an interview with doctor Jean e Rhodes, the director of the Center For Evidence Based Mentoring at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Doctor Rhodes has dedicated her career to researching the efficacy of youth mentoring and wrote a book titled older and wiser, drawing on more than 30 years of empirical research to answer that question. We hope today's episode gives you or your organization value.
Speaker 3:And if so, we'd love to hear about it. Leave us a review, rate the podcast, and share this episode with someone you think would benefit from the content. Thanks for listening. Welcome back to the You Can Mentor podcast. My name is Steven, and I'm here with my co host, Zachary Garza.
Speaker 4:Hi, guys. How's it going?
Speaker 3:And our very special guest today is doctor Rhodes. Doctor Rhodes, how are you doing today?
Speaker 2:Very good. Thank you.
Speaker 3:So Jean Rhodes, she's essentially I don't know how to put this, but I think you are the the Jordan Peterson of youth mentoring research. I I feel like I can be as bold to say that. So really excited to have you on. She is the Frank l Boyden professor of psychology and the director of the Center For Evidence Based Mentoring at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She's devoted her career to understanding youth mentoring and looking at the efficacy of youth mentoring.
Speaker 3:And so we're having her on here as an audit to make sure our podcast is alright, but also to make sure that we're doing a good job as youth mentoring leaders. So if you're a youth mentoring leader, you need to buckle up for today's interview. Jean, I wanted to have you on to talk about recommendations for people like you who are creating best practices for youth mentoring and coming to a place where practitioners are wanting to seek you out and ask you, Jean, what should I do when it comes to mentoring youth? And how how can we do this better? And so after reading your book, which you just came out with older and wiser, the subtitle is new ideas for youth mentoring in the 21st century.
Speaker 3:I finished reading it. I underlined half of it. So I just I loved your your research, and the the primary takeaway was that everybody loves mentoring. But is it actually doing what we think it's doing? Is it effectual?
Speaker 3:And so your research is all about the efficacy of youth mentoring, and you bring into question, how how are we tracking? How are we measuring? How are we looking at statistics to view what mentoring programs are doing currently, and how can we make it better? And so I'd love for you to share just even just what you kinda talk about in the book is, like, the history of youth mentoring, how it came to be, and how it how it became one of the most, I guess, sought after ways to volunteer is becoming a youth mentor.
Speaker 2:Sure. I'd be happy. So I'm I'm gonna start by giving you a little history as you asked, and then answering the first part of your question is sort of how can we make it more effective. So the history of mentoring in the US is actually pretty interesting. It started with a young whiskey salesman who looked out his window and saw a kid in Cleveland digging through his garbage.
Speaker 2:And he went outside and befriended him and took him out to lunch and began to kind of really help him and his family. And he really liked that idea and he got other people in. He was a member of the JCC, the Jewish community center. He got other members of the JCC to help him. And, he said he was just like Johnny Appleseed spreading the word of mentoring around.
Speaker 2:And that was big brothers. And at the same time in New York City, there was a Christian element in the court systems in the the communities in New York City that kinda was doing the same thing. So this happened right around the progressive era in the US, which was around the turn of the century when there was great wealth gaps, just like we have today. And mentoring was seen as a way not only to help children, but their families. Now it kind of continued slowly.
Speaker 2:It was mostly Big Brothers Big Sisters of America for for for for for decades. And then there was a second mentoring movement, and that started around the 19 eighties. And it started with a number of things that were happening all at once. One is that inequality was beginning to get worse again under the kind of policies of of Reaganism. After, you know, a period of time where there was a robust middle class, we began to see wealth concentration again.
Speaker 2:So there was that same desire to help kids. We saw an evaluation of Big Brothers Big Sisters that was conducted that showed some promising effects. Now they were exaggerated, but they it was enough to make people really galvanize around the idea of youth mentoring. But this time, it was different. This time, it was really focused squarely on the child and not on the whole, you know, getting family housing and jobs and all that.
Speaker 2:It was really this almost a notion, let's pull that child out of poverty and provide almost, like, secondary parenting to this kid because maybe their community was failing them. So it had a different feel to it the second time around. And it began to be a little bit more perfunctory. It began to be just I'll meet with you for an hour a week, and then I'll go my way and you go your way. And it was never a real focus.
Speaker 2:It was just, let's have a relationship. And just by hanging out together, you're gonna have and building a relationship, so many positive things will happen. You won't believe it. But it was a fantasy really to think that all of the entrenched problems of mental health, of education, of, you know, a lot of the things associated with poverty, it was a fantasy to think that that could all be washed away with a 1 hour a week meeting. And results of evaluations began to show that.
Speaker 2:You know, if you look at what's called the effect size, which is like the magnitude of impact, you see that really since we began to evaluate mentoring programs back 20 years ago to most recently, we haven't improved the practice of youth mentoring. And for many of the programs that are most, you know, recognizable, the big programs, the effect size is close to 0. Now if that was a clinical trial for a new, vaccine or anything else, we would say, all right, let's let's go back to the drawing board. But for some reason, we keep we we keep doing it over and over again. In fact, one of the, endorsements on my book was from the Obama Foundation and, the director of My Brother's Keeper.
Speaker 2:And he said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Mhmm. And that's kind of we've been kind of insane. And so a little so, you know, after I traced the research and I show that it's pretty disappointing for most models, I have a chapter that I I really go into sort of how did we get it so wrong for so long. And and that's where I delve into some of the cognitive biases that are triggered simply by using the word mentoring.
Speaker 2:If we had the clunkier but perhaps more accurate term, which would be like paraprofessional youth specialist or something, it would we would have higher expectations and we wouldn't allow such sort of promiscuous do what would do whatever and good things will happen. And we would pay more attention to the results. And so I think part of it has to do with the word mentor. So that's another argument that I make in the book.
Speaker 3:That's awesome. Well and I I think that even just
Speaker 2:from
Speaker 3:what I remember in in your book is that there's this there's this insistence upon having a nonspecific model that that that people convince theirselves, well, we're addressing all of the issues. And and what you say in your book is like, well, when you try to address all the issues, what you're really saying is you're not Yeah. Addressing any of
Speaker 2:that. No. Exactly. I was actually gonna call the book the mentoring paradox for a while. Because to me, the paradox was that the harder we push just to form a friendship, the more we're kinda weakening the whole enterprise.
Speaker 2:Because the friendship alone was never gonna be enough. It had to be the friendship plus something. And there were people that felt like, well, if you add the plus something, like, you know, focusing on grades or, you know, relaxation skills or whatever it is the young person needs that you would take away from the relationship. But actually, you'll strengthen the relationship because you'll have a shared goal and you will be making progress. And so absolutely.
Speaker 2:The another term for the nonspecific approach is what I call the friendship model. You know, it's like this whole idea that the friendship alone is enough. It's not. It you know, you don't go to a teacher and say, let's just form a relationship and and somehow I'll learn math. You don't go to a doctor.
Speaker 2:Yes. It's important to have good bedside manners, but the doctor also has to have some sort of intervention on top of that. And somehow inventory, we just got stuck with the bedside manners or with a hodgepodge of like, oh, this week, your saddle, let's talk about it. And this week, you're struggling in math. Let's look at that.
Speaker 2:And and when you do things like in this low dose way, you're not gonna get anywhere. But I also wanna kinda step back and have a little forgiveness for programs that that took this approach. First of all, researchers were saying that it worked, including me. If I wrote a book in 2002 called Stand by Me, where I really argued the opposite of what I argued in this book. And so in some ways, we researchers led programs astray.
Speaker 2:But more importantly, it's really hard to provide targeted care when you have a big program. So say you're like a Big Brother, Big Sister of America. Well, and there's 5 kids at the door. Well, 1 kid might be depressed. 1 kid is acting out.
Speaker 2:1 kid is squunking school. The other one can't get along with their peers. That's 4 different interventions you would need. And what is the likelihood that that program is gonna have the resources and the training capacity to deliver with any kind of fidelity for completely different interventions. And so, you know, I think that it makes sense that they defaulted to the lowest common denominator, which is a relationship.
Speaker 2:But I think we have new technologies now that will enable us to pick that relationship and leverage it. And that's one of the other things I talk about in the book.
Speaker 4:Yeah, Jean. So one of our favorite sayings is relationships change lives. Right? We tend to focus in on the relationship and not so much teaching these kids certain skills. But what we found out with your book is it's yes.
Speaker 4:Relationships change lives because they give you the the right to speak into a kid's life. But unless you use that right to teach them a skill that is going to help them become a positive and productive adult, then it is all for naught.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, that's a really good way of putting Zachary. I mean, it's just like the relationship alone is typically not enough. Now for some kids, it is in and of itself so revolutionary to have an adult that you can trust, that it enables you to heal in a way that the very process of forming trust is the intervention. Right?
Speaker 2:So I don't wanna minimize that. I also wanna say that it having the relationship is absolutely viable valuable. And we all know this. I'm a clinical psychologist. You can't get a kid motivated to change or to try something new if they don't like you.
Speaker 2:And if you don't have, you know, what's called a working alliance and, you know, where your kid senses that you get them, that you like them. So those things remain absolutely vital. But I would say for some kids who already have trust and already have the ability to forge ties, that just forging a tie is not enough. And in fact, there's some new research that suggests that there's sort of a a ceiling. Like after a certain point, just making the relationship stronger and stronger and stronger isn't really doing much.
Speaker 2:You just have to have a good enough relationship to be able to leverage it for other things.
Speaker 3:I I wanna read a quote from the book. You said, the structured goals and tools, which would be the targeted evidence based interventions. You say the structured goals and tools, whatever their specific value may actually contribute to the relationship rituals that inspire hope and fuel self efficacy. And you mentioned in the book that one of the one of the main reasons volunteers fall off in the attrition rate of mentors is so low is because they don't know what to do. And their role is so ambiguous that we tell them to build a friendship, but we don't give them activities and, and things that would give them value and help them build relationships.
Speaker 3:So I thought that was funny that, really, the organizations that are focusing on solely relationship building, what they need are these practices and tools Yeah. In order to build those relationships.
Speaker 2:That's right. And, you know, in some ways, if we give them the message that there's no particular goal, then, you know, the really ambitious ones are gonna be like, well, then I have to fix everything. And it becomes it becomes overwhelming to like because often the lives of the young people who are referred to mentoring programs, there's a lot of trauma. There's a lot of mental health issues. There's a lot of difficulty.
Speaker 2:And particularly during the pandemic and, you know, parents losing jobs and all of this and not being able to be with your friends. The mentor might feel like, oh my god. I can't do all of this. And so what can I do? And and now let's let's look at where I can make the biggest impact right now.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Can you define for our listeners what a targeted evidence based intervention is? Because when I hear that, it's kinda like what you said about paraprofessional health provider, and I'm like, you lost me. I'm not a doctor. You are a doctor, Jean.
Speaker 3:But can you break that down? Because Yeah. Every every intervention isn't very complicated at at least from what I've seen.
Speaker 2:Right. So let's talk let's just break it down by the words. So targeted means that, we know from clinical research that the best outcomes come when you focus on one thing at a time. You know, you're not going to solve everything at once. So you've got a young person who's struggling across a lot of different things.
Speaker 2:You can't just say, alright, let's fix it all at once. So you get the young person to kind of prioritize it. You target one thing at a time. Sometimes multiple things. But, you know, if if the problem is that they are not doing well in school, but you really dig and it's because they're not sleeping, then that's the first thing you start.
Speaker 2:You start by saying, you know what? You can't learn on an empty tank. Let's get you sleeping and eating. Let's get a schedule. And and then from there, we'll we'll tackle the mood problems.
Speaker 2:But they may go away when we get to the you know, so it's like really kind of beginning to target what exactly is holding this young person back from reaching their potential. And let's target that. Evidence based means that at some point, the intervention has been evaluated and has shown to be effective. And so often, programs just kind of homegrow and come up with interventions. And we don't know whether they work or not.
Speaker 2:And yet, there's this whole world of people building effective interventions that aren't being used. And so how do we put those two things together? How do we put together these beautiful interventions for each thing with the you know, and getting people using them and not just trying to, you know, do it themselves. DIY intervention. So it's targeted evidence based approach.
Speaker 4:Hey, Jean. Do, you think you could just give us just a really simple example of that for some of our listeners?
Speaker 2:Sure. Okay. Well, let's say we have a young person who's not making friends. They're getting bullied at school. There's a program.
Speaker 2:It's it was created by my friend, Tim Cavell. He's a professor at University of Arkansas. And he has the mentor go into the cafeteria. This is back when we had school. And sit with the poker and really look at what's going on in that friendship world that the kid is being rejected and bullied.
Speaker 2:And it it trains college students to really go and they're called lunch buddies to go in and sit with the kid and really help them figure out how to how to make friends. That is really targeted and it's really effective. There's other ones for kids who are making the transition from elementary school to middle school, middle school to high school. But those transitions are hard. It teaches them how to make that transition.
Speaker 2:You name it. There's an intervention for it.
Speaker 3:Now I loved even just seeing some of the resources you mentioned in your book. There was a I I don't remember the researcher, but he came up with 52 behavioral kernels. And I looked them up, and I was like, these are these are so intuitive, and yet these have been practiced and shown to work. And so we would be remiss to not implement them. And it was it was as simple as, like, omega 3 fatty acids, like, to help with the physiology and, like, the learning capacity of a child.
Speaker 3:Just give them something like an egg. Like, that's a great intervention.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. That's Anthony Biglin. And the idea is that you can not you know, because so many of our the issues that we have are are caused by multiple things that you can kind of mix and match the intervention to fit the specific need of the child by putting together these smaller pieces of an intervention.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And so one one of the things it's like, really, the the desire is to get organizations to identify a particular youth and then to also identify particular outcomes that they wanna have. And without those two things, really, the the research and that portion is gonna be really difficult for you to determine what works and what doesn't. And so the nonspecific model is making your job harder as well as
Speaker 2:Yeah. And it's another another name for that is, like, the spaghetti model. Let's just throw a whole handful of spaghetti and see what sticks and and and we'll report that to our funder. And it's just so much less efficient than really going right for the thing that you are you care about as an organization. And I'd I'd love to make a little time to talk about things that I've done since the book that are are trying to kind of test this in reality.
Speaker 2:So because we actually it solves a problem. So so here's the problem that I was stuck with as I was writing this. And that is that, yes, evidence based targeted interventions are most effective like that lunch buddy program or like a cognitive behavioral treatment program for a kid with anxiety. But what are the chances that one of those really good programs is going to have an opening and be available for any kid that walks in the door of big brothers, big sisters Or any program that that those boutique programs that are most effective are usually incubated at universities and are very small scale. And so it makes it really hard to scale evidence when when things are so boutique y.
Speaker 2:And so when I came to it, I'm I'm sure you remember this, it's blended mentoring. This idea that there is this tremendous really explosion of evidence based tools on your smartphone. Now you may not think about you may do you guys have iPhones?
Speaker 3:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Okay. At some point, you may have downloaded an app that promised to promised some form of self improvement. Right?
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Maybe it was to exercise or to meditate or to
Speaker 3:I do buy I do buy annual workouts, doctor Rhodes. So
Speaker 2:Okay. So maybe it was to increase the number of workout. And on its own, the fact that you downloaded that is not particularly consequential, but the fact that everybody does that means that what we're doing is we're taking evidence from my lab, from other labs, from, you know, professor Cavell's lab and putting it into interventions that are now on our smart smartphones. For example, Headspace is a meditation app that shows huge effects for anxiety and depression. That's on your phone.
Speaker 2:There's it's called mental health apps, but there's also like Khan Academy. There's education apps, there's Duolingo, there's language apps, And those represent targeted evidence based interventions. The problem is nobody's using them. After 2 weeks, most of us stop using whatever we download, myself included.
Speaker 3:Yes. Adults do that. So how much more will children not make it through Yeah. Using it the whole time? And
Speaker 2:yet there's great child mental health apps out there for everything. From fears and sleep and focus and social emotional worry and everything. So there's a scientist at Northwestern. His name is David Moore. He came up with this idea that all of these really good technology delivered intervention that will enable us to provide targeted care are going to work if they're, if, if they're connected with a coach or a mentor.
Speaker 2:Because if you connect it with a coach who is you're accountable to, we're much more likely to stick with something. And we know we've known that forever. We knew that with, like, alcoholics anonymous that you had a sponsor or weight watchers or whatever it is. You would never just go into it alone and say, oh, I'll do it all. Don't worry.
Speaker 2:And so if we compare the incredible potential mentoring and all these programs with targeted evidence based innovations that are delivered through technology, we might be able to improve mentoring in a big way. And so in recent, well, in the past year, I've developed a supportive accountability tool for free for mentors. It's called Mentor Hub. And it What I've done is I partnered with all the best child focused interventions, and I've created a platform for mentors to check on the progress and encourage young people to use them. So if anybody's in it's called mentor go to mentorhubapp.org, and you'll see it.
Speaker 3:Mentor hub. We'll leave that in the show notes. Mentors,
Speaker 2:get
Speaker 3:on the app. Be a I I love what you said, just that that really come coming back to the relationship side of really needing guidance, direction, support. We're sitting right now in our literacy lab for boys. If there's not a coach in here, it's not gonna happen.
Speaker 2:It's not gonna happen.
Speaker 3:And they're they're gonna do something on their computer that, even shows that they're horrible at reading, and they may be really proficient at reading and not help them excel. And so, really, the the need for someone to assist and hold them accountable. And and, you you said recognize failure points in the sis that that kids have, I think, is a huge a huge part, because one of the main things we run into in our mentoring program is kids give up. And they need someone. I mean, we give up.
Speaker 3:I mean, that's why we do CrossFit and Camp Gladiator. Like, we have to go work out with other people. We can't work out by ourselves. Like, trust me. I know.
Speaker 3:But I I just I I love the emphasis of how do we scale this? We scale it by getting getting resources into the hands of people who aren't professionals, who aren't clinical psychologists like Gene Rhodes, but can hold a kid accountable and help them through a process.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 3:Which that was something in your book you talked about was like giving it away, that the psychological needs of children in America are far beyond our capacity for professionals to deliver them. And so if you can do research that enables regular everyday mentors to deliver stuff, that's that's how we're gonna reach the the most kids.
Speaker 2:Oh, I'm so glad that that, Stephen, that you really got that because, that's really the essence of it. That we're never gonna bridge the gap by relying on professionals and that mentors. They don't have to deliver these interventions with, you know, rigor because the interventions deliver them themselves through technology. What they have to do is support it. So it takes them out of the delivery role and puts them in the support role, which is a much better place for your average volunteer.
Speaker 4:So let me make sure that I'm hearing this right. Okay? So we're part of a mentoring organization, and it's our job to find caring adults out there who wanna build relationships with kids who need relationships. Once they're in the front door, then it's up to us to introduce them with the solutions to the issues that our kids have. And then they can take those solutions, and they can introduce them to the kid and support the kid while they take part in those interventions.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 4:And so things like showing up, things like encouraging, things like not quitting on the kid, and and introducing them to things that they need that can help move the ball forward in their life in a multitude of different areas, that's the job of a mentor.
Speaker 2:That's right. That's exactly it. You got
Speaker 4:it. Man, Jean, my head is exploding right now. I just wanna tell every person who is on this podcast, who is listening to this podcast, you need to get this book. Like, this book, Steven and I, we haven't got gotten any work done this week because we've done nothing but talk about this book. Because it is like for those of you out there who are in charge of mentoring orgs, I sometimes question whether or not I'm making an impact.
Speaker 4:And I'm giving my life to this. Right? Well, this book will tell you what you need to do to make an impact. And that is encouraging to me because this book helps me know that there has been research done, that there's a professional out there who has said, I have done the homework on this, and it works. And she has given that to me so that I know that I can be an effective mentor, so that I know that what I'm giving my life to is actually making a difference.
Speaker 4:And that's so cool to me, Jean. So thank you so much for this book. I I am in love with it, and I can't wait to start. I'm just gonna call you all the time. I'm I'm just gonna email you.
Speaker 4:I'm just gonna bother you for the next 6 months. So I hope that you're ready for that.
Speaker 2:Oh, I'm it's just so gratifying. You know, writing a book is so lonely. So many lonely days, and it's like you're writing same thing with The Chronicle of Evidence Based Mentoring. You guys know about that? Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I've I've read it for a while, and Peter Vanacore introduced me to you.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We'll go back to it because, like, I just put one out today. So you can subscribe for free. It's called the go to evidence based mentoring.com. It's It's called the Chronicle of Evidence Based Mentoring.
Speaker 2:And today, I wrote a a piece. It's called how the pandemic is going to change mentoring forever. So if you like what you have in the book, there's more of it there. But really all of that is like an echo chamber. I just put it out there or I guess not even an echo chamber.
Speaker 2:Anyway, I just put it out there, and I don't hear much feedback. And so this is really gratifying to to hear back from you that it was helpful.
Speaker 3:You know, those those researchers and their clickbait, you know, blog posts just you know, I'm just kidding.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Like
Speaker 2:But actually yeah. The Chronicle has slowly you know, I don't advertise. I don't we don't have any funders, other than Mentor National Mentoring Partnership, but we don't have any advertisers. We have over 10,000 subscribers on that. And so, you know, it has kinda quietly built up a a readership.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's awesome. Well, we we will link to that in the show notes and give that to our mentors and mentoring organizations. To finish our time, Jean, would you have any recommendations for bridging the gap between practitioners and researchers that that we haven't discussed, just just any encouragement you would give maybe to an a mentoring organization that has been in that place where they're just making up their own stuff and aren't connected to resources like you.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, one one treasure trove is the National Mentoring Resource Center, and I don't know if you guys know about that. It's through the Mentor National Mentoring Partnership. And with funding from OJJDP, they created this center where they'll provide free consultation to practitioners, and they write about really important topics that affect mentoring programs, and it's all free. And so I would point people there as well.
Speaker 4:Thank you so much for your time. We are just all about the work that you're doing, and we're just here to say thank you. Like, thank you for making us better. And so we are super grateful to connect with you.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm grateful to connect with with you as well. I learn everything from people on the ground doing the practice, and so it's really important for us to be having these conversations.
Speaker 3:And so, Jean
Speaker 2:So thank you.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Thank you so much. And could you could you point our listeners to your your website again? Just just so they know where to to learn what you guys are doing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. All they have to do is, type in The Chronicle of Evidence Based Mentoring. And on that website, they can if they type in they can click it and get a a 30% discount on on the book just by typing in the word, holiday. And they can read almost 10 years of research article summaries and and profiles of of practitioners and researchers and so forth.
Speaker 3:That is Doctor. Jean Rhodes, older and wiser, the book she just wrote, New Ideas for Youth Mentoring in the 21st Century. Go pick up that book for Christmas. Thank you so much, Jean.