This book examines professional youth mentoring, which is marked by enduring relationships throughout childhood and adolescence between youth and their adult mentors who are embedded within a formal program. It describes the ways in which these mentors – full-time, paid professionals – specialize in helping youth to build the resilience, skills, and hope that prepares them for prosocial success during emerging adulthood and beyond. The book explores the extensive initial and continuing education and skills training that professional youth mentors receive as well as ongoing supervision and support to bolster their effectiveness with children, their families, and systems (e.g., schools, health care) that they interact with regularly. It addresses the scientific and theoretical rationales and potential benefits of professional mentoring, a program model that differs from the current dominant youth mentoring paradigm (i.e., short-term volunteering).

Key areas of coverage include:

Detailed descriptions of the most prominent professional youth mentoring programs.
Social-ecological models of professional youth mentoring.
An intensive case study of a mature professional mentoring program, Friends of the Children.
Developing and sustaining professional youth mentoring programs.
Perspectives from youth, parents and other caregivers, mentors, and program administrators.
Youth mentoring programs around the world.

The Handbook of Professional Youth Mentoring is a must-have reference for researchers, professors, and graduate students as well as clinicians, therapists, and professionals in developmental, clinical child, and school psychology, child and adolescent psychiatry, social work, pediatrics, public health, juvenile justice, sociology of family and youth, prevention science, and all related disciplines.