Research Paper on Youth Leadership Effects on Children Development

Introduction

Youth leadership is crucial in leading the young people who look upon their leaders to understand how they are supposed to behave and handle themselves with matters concerning life. Youth leadership involves the teenagers experiencing their ability to manage and have authority over others in their age group. The young people tend to gain skills and become knowledgeable thus enabling them to organize community activities, understand the education reforms and learn the civic education. There exist numerous programs around the world that offer the youths the training activities to enable them to realize their goals and objectives of leadership. The government and the relevant bodies are supposed to foster good youth leaders to ensure that the people who will be managing issues in the society are people of integrity and good values. The leadership process should be ethical and follow all the required guidelines to ensure that the officers manage to have a positive and not negative effect on the children and groups that they are running. Considering that the teenagers are easily influenced as they always want to do things their way, the youth leadership can have a great effect on this group of people living in urban areas. One of the youth leadership factor that can affect the way that urban youths behave include the existence of healthy leaders, consistent leadership process, and trained and skilled people. There is a need to have a group of people working together towards the achievement of a single goal, the ability to have the freedom to exercise their leadership capability, and the process through which they can achieve the set goals and objectives.

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The success of any group in achieving the desired goals starts with the leaders in that group. If they portray positive behaviors and desire to have the results realizes, the rest of the members will follow suit. Healthy leaders tend to create a conducive working environment for all the others involved as a way of raising togetherness and moral responsibility, and this tends to improve productivity while ensuring that all the members remain loyal to their group. The leader needs to look after the emotional, physical and mental wellbeing of their members to ensure that they are all working on the same wavelength. The teenagers need someone who can understand them for they are usually in a stage of life that they seem confused as they start experiencing independence from their parents' scrutiny. It is at this time that they usually want to experiment and engage in activities that they have never done before (Ansell, 2016). In most of the cases, they will take after what they see their friends doing or in this case the leaders in their youth group for they believe that they are one of their role models. A good number of them are left to make decisions about their lives and this creates a moment of panic for they do not understand if what they are doing is right or not considering that a good number of them are doing these activities for the first time. Therefore, having a healthy leader is an important issue that can have a great effect on the youths found in urban areas. These leaders should pass their traits to the people they are leading by ensuring that they create an environment of compassion, integrity, and dignity and pass the message that this is how people are supposed to run their lives. If these traits are passed to them at an early age, they are likely to behave in the same manner for the rest of their lives leading to the creation of a society that is responsible and conducive to life.

A healthy leader should manage to communicate freely and openly. They need to learn from their mistakes and avoid repeating the things they have done in the wrong way in the past. This will teach the urban children that people are supposed to accept and learn from their mistakes and avoid repeating them in the future. They need to understand that the communication channels need to be open when they are interacting with others in society and ensure that they make their feelings known so that everyone can understand each other. Failure to do this can lead the youth leaders to pass the wrong message to the young children on the way that they are supposed to handle themselves and run their lives. The leaders should not hide their mistakes, but they should work on them and ensure that they have managed to overcome them (Day, Fleenor, Atwater, Sturm & McKee, 2014). They need to teach urban children that it is normal to make mistakes, but the most important thing is how these mistakes are corrected. Therefore, the youth leaders should be a good example on the way that these young people can learn to work through their mistakes. Engaging in such activities will create an environment of togetherness, cooperation, and ensure that all the members in the group are free to suggest ideas. The issue will raise their thinking capability for they will have to find ways through which they can manage the various problems issue affecting them.

Another youth leadership factor that can have a great influence on the way that the urban children develop is the consistent leadership. Consistency is one of the traits of great leaders globally, and the followers always admire consistent leaders for they get to understand what to expect from them. They tend to run their activities in the same manner, they let their goals and objectives known by everyone, and they let the others know what is expected of them. These successful leaders tend to maximize on using their strengths and work on their areas of weakness, and when these traits are passed to the children in the urban, they stand to run a successful life. The traits that children learn at a young age are crucial for they are the ones that help them throughout their lives. Consistent leaders tend to be trustworthy for they always fulfill their commitments and they often undertake the challenge of building relationships that are based on trust. Gaining the trust does not happen overnight; it takes times, and this is the reason why the youth leaders need to be consistent in whatever they are doing to ensure that they manage to convince the children in the urban centers that they are required in behave in a certain way to ensure that they grow up as good and respectable kids. A consistent leader should define expectations and make sure that all the urban children understand that society has high expectations on them and they shroud not let them down. Their parents are looking up to them to grow into being adults who can be relied upon to make the right decisions when they are expected to manage a give situation. It is not right to overpromise and raise the expectations of people and then at the end let them down. The leaders need to pass the messages that the children should learn to manage their expectations and ensure that they work within their limits as a way of creating healthy relationship among themselves. The leaders should pass the message that the children need to have personal rules where they set their rules that they need to observe. Peer pressure is one of the worst issues that affect the lives of children and learning to manage it is crucial to avoid these kids falling into the wrong hands and engaging in activities that are not goods for their lives. Therefore, teaching them how to get personal rules is one of the critical ways that they can rely on to ensure that they move into adulthood as being people of integrity.

Another youth leadership factor that affects the development of children based in the urban centers is the issue of working as a group. The youth leadership should be made of different people that have the leadership attributes. Mixing these different characters will be essential in making sure that they become a success. This will pass the message to the children that success is not achieved by being individualistic, but rather working with others (Wagner, 2016). People are blessed with different skills and expertise levels, and this means that a given objective can be achieved if all the people manage to work together and each to raise their contributions.

The democratic method of leadership is one of the best ways of managing a group where all the members are given the freedom to express themselves, raise their issues and take part in the decision making process. It is a process that is participative where everyone has the opportunity to exchange ideas freely with discussion being a critical component of running an organization or a group of people. Before a decision is passed and a group decides to take a given action, all the members are notified of the issues at hand and they are allowed to give their contributions (Murphy & Johnson, 2016). It can be noted that in a group, most of the decisions made are implemented by the members, and this means that they have to be involved in the analyzing of these ideas so that the implementation process can be successful. The youth leadership needs to adopt this leadership process with the idea of making all the children in the group to participate (Dionigi, Fraser-Thomas, Stone & Gayman, 2018). The process will teach these children that in life, everyone should be given the opportunity to be themselves and no ideas should be ignored. Even if people may fail to agree, they must never fail to listen to each other. The fact that all the members are treated equally in a group means that there are high chances of the activities being conducted becoming a success. The urban children need to be taught on the procedure that they can use to solve the complex life issues. They need to understand that they cannot have all the solutions to the problems affecting their lives for their knowledge is limited by their level of expertise. Therefore, they may require to call upon the services of others through the open way of engaging in dialogue (Villa-Torres & Svanemyr, 2015). The democratic youth leadership style that a group can adopt is a good way of teaching the urban children that they need to be creative considering that the world is constantly changing and to remain relevant, an individual must move with time and be innovative. Even though the style of leadership discourages individualism, there is an instance in which the children will be needed to be presented with problems that they will be required to solve. Honesty is a trait that is built and teaching the children to be honest with one another, and this will be a good way of influencing their future life for the better.

The life of a human being is always of a growth mode meaning that people do not stop learning even in their old ages. However, most of the learning process is shaped at the child level for the habit that they take at this period, they never leave it, and they treat it as the way that things should be handled. It is, therefore, critical to ensure that the youth leadership that manages their various groups is up to the task and follow the right procedures in running these urban kids. It is thus important that they introduce the issue of fairness when they are doing their various chores. These urban kids will take after them and lead a fulfilling life. The fairness may be in the way that they share responsibilities or any other good things that are presented to the group (Redmond & Dolan, 2016). The children need to be taught the importance of treating the people around them with dignity and respect, ensure that they do not take advantage of others. Life should be about sharing what others have with those lacking for people in the society can never be equal. Some are blessed than others may it be intellectually, financially or socially and it is important that the ones who are efficient in a given acti...