“Growing evidence suggests that a close and enduring connection must form in order for youth to benefit from a mentoring relationship. Relationships that are less close tend to have little effect, and those of short duration can actually make matters worse for some youth.” (Rhodes, J. E., Davis, A. A., Prescott, L. R., & Spencer, R., 2007, p. 148)

Mentors can play an important part in an adolescent’s development especially in “urban youth” or “at-risk youth”. Normally we tend to look at mentoring programs and the relationship between a mentor and an adolescent as a positive thing that can help adolescents through difficult times. However, not all mentoring is beneficial and in “Caring Connections – Mentoring relationships in the lives of urban girls”, Rhodes et al. briefly introduces the possibility of the negative and possibly damaging consequences of mentoring.

Rhodes states that in order for a mentoring relationship to be beneficial, there needs to be an “enduring connection” and the relationship should be long term because the adolescents need to be able to trust their mentor. Naturally a long term enduring connection and relationship is more easily formed when there is a natural mentor rather than an assigned mentor. However, that doesn’t mean that all assigned mentors and mentoring programs where they place mentors with adolescents rather than naturally forming mentoring relationships are bad and harmful to the adolescent. Assigned mentorships can be beneficial to adolescents if the mentor is genuinely interested in forming a relationship with the adolescent and sticking with that relationship over time. The duration of the relationship is important because short term mentorships can be damaging especially if the adolescent doesn’t have many stable relationships in their life.

When I was an undergraduate in college I was in an education class where we were paired up with an “at-risk youth” from a local school for three weeks. I was placed as a tutor in an alternative education school where the students in that school had either been suspended or expelled from their previous school and I was placed with an adolescent girl. The requirement for the duration of our mentorship was only three weeks and I specifically remember the first day I got to the school the teacher telling me to be careful about forming a relationship with the girl because if I was only going to be there short term that it could be damaging to her because three weeks is so short and it could affect the way she trusts adults. I ended up staying and volunteering once a week after my class because I enjoyed tutoring and had started to form a relationship with the student and started to see her open up a little bit and working harder on her school work. Unfortunately because I as in college, I wasn’t able to spend more than an hour or two once or twice a week at the school with the student but I had already seen a few small improvements over a few months and can only imagine what a mentor can do if they were to spend more time with the adolescent or student that they are mentoring. The factor of time spent with an adolescent could be another reason as to why the natural mentors are more effective and beneficial than the assigned mentors because the natural mentors most likely are more accessible to the adolescent rather than assigned mentors who have more of a distance from their personal lives and the mentoring that they are doing.