In the community Thriving & Healthy Youth, the focus is on enhancing development opportunities, resilience and destigmatising children and youths. All children, but with a special focus on children dealing with cancer, chronic illness, mental disability, poverty, trauma, neglect, divorce or loss of a loved one during their childhoods.

Early warning

An important cornerstone in the research project is recognising which children and youths need support in an early stage. By systematically following them and mapping their vulnerabilities when it comes to their health, well-being, participation in social activities and school. Besides acknowledging problems, we expressly focus on what children and youths can do at personal, societal and social levels.

Course-of-life perspective

We explicitly look at what children can do, and how children can be empowered. This way, we want to contribute to a healthy development of youths. From a course-of-life perspective, our community does not focus on a specific age demographic, but instead looks at how children can develop resilience from childhood to adulthood.

Attention to play

Play is an important field of attention within this domain. Playing is fun, but playing is also important. By playing alone or with peers, children learn to know themselves, how to interact with each other, but also how to solve problems and how to think creatively. That is why we have special attention for the influence of play on children’s development within this domain, a subject that we approach from various angles – geographical, neurobiological, educational-scientific, pedagogical and clinical.

Joining forces

Within the community Thriving & Healthy Youth, we want to use data that was or is being collected within existing youth cohorts. By joining forces and encouraging data exchange beyond the boundaries of faculties, we can gain a much better overview on factors that explain how children and youths thrive. We also use this information to develop interventions in order to further support the resilience of children and youths who need that.