Youth mentoring is a potentially powerful tool for prevention and intervention, but it has garnered little attention from clinical child and adolescent psychologists. For decades, the practice of youth mentoring has out-paced its underlying science, and meta-analytic studies consistently reveal modest outcomes. The field is now at an important crossroads: Continue to endorse traditional, widely used models of mentoring or shift to alternative models that are more in line with the tenets of prevention science. Presented here is a bilateral framework to guide the science and practice of mentoring going forward. Our premise is that mentoring relationships can serve as both means to a targeted end and as a valued end unto itself. We present a functional typology of current mentoring programs (supportive, problem-focused, & transitional) and call for greater specification of both the process and expected outcomes of mentoring. Finally, we argue that efforts to leverage mentoring relationships in service of youth development and the promotion of child and adolescent mental health will likely require disrupting the science, practice, and policy that surrounds youth mentoring.

青年指导是预防和干预的潜在有力工具，但它很少引起临床儿童和青少年心理学家的关注。几十年来，青年指导的实践已经超越了其基础科学，元分析研究始终显示出适度的结果。该领域现在正处于一个重要的十字路口：继续支持传统的、广泛使用的指导模式或转向更符合预防科学原则的替代模式。这里介绍的是双边的指导未来指导的科学和实践的框架。我们的前提是，指导关系既可以作为实现目标的手段，也可以作为其自身的重要目标。我们提出了当前指导计划（支持性的、以问题为中心的和过渡性的）的功能类型，并呼吁对指导的过程和预期结果进行更详细的说明。最后，我们认为，利用指导关系服务于青年发展和促进儿童和青少年心理健康的努力可能需要破坏围绕青年指导的科学、实践和政策。