Section 5. Building Youth/Mentor Relationships

Congratulations! You've chosen to take on an important and potentially rewarding responsibility: building a mentoring relationship with a young person. Strong mentoring relationships require patience, consistency, openness, and a willingness to learn. Communication, problem solving, listening, and goal-setting skills can help you build a relationship that is supportive, respectful, and centered on the young person's strengths and goals.

These next sections are for you, the adult mentor. In addition to outlining communication, problem solving, and goal-setting techniques, they'll offer guidance for building and sustaining a healthy mentoring relationship.

Why is your relationship with your mentee important?

Few parts of an intergenerational mentoring program are as important as the quality of the relationship between mentor and mentee. Like any relationship, a strong mentoring relationship does not simply happen. It develops over time through communication, reliability, mutual respect, shared experiences, and effort from both people.

The foundations of the mentoring relationship begin as soon as you meet. The relationship will continue to grow and change as you learn more about one another, so it's worth taking the time to establish trust, clear expectations, and healthy boundaries from the beginning.

How do you build a mentoring relationship with young people?

A number of factors contribute to strong youth mentoring relationships. In this section, we'll discuss attitudes, skills, and practices that can help mentors build supportive relationships while respecting young people's individuality, agency, culture, and goals.

The importance of modeling behaviors

As a mentor, your actions can influence how your mentee experiences the relationship. Young people notice whether adults are reliable, respectful, accountable, and consistent. You do not need to be a perfect role model, but you should try to model the qualities you hope to bring to the mentoring relationship.

Positive practices you can model include:

• Being consistent and reliable
• Using language that is respectful and appropriate to the setting
• Following through on your commitments and communicating promptly when plans need to change
• Being friendly and considerate
• Being helpful without taking over decisions that belong to the young person
• Treating the mentee and others with respect
• Acknowledging mistakes, apologizing when appropriate, and showing that adults continue to learn too

Cultural humility

You and your mentee may differ in race, ethnicity, culture, socioeconomic background, religion, disability, gender identity, sexual orientation, family structure, education, language, age, or life experience. These differences do not prevent a strong mentoring relationship, but they may shape how each of you understands the world and the relationship.

Be aware of your own assumptions and avoid treating your experience as the standard against which your mentee's life should be measured. Your mentee is an individual with strengths, knowledge, values, experiences, and goals of their own.

Cultural humility means remaining open to learning rather than assuming you already understand another person's culture or experience. Ask respectful questions when appropriate, listen to how your mentee describes their own identity and community, and recognize that no single person represents an entire racial, cultural, religious, or social group.

Remember: the mentoring relationship is not a one-way street. Mentors bring knowledge and experience, but mentees do too. A strong relationship gives both people opportunities to learn from one another.

Building trust

Respect for a young person's identity and culture is one part of building trust. Trust also develops through reliability, honesty, boundaries, listening, and follow-through. Your mentee may not trust you immediately, and that is understandable. Trust develops over time.

Here are some ways to support that process:

• Give your mentee time to get to know you. Trust cannot be demanded or rushed.
• Be clear about confidentiality and its limits. Do not promise to keep information private if program policy or law requires you to share certain safety concerns. Explain from the beginning what information may need to be reported and whom you would contact.
• Be sensitive to the responsibilities, stressors, and circumstances your mentee may be managing outside the mentoring relationship, including school, work, caregiving, health, transportation, housing, or family responsibilities.
• Be patient as your mentee navigates adolescence, growing independence, changing relationships, and new responsibilities.
• Be consistent. Reliability can help create a relationship in which your mentee feels comfortable being open with you.
• Show through your words and actions that your mentee's ideas, interests, time, and experiences matter.
• Recognize strengths, effort, growth, and accomplishments sincerely and specifically.
• Share feedback respectfully when it is useful, but avoid treating your role as one of directing or correcting every decision your mentee makes.
• Respect your mentee's growing ability to make their own choices, even when you would choose differently, unless there is a serious safety concern that requires intervention.
• Be sensitive to your mentee's feelings and perspectives. Take responsibility for your own reactions rather than projecting them onto the young person.
• Follow the program's expectations for scheduling and communication. Take appropriate responsibility for staying in contact while also encouraging shared responsibility as the relationship develops.
• Make every reasonable effort to keep planned meetings. If plans change, communicate as early as possible and reschedule when appropriate.
• Notice progress in ways that reflect the young person's own goals and priorities, rather than measuring them only against an adult's expectations.

Trust, like communication, is mutual. Your mentee should be able to rely on you, and you should also give them appropriate opportunities to demonstrate responsibility, make choices, and shape the relationship.

Communication skills

One of the most important things you can contribute as a mentor is a relationship in which a young person feels listened to, respected, and taken seriously. Communication skills take time and practice, and mentors should expect to continue developing them throughout the relationship.

Some important communication skills include:

• Active listening: Giving your attention to what the other person is communicating and checking your understanding rather than assuming you already know what they mean.
• Assertiveness: Expressing your own needs, concerns, and boundaries clearly and respectfully without trying to control the other person.
• Empathy: Making an effort to understand another person's experience and perspective without judgment. Empathy does not require assuming that you know exactly how someone feels.
• Open-mindedness: Recognizing that your mentee may have personal, political, religious, cultural, or other beliefs that differ from yours and that those differences do not need to prevent mutual respect.
• Self-awareness: Recognizing your own assumptions, emotions, limitations, and reactions and taking responsibility for how they affect the relationship.
• Support: Offering encouragement and respect even when you disagree with a particular decision, while recognizing when safety concerns require help from program staff or another qualified person.
• Trust: Being appropriately open, honest, dependable, and willing to listen while maintaining the boundaries expected in a mentoring relationship.

Active listening

As mentioned above, active listening is central to effective communication.

Whenever two people communicate, there is a person sending information, a person receiving it, and a message being communicated. But communication is rarely as simple as the words themselves. People may understand the same statement differently because of context, tone, previous experiences, culture, or expectations.

If you tell your mentee, "I'll meet you at the library at four o'clock," you may believe the message is clear. But if the young person misunderstood the time, missed part of the conversation, or thought you meant a different library, the communication has not worked as intended.

Active listening helps you check your understanding rather than simply assuming the message was received or that you understood everything your mentee meant.

An active listener:

• Pays attention to what the person actually says
• Notices possible emotions but checks rather than assuming: "You sound frustrated. Is that how you're feeling?"
• Pays attention to context, tone, and what the speaker says is important without trying to uncover hidden feelings or motives that the person has not expressed
• Listens for values, priorities, relationships, experiences, and concerns that the speaker chooses to share

The components of active listening:

Active listening can include verbal responses, nonverbal communication, and empathy. Let's look at each of these.

Responding:

To show interest and make sure you understand, respond in ways that help the speaker continue or clarify what they mean.

• Paraphrases: Restate the speaker's meaning in your own words and give them an opportunity to correct you.
  • "So the security guard accused you of taking the shirt even after you explained that it had been paid for. Did I understand that correctly?"
• Feeling reflections: Gently check the emotion you think you are hearing rather than stating it as a fact.
  • "It sounds like that was really frustrating. Is that how it felt to you?"
• Clarifications: Ask questions that help both of you understand the situation more clearly.
  • "Did that happen yesterday?"
• Neutral statements: Use brief responses that show you are following the conversation without taking it over.
  • "I see. Go on."
• Summaries: Pull together the main concerns you have heard and check your understanding.
  • "If I'm understanding you, the situation felt unfair, and you're still trying to decide what you want to do next. Is that right?"

Nonverbal communication:

Nonverbal communication can influence how a conversation feels, but there is no single correct posture, level of eye contact, facial expression, or physical position that demonstrates good listening. Communication styles vary across cultures, personalities, disabilities, and neurotypes.

• Give the person your attention in a way that is natural and respectful. Eye contact can be useful when comfortable for both people, but it should not be treated as a requirement.
• Use a comfortable and attentive posture. Try to avoid behaviors such as repeatedly checking your phone, turning away to do something unrelated, or otherwise signaling that you are not available for the conversation.
• Respect personal space. Sit or stand in whatever arrangement allows both people to feel comfortable. Do not assume that leaning toward someone, sitting close by, or facing them directly will feel supportive to everyone.

Empathy:

Empathy means making a sincere effort to understand another person's experience and perspective without judgment. Avoid assuming you know exactly how your mentee feels. Instead, listen and give them opportunities to explain their own experience.

• Concentrate on what the young person is saying
• Pay attention to tone, facial expressions, body language, and context while remembering that these cues can mean different things for different people
• Check your understanding of feelings or values rather than stating them as facts
• Summarize the important issues you heard and give your mentee a chance to correct or add to your understanding

Communication pitfalls - what not to do:

Good listening encourages communication and understanding. Some common responses, however, can make a young person feel dismissed, pressured, or judged and may make them less willing to continue sharing.

Common pitfalls include:

• Interrupting while someone is talking
• Arguing with or repeatedly challenging every point the other person makes
• Blaming another person for your own emotions or reactions
• Responding with judgment before understanding the situation
• Demanding that someone act or think the way you would
• Dismissing a person's right to their own opinions, values, or priorities
• Giving advice immediately instead of first asking whether the person wants advice, ideas, information, or simply someone to listen
• Jumping to conclusions
• Pressuring someone to disclose information before they're ready
• Sharing private information outside the limits established by the program

Most people fall into some of these habits occasionally. The important thing is to notice them, repair the conversation when necessary, and keep practicing more respectful ways of listening and responding.

Problem solving

Problem solving in a mentoring relationship means helping your mentee understand a concern, explore possibilities, consider consequences, and decide what they want to do. The mentor's role is not to take over the problem or make every decision for the young person.

One possible problem-solving process is:

• Exploring the concern: Give your mentee space to describe the situation in their own words
• Understanding the situation: Use open-ended questions to learn more about the circumstances, people involved, emotions, barriers, strengths, priorities, and available resources
• Clarifying the problem: Work together to identify the part of the situation the young person most wants to address
• Brainstorming options: Identify several possible ways forward without immediately judging them
• Considering options: Discuss possible benefits, risks, barriers, resources, and consequences associated with each option
• Choosing what to do: Support your mentee in deciding which option best fits their values, goals, circumstances, and safety. Respect their decision whenever it falls within reasonable safety and program boundaries
• Taking action and following up: Identify any next steps and decide what support, information, or resources may be useful. Later, check in about how things went and whether the plan needs to change

Mentors should also recognize when an issue goes beyond the mentoring role. Serious safety concerns, abuse, self-harm, exploitation, medical or mental health crises, legal issues, or other situations may require program staff or qualified professionals rather than informal problem solving between mentor and mentee.

Take time to strengthen your communication and problem-solving skills. They will be important throughout the mentoring relationship.

What do you do when things don't work out?

Despite everyone's best efforts, not every mentoring match will work well. A mentor and mentee may have different expectations, schedules, communication styles, interests, or relationship needs. Sometimes the match simply doesn't feel comfortable or useful to one or both people.

Do not assume that differences in culture or identity are themselves the problem. If differences are creating misunderstandings, seek support from program staff, communicate openly, and consider whether greater cultural humility, clearer expectations, or another approach could strengthen the relationship.

When difficulties arise, involve program staff rather than expecting the mentor or young person to resolve everything alone. Sometimes expectations can be clarified or the relationship can be repaired. In other situations, changing or ending the match may be the healthiest option.

Ending a mentoring relationship should not be framed as a failure or as something the young person caused. If possible, discuss the transition respectfully, acknowledge the relationship and what both people contributed, and make sure the young person understands what will happen next.

If your mentee shares or you observe concerns involving abuse or neglect, self-harm, violence, exploitation, substance use, serious mental health needs, or another significant safety issue, contact program staff promptly and follow the program's safeguarding, referral, and reporting procedures. Do not try to diagnose the situation or manage it alone.

If the mentoring relationship itself has become a barrier to the young person's well-being or goals, program staff can help determine whether the match should be changed and how to make the transition as supportive as possible.

In Summary

Building a mentoring relationship takes time, patience, communication, and mutual effort. Strong relationships are built through reliability, respect, listening, healthy boundaries, cultural humility, shared learning, and attention to the young person's interests and goals.

You will not always know exactly what to say or do, and not every mentoring relationship will develop in the same way. Stay open to feedback, ask for support from program staff when needed, and remember that your role is not to direct or "fix" your mentee. It is to build a dependable relationship in which the young person feels respected, supported, and able to pursue goals that matter to them.