For over a decade, concerning trends have emerged among youth globally, including worsening mental and physical health, declining physical activity and academic performance, and high levels of loneliness. These trends are particularly worrying for youth, as they are in a critical period of development when many lifetime mental disorders may first emerge. Together, they highlight the need for upstream and equitable approaches that protect and promote youth well-being as a whole. Canada’s Youth Policy similarly identifies health and wellness as a key priority and emphasizes creating conditions that enable all youth to flourish. Flourishing means doing well across the different aspects of life that matter for a young person’s well-being.

Where young people live, learn, grow, and spend their time matters for flourishing.

Youth well-being is shaped by interconnected conditions around them, from families, peers, schools, and neighbourhoods to services, policies, economic systems, and the broader social and physical environment. Yet efforts to understand and improve youth well-being often focus on individual risks, behaviours, and responsibilities, underestimating the role of the environments that young people experience every day. Research also tends to examine individual aspects of well-being and their determinants separately, even though they coexist and interact in real life. And because population-level research often focuses on averages, it can hide the fact that some groups of young people living in the same place are doing much better – or worse – than others. As a result, we know surprisingly little about what combinations of conditions come together in real-world places where diverse groups of young people consistently flourish.