The Growing Up FAST: Families and Adolescents Surviving and Thriving™ program

This paper discusses the development of The Growing Up FAST: Families and Adolescent Surviving and Thriving TM Program. The Growing Up FAST program is an approach to working with adolescents and their parents that is based theoretically on various literatures concerned with rites of passage, multicultural issues, and the solution-focused perspective. The present paper discusses this theoretical background, as well as the program's specific goals, current evaluative efforts and implementation strategies. "Traditional psychotherapeutic approaches cannot make a dent in the mental health problems of the nation. Perhaps the day is beginning to dawn when replicable, programmatic, community-scale primary, secondary, and tertiary problem-prevention programs for the family will improve the way family members behave toward one another" (Guerney et al., 1985, p. 1209). "A new era of prevention and intervention with youth is upon us. We can no longer accept the notion that mental health professionals-including family therapists—should only be connected with adolescents at the point of intervention" (Gavazzi and Blumenkrantz, 1993, p. 65).