Transitional Age Youth: Shape Your Own Success
- Accrescent Institute
- May 30
- 9 min read
As Transitional Age Youth, shaping your own success after foster care means taking ownership of your mind, your decisions, and the people you let into your life. In this panel discussion, Accrescent Institute founder Thomas C. Rector, executive director Shannon Stoltz, and program specialist Rachel Miller dive into how our three core trainings are designed to guide you in leveraging that control. Rooted in the science of biology, neuroscience, and genetics, BioSocial Cognition explains your brain's biological shift to demand independence, and gives you the framework to handle it.
This isn't more adults telling you what to do—it is about giving you the tools to understand how your brain works. From learning how to stop reacting to your environment to strategically choosing mentors, this conversation shares a foundation to building a self-directed future on your own terms.
You don't have to navigate these massive shifts alone; this discussion was put together to help you unpack the real questions on your mind:
Why do I feel this intense need to make my own choices, and how do I actually handle that independence?
How can I stop my heaviest memories from causing me to react in ways I regret, and turn them into something useful instead?
Do I actually get to choose who influences me, and how do I find mentors who truly respect my journey?
Are these tools just a quick fix for right now, or will they actually help me as I navigate my 20s, 30s, and the rest of my life?
Transitional Age Youth: Shape Your Own Success - Panel Discussion with Thomas C. Rector, Shannon Stoltz, & Rachel Miller (Transcript)
Table of Contents
What is in This Training For You as Transitional Age Youth?
Shannon:
For foster teens and young adults transitioning out of, or aging out of foster care, transitional age youth, I believe is the official term. There's three specific training components that we focus on.
One is Your Brain, Your Choice.
The second is Beyond The System: Empowering Your Success Through Learning.
And the third is The Agreement Process.
Tom let's start with you as far as - What is in it for a teen or a young adult to take those trainings? What do you want them to walk away with?
Why Your Brain Biologically Shifts to Demand Independence
Thomas C. Rector:
I think most fundamentally I want them to walk away with knowledge they can use. And use in the sense of they have arrived at the place where their brain now says, “I wanna make my own choices”. They've arrived at the place where the brain is saying, “I want to make my own choices”.
By going through these three trainings, it really feeds and provides the memory, the knowledge, to really, truly engage that place that they're in now. And it will take out a whole lot of the experimentation, reaction, kinds of things that are typical of us who go through teens and really give them a direction and a focus and recognize who they are at the early side of it.
Who am I?
What am I?
What do I like?
What do I wanna do?
Which way am I going?
That self-identity.
This information will give the tools to be able to have them process it. It doesn't tell them who they are. It gives them the tools to have them be able to discover who they are, and it will give them methodologies that they can use when they engage other people.
So as they want to move forward and go forward and make things happen and get people to hear what they're saying and test their ideas, it will give them the tools to be able to do that.
It will also provide them with the perspective, I think that's the right way of saying this. It will also provide the perspective how to use both the positive and negative experiences that they've had so far in life. How do you use those to go forward to achieve what they want to do? And I think that that's really, really important. And it will make 'em, in a way it will make 'em smarter because they now know how to do this, and what to do with it, and how to do it, and what tools to use.
So, very leverageable. Very leverageable.
Lifelong Tools for Steering Your Life in a Productive Direction
Shannon:
Rachel, what's your perspective?
Rachel:
I think it's important for the teens to understand that we have a lot of adults taking these trainings who go, “Oh!”. So the lack of awareness is not specific to being a teenager, and we're not discounting the fact that you have had an amount of experience in your life, especially if you're coming in from a situation where, as a foster youth or aging out of the system or something like that. You've had a lot of experiences that we as adults cannot…we can try to empathize with and we can try to understand…but the day-to-day life is yours and you own that. And those memories are there.
What I appreciate about the training is that it allows you to look at your very specific background and focus on those things, like Tom says, in a productive manner. There have been some really bad things that have happened. People who have disappointed you. And how do you use that information to grow and to make choices so that your future is the future that you want?
Because now you're at the point where you are able to make choices and those decisions, and you are allowed to steer your life in a way that you didn't necessarily do before. One of our common things is to say, “understanding why people make the choices that they do”. And so it's very helpful.
I just want to pass on to a teen that even I, as a 50-year-old woman, am still acknowledging like, “Oh, that's why I did that.” - there's still those moments for me. So this is a tool that not only can you use it right now on the things that you've done, but it's a tool you can continue to use throughout your life in identifying the decisions that you continue to make. Again, positive, negative, or the experiences that you have, positive, negative, and continue to create wisdom out of those experiences moving forward.
Moving Past Survival Reactions to Understand Your Mind
Shannon:
Rach, as someone who has a lot of those negative experiences in your childhood and have had to navigate adulthood with those negative experiences and still the relationships that those experiences came from.
Do you feel that having had the perspective of the trainings would've helped you earlier, process through it, or did it supplement the counseling that you had? What is your thought on that?
Rachel:
I think, and this goes back to the why behind the “behavior is a reaction”. It's a telling and there were times that I did not understand my own behavior. I knew it was happening. I knew I felt angry. I knew I felt scared. I knew I felt these things, but I didn't understand the source of those things or where exactly they had come from. And it was a lot of trial and error for me to figure out where those things came from.
Whereas if I had the information that I've had taking Tom's classes for the last couple of years, and through therapy, and through my training as an advocate, there's that whole, for the last 30 years, that whole process of taking those trainings and becoming an advocate and working with foster teens and working with domestic violence survivors and sexual assault survivors and those kind of things has helped me - both understand their behavior and have an in more insight into my behavior.
So I think it's definitely helpful in terms of being aware of your internal reactions and aware of the impact that has and how to create a smoother road for yourself, in terms of, “This is a kind of personality I don't get along really well with, so this is not the kind of person that needs to be a mentor in my life.” Right?
Mentors: Taking Charge of Who You Choose to Influence You
Rachel:
It's interesting, we had another discussion where you [Tom] talked about mentors and I think the other nice thing to point out is mentor does not equal someone who is in your life the most. It equals someone that you have that connection, that trust, that example that you want to follow and that person that respects you.
So I had mentors in my life who were absolutely people I only spent an hour with a week or once a month. I had an English teacher that was very understanding about a lot of things that were going on in my life. I had an art teacher who was just fabulous with those kind of things.
So I also wanna point that out too, when we talk about you can kind of, invite mentors into your life to also understand that just because someone is the person that spends the most hours with you, that does not…I'm trying to, I may wanna back up and rephrase that.
Shannon:
They don't have the most influence on you. You choose that.
Rachel:
Right. They don't have to have the most influence on you. It may mean you have to be more aware of the influence they have on you because they do spend the most time with you. But a true mentor is someone that you look up to, you have a relationship with, you have good communication with. Those kinds of things. Who respects you. Who wants the best for you. Who's not in that relationship just for what it can give them. I may have gone a little off the rails there with your original question, but it reminded me when Tom was talking earlier about mentors.
Believing in Your Power to Define Your Own Success
Shannon:
I would like to add to that even though it's a little off discussion, but I have had mentors. These are people that I have chosen that I am watching, that they have no idea that they are my mentors.
They're people who I would like to emulate pieces of their things. Very, very rarely is there somebody who I wanna emulate everything about their life or their perspective, but there are aspects that I want to emulate. I know that I have the choice to do that and then when it stops serving me, I can not. But there's books, surrounding yourself with the voices. Whether they know that they're the voices in your life or not, but surrounding yourself with the voices that help you achieve your goals is important.
And I think what happens a lot when we're coming out of the foster system or a traumatic or unsupportive family situation is that it's hard to believe that we have our own ability to surround ourselves with where we wanna go. Or that we do have choice in the process. I think the training helps us recognize that we get to create our own memories and we get to make our own choices, and we get to define our own success. And that can change - we can make one choice and we can choose a different choice.
Owning Your Knowledge and Becoming Your Own Expert
Shannon:
We took off the rails there. Tom, do you wanna bring it back onto what this is citing for you?
Thomas C. Rector:
I think that… Do the trainings do us any good? and What's in it for me?
And the answer is, “Yes, absolutely.”
You get to choose what you want out of them to grow and do and achieve whatever you want to do. And more than likely, once you have this information, the people around you are gonna become students of your knowledge and that will work well.
Shannon:
Thank you.
Accessing Additional Support & Training
If you want to keep exploring the practical tools and discussions built for navigating life during and after the foster care system, you can access our library of youth resources here:
Resources for the Adults in Your Circle
Great support systems work best when everyone has the right tools. If you have foster parents, case workers, or mentors who want to better understand your journey and learn how to support your independence, you can share these resources with them:
For Families: Foster Parents
For Professionals & Advocates: Adults working with Foster Youth
Comments