“I wished I could have said bye”: exploring youth reactions to formal mentoring relationship endings

Youth mentoring programs strive to create stable, supportive relationships between adult mentors and youth mentees to promote positive youth development. Although these formal relationships always reach a conclusion, little is known about how mentees experience the endings of their relationships. This study elicits the words and perspectives of mentees to investigate the emotional reactions provoked by mentoring relationship terminations. Participants were youth (n = 72) in a prospective study of mentoring relationship development who completed a survey following the official closure of their match. Asked how they felt about the match ending, mentees more often indicated negative rather than positive emotions. Invited to give a single word describing their feelings, youth shared a range of responses (e.g., nonchalant, bittersweet, confused, shocked, sad, lonely, angry, abandoned). On an adapted Extended Grief Inventory, youth were more likely to endorse positive memories, but sizeable proportions also endorsed items from the traumatic grief subscale. Content analysis of responses to how mentees wished the ending had been different yielded themes such as wanting an explanation, a final meeting, a chance to say goodbye, a better relationship experience, or simply continuing the match. The findings, interpreted with respect to attachment theory, ambiguous loss, and disenfranchised grief, suggest mentoring relationships have meaning to youth beyond the life of the relationship and that endings can elicit strong feelings. With an ethical imperative to do no harm to youth, mentoring programs should attend to the potential for loss and grief and provide adequate support to mentees during and after relationship endings.