ABSTRACT
Youth mentoring is a complex relationship that mobilises features from parenting, friendships, or counselling. In the ecology of social relationships, mentoring relies somewhat in between these relational contexts, posing considerable challenges to mentors in order to negotiate between different beliefs and approaches to the mentees' development. Some significant efforts have been made to understand the processes underlying the exchanges between mentors and significant others in the mentees' lives. Most of this research body has been dedicated to examine parents-mentors communication. Less is known, however, about how mentoring fits patterns of social support involving significant adults and/or peers in the mentees' lives and how these patterns, in terms of greater or lesser consistency, may come to affect youths' development. The aim of this work is to summarise empirical findings related to the impact of patterns of social support on indicators of social development and well-being.
