It is crucial to focus on the strengthening of adolescents’ resilience and well-being. This is because adolescents are, with increasing age, more vulnerable for depressive symptoms and low intrinsic academic motivation. During adolescence, the satisfaction of the psychological needs for autonomy, relatedness, and competence, which serves as a catalyzer of growth, is increasingly threatened. Therefore, from a prevention point of view, it is crucial that students acquire the skills to get their basic needs met at an earlier age period. Although a large body of research demonstrates the
importance of a need-supportive context in early adolescents, they can also learn to craft their own basic needs (need crafting) by seeking out activities, contexts, and relationships that increase opportunities for need satisfaction. Building on an effective training (called LifeCraft) for late
adolescents, this project aims to develop and validate, for the first time, an effective, universal training for early adolescents. Because early adolescents are still in elementary school and may benefit more from classroom support, a ‘classic’ online LifeCraft condition will be experimentally contrasted with both a control group and a LifeCraft condition with additional classroom support. The condition with classroom support is expected to result in the most sustainable mental health benefits.