The project focuses on the issue/problem of citizenship education as a tool to contribute to the promotion of youth well-being. The research hypothesis relates the phenomenon of youth existential distress to the lack or absence of life skills, and the construct of active citizenship and education for its exercise as educational key categories and tools to promote such skills and contribute to dealing with the phenomenon of youth existential distress.The research questions were the following: What is the role and influence of beliefs and efficacy in life skills on the development of positive thinking and subjective well-being of adolescents? What is the relationship between these two aspects and participatory processes, the propensity to assume forms of responsibility and civic engagement, and the development of active and proactive attitudes towards the future?

The research aimed to understand the relationship between the phenomenon of youth existential distress and the lack of life skills; to understand the relationship between the perception of one's own effectiveness in life skills, the perception of well-being and the lack of forms of positive thinking and the propensity to project oneself positively and responsibly into the future; to pedagogically re-signify the construct of active citizenship and its implementation through a bottom-up approach.

The research focuses on one of the educational emergencies facing pedagogy and education today: the challenge of the existential distress of adolescents, understood as the difficulty in performing "normal" evolutionary tasks. The data provided by ISTAT (2019), SIP (2022), UNICEF (2021) are alarming and show the increase, especially after the Covid-19 pandemic, in mental disorders between 10 and 19 years old and in suicides between 15 and 19 years old. The interpretation used was pedagogical, with the aim of formulating the issue from the point of view of the subject educability. For this reason, the research did not focus on pathological distress, but on those forms of socially compatible, often invisible distress that Sergio Tramma (2019) includes in what he calls the "grey zone". The epistemological framework of the research is that of complexity theory (Morin, 2000; Ceruti 1994, 2020, 2021), the capability approach (Sen, 1986, 1993, 1994; Nussbaum, 2011, 2012, 2013), ecological theory (Brofenbenner, 2002), the sustainability paradigm (ONU, 2015) and global citizenship education (UNESCO, 2017; 2023).

Attention to skills is at the heart of the research, and reference is made to the numerous national and international documents that stress the need to promote not only knowledge in the younger generations, but also the ability to be and the ability to do (WHO, 1993; OECD, 2021; UNICEF, 2021; European Commission, 2020). First of all, the Council Recommendation on key Competences for Lifelong Learning (2018), which questions the construct of citizenship and civic competences for the integral education of the subject. In this sense, the research identifies citizenship education as a way to counter existential distress, together with educational approaches based on the promotion of life skills. In this sense, citizenship education is seen as a practice of developing the future (Pignalberi, 2020), taking on a capacitive and educational meaning and using concepts such as empowerment, agency, participation, individual and collective well-being self-efficacy, fundamental protective factors against the emergence of forms of discomfort.

The research used a mixed methods approach and included a quantitative phase using standard research and a qualitative phase using interpretative research. The research tools were the questionnaire and the focus group. The questionnaire was divided into three sections: the first aimed at measuring life skills and focused on the processes of transition to adulthood, on biographical paths, the dimensions of values, attitudes, perception of one's existential condition; the second aimed at measuring positive thinking and focused on the participants' perception of well-being, self-esteem, optimism and life satisfaction; the third aimed at exploring the themes of active citizenship, agency, social participation, public engagement and the relationship with the social context of belonging, with institutions, with the educational reality and with places of aggregation. Several reference models were used to construct the questionnaire. Specifically, the model proposed by the OECD (2021) and the "Four-Dimensional Learning Model" (Unicef, 2021) were used to identify the life skills to be studied. For each of the life skills included in the models, items were constructed to measure participants' perceptions. Each item was constructed using a psychometric scale (Likert 1932; Thurstone 1929). The items used in the questionnaire took the form of statements to which students were asked to indicate their level of agreement or disagreement using three different scales with five response intervals. The focus group consisted of a moderately rigid schedule consisting of seven questions aimed at gathering beliefs, knowledge, opinions, attitudes and desired behaviours around four specific themes: citizenship, citizenship education, future, school. The sample analysed was identified in a well-defined population: students in classes III, IV and V of secondary schools. The sampling strategy used to administer the questionnaire was non-probabilistic for convenience. However, for the focus group, a non-proportional stratified random sample was used for representative elements. The total number of students enrolled in the classes was 354. There were 164 respondents to the questionnaire and 18 participants in the focus groups.

The data made it possible to argue that there is a positive relationship between low perceptions of life skills and low perceptions of well-being and positive thinking. It is therefore possible to argue that there is a relationship between the phenomena of existential distress in young people and the lack of life skills. Furthermore, the data shows a close relation between low levels of self-efficacy in life skills, self-esteem, agency, low perceptions of well-being and positive thinking and the adoption of a tone of renunciation-disengagement towards existential planning, civic responsibility as well as participation. Overall, the results encourage the use of educational models that focus on the promotion of life skills, i.e. non-cognitive, social and emotional skills that promote young people's agency. The analysis of the data shows that the promotion of participation and the education of citizenship skills, as well as the active exercise of these skills, especially in the developmental age, would allow us to increase the perception of having the possibility to influence future changes, to be able to modify events, to be able to solve individual and collective problems and, above all, to allow the development of protective factors. The pedagogical impact materialises in the identification of the horizons of meaning towards which citizenship education practices must move, starting from an awareness of its constitutive complexity and multidimensionality, in order to hypothesise citizenship education paths that go beyond a purely disciplinary perspective and embrace the various components of the individual's educational process: the cognitive (knowledge, critical thinking, conceptualisation); the affective (experiences, attribution of meaning, positive evaluation values such as justice, fairness, freedom, solidarity, empathy); finally, the volitional (making choices and actions, implementing behaviours in these directions).

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