Promoting Healthy Adolescent Sexuality

The healthy, rather than problematic, aspects of adolescent sexuality are emphasized in an approach that combines biosocial-psychological factors in a lifespan, contextual, family systems perspective with an emphasis on adolescent development from ages 10 to 20 years. A broad definition of healthy adolescent sexuality as a normal, positive, central part of growth toward maturity is proposed. Pertinent theory and research are briefly summarized to learn what factors are known to affect adolescent sexual health in both positive and negative ways. This article is about adolescent sexuality as a central and positive part of the total well-being of young people from the ages of about 10 to 20 years. It is not focused on specific sex behaviors such as petting and intercourse, even less so on problems such adolescent pregnancy and childbearing. After all, only about 5% of adolescent women bear a child in any one year at the present time (Moore, 1989). Although these young women, their mates, children, and families may well have associated problems, a specific emphasis on problems such as these has overly dominated much of our research and policy/program focus about adolescence in the past several decades. This emphasis has played into an already widespread unfortunate and mistaken impression that adolescence is inevitably fraught with problems and that sexuality is particularly dangerous and disturbing.