For 16 year old Matthew, it is the four wisdom teeth he just had extracted. For 17 year old Jacob, it is confronting a friend about his drinking. For 13 year old Melissa, it is recovering from a sports injury and scratchy sore throat before this week's big game. The six-year span between 13 and 19 offers as many changes in growth and development as changes in the eighth grade to twelfth grade school curriculum.
Youth are more responsible for their personal care and decision making.
Long gone are the days when a caregiver was responsible for the basics of health such as bathing, good nutrition and proper rest. For the present time, a teen is feeling basically healthy and the threat of being sixty years old with heart disease or cancer is hard to sell as reason for choosing healthy behaviors now. M.D. The content of school health curriculums offers another challenge in the scope of teen health issues. The greatest reason being that personal health choices are exactly that, personal. Values come into play when educators are challenged for example to teach reproductive health.