Work Group IV: Increasing the capacity of parents, families, and adults living with adolescents to improve adolescent health outcomes

Parents and similarly situated caregivers play a vital role in the health and well-being of adolescents, as direct influences on their children’s physical and psychological development, as providers of guidance and information on health-related matters, and as individuals who often influence adolescents’ access to health care and health-related information. Parents and other caregivers need to know what healthy adolescence is, how to assess whether their child is on a healthy trajectory, how to facilitate their adolescent’s healthy development, and how to get help and advocate for themselves and their adolescent when problems arise. To succeed, therefore, any comprehensive effort to improve the health of America’s adolescents must involve their parents and other caregivers [1,2]. Our focus in this report is not intended to minimize the importance of influences outside the family, such as the peer group, school, neighborhood, or mass media, nor do we believe that the influence of parents over their children’s health and development is limitless. Nevertheless, we should not underestimate the importance of parents and other caregivers in the lives of young people or the potential benefits of involving these individuals in interventions designed to promote adolescent health and well-being. Indeed, we believe that the exposure of today’s adolescents to the influences of so many individuals and institutions outside the family makes the inclusion of parents in the promotion of adolescent health more important today than ever before. The successful involvement of parents and caregivers in adolescent health promotion will require important changes in the ways in which parents of teenagers view themselves and their role in their adolescent’s development. In an effort to counter the clearly exaggerated claim that adolescent development and behavior are solely the product of how children have been raised by their parents, some writers have argued that parents’ behavior is completely irrelevant, that adolescent health is governed entirely by genetics or by influences outside the home, or that any parental efforts to influence their children’s health or development are futile after children have passed into adolescence. Social and behavioral science tells us that either extreme is incorrect. Clearly, genes matter, peers matter, and the media matter. But parents and other caregivers matter as well, and it is a mistake to lead parents to believe otherwise. One of the most important messages we can convey is that parents continue to matter, even after their children have entered adolescence. Parents and other primary caregivers need four things to facilitate their adolescent’s healthy development. First, they need basic information about the normative developmental changes of adolescence so that they can better understand and respond to their child’s behavior. Second, they need basic information on the principles of effective parenting during the adolescent years so that they can adapt to the From Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (L.S.); and the College of Medicine, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vemont, (P.D.). Address correspondence to: Paula Duncan, M.D., Youth Health Director, VCHIP, University of Vermont, College of Medicine, Arnold 5, UHC Campus, One South Prospect St., Burlington, VT 05401. E-mail: paula.duncan@vtmednet.or. Manuscript accepted August 21, 2002. JOURNAL OF ADOLESCENT HEALTH 2002;31:261–263