Book Takes New Angle on Adolescent Health

A groundbreaking new book from the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) offers a new perspective on the challenges of health promotion and prevention efforts aimed at adolescents.

Youth: Choices and Change, produced by PAHO's Adolescent Health Unit, examines the latest behavioral change theories and models and shows how these can be successfully applied to the development of international public health programs targeting teens.

It argues that the key to developing successful programs in this area is taking into account the target group's developmental context. Interventions aimed at 13-year-olds, for example, need to account for the different emotional and social needs of this age group as compared with those of 15- or 18-year-olds. The book also notes the importance of taking into account cultural, ethnic and gender differences, as well as poverty, and how these affect adolescents as they grow and mature.

The book's authors—Cecilia Breinbauer, a psychiatrist specializing in child and adolescent health, and Matilde Maddaleno, a pediatrician and public health expert specializing in adolescence—examine the reasons why some health interventions for adolescents succeed while others fail. They argue that most such interventions are too narrowly focused and "curative" in their approach; few designers of these programs consider the broader social context in which young people live.

The authors show how the lifestyles and habits of adolescents in Latin America and the Caribbean present special challenges and opportunities to public health work. Respectful and successful interventions depend on choosing the right theoretical framework for a target group’s socioeconomic situation, as well as consideration of different stages of adolescent development and the needs and wants they engender.

The authors provide an overview of theories and models of health promotion at the interpersonal, community and policy level. They provide detailed reporting on how these theories have been applied in diverse contexts throughout the world to encourage and maintain healthy behaviors in young people.

Youth: Choices and Change also notes that adolescent health programs have tended to overlook pre-adolescents and early adolescents, a group they say is ripe for appropriate interventions. The book presents a list of developmentally appropriate goals for planning health promotion and prevention programs for this age group.

The ultimate goal, the authors say in their introduction, is "positive, sustainable behavioral change which enables young people to become actors of their own change and achieve their self-set goals."