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Should an adolescent receive individual or family therapy? It may depend on the level of their parents’ psychological distress

Does A Parent’s Mental Health Affect How Well An Adolescent Responds To Psychological Interventions?

Parents play an important role in their adolescents’ lives. When parents are suffering from their own mental health issues, their children suffer as well. For example, when parents experience psychiatric symptoms, their adolescent children are more likely to use substances or develop mood disorders. However, there is little research involving how parents’ mental health issues affect how well adolescents respond to psychological interventions, especially for interventions that target adolescents’ use of substances such as marijuana and alcohol, and their sexual risk behaviors such as engaging in unprotected sex. There is even less research of this type on adolescents involved in the juvenile justice system. Thus, the current study set out to fill these gaps in the literature.

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The Promises and Pitfalls of Youth Mentoring Programs

Youth Mentoring Is A Popular, Cost-Effective Intervention, And We Need To Be Realistic About What It Can And Can’t Do.

Youth mentoring relationships are formed between young people and caring, non-parent adults. Enthusiasm for mentoring – from researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and the general public alike – has exploded over the past two decades, resulting in a rapid expansion in the size and number of mentoring programs. These programs, such as Big Brothers Big Sisters, typically seek to match adult volunteers with a young person (often designated as “at risk”) who needs a positive adult role model. At a given time, mentoring programs are serving an estimated 4.5 million children and adolescents in the U.S.

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Permanent Change: Oxymoron or Possible?

A major advantage of being members of the Society for Research on Adolescence is that we have access to a vast amount of evidence about the social, emotional, and cognitive development of children and adolescents. In addition, we have learned a great deal about the risk factors for dysfunctional development in those areas. Using this information, many educational programs and clinical treatments have been developed that have shown significant pre- to post-treatment decreases in adolescents’ drinking, smoking, and risky sexual behaviors. Unfortunately, many studies that have followed participants over longer periods (6 months to several years) have found that the small to moderate effect sizes tend to dissipate. Perhaps we are missing a piece of the puzzle. Why do these effects often disappear in the longer run? I would suggest that what might be missing is something physiological that interferes with the retrieval of information learned in these programs. Recent research shows that at high levels of emotional arousal, cognitive functioning is disrupted, often inaccessible, resulting in a panic-ridden reversion to over-learned, habitual, and sometimes maladaptive behaviors. In addition, previous attachment research has helped us to understand how these over-learned, habitual, and sometimes maladaptive behaviors develop. I suggest here that we attend to coupling these two lines of research – attachment and physiological arousal – in order to improve the efficacy of our educational and clinical interventions.

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