How reacting to adolescents questioning their sexual identity or gender role impact their social environment, behaviour and self-esteem.

How reacting to adolescents questioning their sexual identity or gender role impact their social environment, behaviour and self-esteem.

It is normal for adolescents to question their sexual orientation and the changes they observe in their body during their adolescent stage. Not all of them do seek answers for the changes. Answers provided to the adolescents at this stage have a greater impact on their life. This happens because most of them do think that they may be different from the normal human beings they see and so any negativity in answering their perceived “abnormality” matters.

Giving a negative reply to an answer to an adolescent on these changes may psychologically affect their thoughts and perceptions to themselves. This results in distress that may affect the teen’s brain. Having been affected, they show this in the results of activities they perform as mentioned by Goldbach and Gibbs (2015) that poor results and outcomes among stressed adolescents are caused by unique psychological stress. Distress attached to the adolescents who feel they are the minority is so hard to imagine. They are better treated well.

Answers given to the adolescents at this stage can create restlessness ad stigma. They feel like they are the minority in society, and maybe they are just about to be segregated. Kosciw (2016) maintains that the identification at puberty the stigma contributes to either being gay or straight. When these groups are stigmatized, they find relevancy and accommodation elsewhere and together with any friend in the same problem as theirs they become bound.

Roles in assuring best outcomes for adolescents.

To ensure that the adolescents are safe, as a social worker, there is a need to develop an initiative of reaching out to the adolescents in different places they are accessed like Schools to provide social education. They are initiating friendly and affordable ways of providing guidance and counselling to the children in this stage. I can as well choose to be always close to them to explain to them more about these unforeseen changes in them.

Kosciw, J. G., Greytak, E. A., Giga, N. M., Villenas, C., Danischewski, D. J., & Gay, L. (2016). The 2015 National School Climate Survey: The Experiences of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Youth in Our Nation’s Schools. Executive Summary.

Steensma, T. D., Kreukels, B. C., de Vries, A. C., & Cohen-Kettenis, P. T. (2013). Gender identity development in adolescence. Hormones And Behavior, 64(2), 288-297.