Assignment: Adolescent Sexual Behavior

Assignment: Adolescent Sexual Behavior

Assignment: Adolescent Sexual Behavior

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Sexual behavior in adolescence can have a wide variety of consequences. In estimation, nearly half of all U.S. high school students have had sexual intercourse; the average age of first intercourse for boys and girls is 15. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), an average of 40,000-80,000 new cases of HIV are reported each year; approximately half of the new infections are among people younger than 25. On average, 12 million new cases of sexually transmitted diseases (STD’s) being reported each year and adolescents have among the highest-reported rates of gonorrhea and Chlamydia. Drawing on material from the course, respond to the following questions:

1.)  What cognitive and social factors contribute to high-risk sexual behavior in some adolescents?

2.)  Should schools have sexual education programs in which they can inform and advise teens about sexual behavior, risk factors, and prevention? Why or why not?

Use the link below to help guide your discussion.

www.cdc.gov/HealthyYouth/sexualbehaviors/index.htm

READING

This lesson will explore the developmental journey of newborn infants, children and adolescents. We will look at newborn reflexes and infant states, or patterns of sleeping and waking, which includes crying. Next, we will look at infant sensory and perceptual capabilities, which include the auditory, visual, taste, smell and touch functions. We will also discuss how these capabilities are coordinated in intermodal perception. This will lead us to investigate how learning and memory develop. The lesson will then explore the development of children, and we will look at the basic functioning of the brain, motor development and physical growth. We will cover the importance of good nutrition and lifestyle habits in the context of healthy physical and psychological development. We will also investigate the important role of the family and social environment in this area. The last section of the lesson will continue focusing on the importance of family relationships, and will concentrate on adolescent development and the adjustments that teenagers grapple with in this stage of development.

Newborns

Reflexes are among the newborn’s first behaviors. All reflexes are involuntary and serve to promote survival. Some are permanent, such as blinking, while others are impermanent and are replaced by voluntary behaviors. Sucking for example, gets replaced by eating. Newborn reflexes that are too weak, too strong, absent or out of place can be used to predict visual, hearing, neurological and other abnormalities that may not present until years later.

The Brazelton Neonatal Assessment Scale is widely used to assess motor, learning and sensory capabilities. Interestingly, Nugent, Lester and Brazelton (1991) found that babies who are carried on their mothers’ backs in slings, as in African traditions, have better motor abilities because they use their muscles to grip onto the mother.

Watch this video to see how the reflexes of a newborn can be tested.

Infant States

INFANT STATES

Infant states are the patterns of sleeping and waking. While behavior does occur as a response to the environment, patterns or biorhythms indicate that behavior is also organized, predictable and governed by internal forces. Newborns nap throughout the day and night, but by about eight weeks they begin to sleep more through the night and less in the day. Infants learn to control their states of wakefulness so that by the end of the first year most infants have adapted their patterns to the external world and sleep through the night (Ikonomov, Stoynev, & Shisheva, 1998).

CRYING

Infants cry to communicate their needs to caregivers. Pediatricians use cries to identify illnesses. Three patterns of crying have been identified by (Schaffer, 1971). Basic crying is primarily linked to hunger, gets progressively louder and has a rhythmic sequence of cry, rest, inhale, rest. Angry crying may be caused when something the infant wants is removed, such as a pacifier. It is not as rhythmic as the basic cry, and crying segments are longer than the basic cry. When babies cry from pain or discomfort, it starts off loud, has long crying segments and long silences in which the infant gasps or holds its breath. A higher pitch may indicate colic, while delayed crying to pain stimulus may indicate brain damage.

A MOTHER’S INTERPRETATION OF CRIES

Most mothers know what their babies’ cries mean, and as infants get older their communication becomes less about their physical needs and more about their psychological needs (Kopp, 1994). Therefore, if a parent can accurately identify the meaning of their baby’s cries, they can respond promptly when the infant is distressed, but delay their response when the infant is fussing about a minor issue, and thereby bolster their infant’s self-sufficiency and decrease its fussiness (Park & Gauvain, 2009). However, ignoring a distressed cry can have severely negative consequences.