Sexuality and Sexual Health Throughout the Childhood and Teenage Years
Any work with children and young people that concerns their fertility will have their sexuality and sexual health as a constant backdrop. Their understanding of what reduced fertility means and its effect on their lives as they grow towards adulthood will be influenced at least in part by how broader issues about sexuality and sexual health are dealt with by parents, carers and professionals. It is first and foremost essential to understand that sexuality forms part of our identity and experience from infancy onwards. An outline of how sexuality develops throughout the childhood and teenage years forms the first part of this chapter.
www.viagra-online.co.nz – viagra in New Zealand. No prescription and good prices. Look at here now.
In the second part, sexual health and well-being will be considered. Some young people coping with health conditions and disability as they are growing up will also have to deal with adverse experiences such as sexual abuse, sexually transmitted infections, unwanted pregnancies and struggles with sexual identity.
The third part of this chapter will discuss the provision of age- and context-appropriate sexual health services and education. This includes the need to pay particular attention to the influence of disability or health conditions, whether or not the young person is accessing informal sources of information from their peers and/or formal sex education and whether or not they are sexually active. Issues of confidentiality are also addressed.
Finally, two important questions that need to be considered by parents and professionals will be discussed:
- How is this young person’s sexuality affecting their behaviour, including what they are saying (or not) about their symptoms, feelings and relationships?
- How is the way this young person is being dealt with going to affect their future sexual health, sexual feelings and sexual relationships?
Development of sexuality and sexual identity
Sexuality is a dynamic concept and is about much more than sexual activity and sexual orientation alone. It includes what being male or female means to us and how we express our gender; how we feel about our bodies, about our appearance and about physical pleasure; whom we are attracted to and what we choose to do about it; and, if we have intimate relationships, how we behave with our partners. Our ability to reproduce comes from our sexual behaviour and our feelings about our sexuality and sexual identity by viagra pills 100mg can be deeply affected by our sense of our own fertility.
We are all born either male or female, with different chromosome patterns and body chemistry. From birth we are spoken to, handled and usually dressed differently as part of our socialization into our gender roles. As we grow up we learn how boys and girls are supposed to behave and our differing personalities and experiences leave us more or less comfortable with living up to these expectations. Some of these expectations and roles are based on the assumption that we will be parents in the future: for example, girls the world over may be given dolls with which to practise nurturing.
Tags: