ABSTRACT
This chapter upon adolescents' self-reported behavioral risk factors and concerns about family and friends. It examines how much adolescents wanted to talk about family and friends with their counselors, gender and age differences in this desire, and how that is mediated by behavioral risk factors. The chapter explores gender differences and age-graded changes in adolescents' perceptions of family and friends, the chapter recognizes adolescents' developmental need to have concomitant changes in significant others in their environment, within families and other social institutions such as schools. Early theorists of adolescent development presumed that this was a time of individual "stress and storm" in response to internal biological changes. Psychoanalytic theorists postulated that adolescence represents an important transition point for the individual in which there is a consolidation of previous developmental achievements. The chapter recognizes and work with the multiple dimensions and complexities involved in adolescent clients' family and social connections.
