Sexuality Development in Adolescence and Beyond Commentary on Arbeit

In her article on adolescent sexuality development, Miriam Arbeit [this issue] conceptualizes adolescent sexuality as a realm of desire, pleasure, and social development, raising issues of negotiation, empowerment, ethics, and identity. This is quite different from the standard approach that classifies adolescent sexuality as a type of “risk taking” and then explains it in terms of a special adolescent tendency to take irrational and pointless risks, which is, in turn, explained by alleged deficits of the immature adolescent brain. Thus, Arbeit redirects the literature in a more scientifically productive direction. Others have provided important critiques of the literature on adolescent sexuality and pregnancy [Macleod, 2011; Males, 2010], but no one to my knowledge has so insightfully integrated research and theory regarding adolescence, sexuality, and developmental processes. In this commentary, I pursue further questions concerning just what is developmental in adolescent sexual development and how a relational developmental systems approach broadens our conception of development and enables us to identify developmental change beyond childhood. I then consider issues of promoting sexuality development in secondary and higher education.