aining to compete in a rapidly changing marketplace, and language and cultural barriers which impede access to social services” (Pabon, 1998, p. 941).
Counseling for Puerto Rican adolescents involves many concepts and approaches that the counseling of any adolescent involves, mainly because of the similar developmental issues offered by adolescence. However, there are also special considerations needed in counseling Puerto Rican adolescents because of their culture and particular socio-economic status in American society. Some of the issues that affect Puerto Rican adolescents, many similar to those affecting other adolescents and many, not, will be addressed in the following section in order to provide some counseling approaches aimed at dealing with these issues. A conclusion will address the significance of counseling when it comes to Puerto Rican adolescents.
Before looking at some unique counseling approaches designed to equip and empower Puerto Rican adolescents with the skills necessary to cope with the challenges they face during adolescence, we need to take a look at some of the issues which affect them. Some of these issues are common to all adolescents, while others are unique to Puerto Ricans because of their culture and minority status in America. Two of the biggest components of problem behavior are delinquency and drug use. While adolescence is a period of experimentation and initiation into various kinds of deviant behavior, different deviant behaviors may be attributable to different factors. For example, childhood aggression is often found to be a precursor to drug use and delinquency in adolescence as well as family factors, such as abuse or parental substance use. One study among the literature analyzed the etiology of drug use and delinquency between African American and Puerto Rican adolescents using the family interactional framework, which theorizes that, “positive acculturative influences are ...