Life Skills Counseling for Preventing Problems in Adolescence

Many social and health problems first appear in adolescence. Prevention is a humane and cost effective approach for human services professionals who work with young people. This paper addresses theoretical, methodological, and outcome issues for the behavioral approach called life skills counseling for helping adolescents avoid potentially serious social and health problems. The authors define life skills, discuss the applicability of the life skills approach to problem prevention, provide an overview of life skills counseling methods, and present results from four applications of the life skills approach to preventing problems encountered in social work with adolescents.