Bonita F. Stanton, MD, Consulting Editor

The adolescent’s potential to engage with the environment has been greatly expanded through technology, the social media, globalization, and travel opportunities for junior and senior high school students outside of the purview of their parents. Today’s teenager has vastly expanded access to new ideas, new knowledge, and new opportunities, both beneficial and potentially harmful, from across the nation and the globe. The medical community and lay press have emphasized the need for parents to be aware of these pressures, opportunities, and risks, and to develop effective means of communicating with their adolescent children about them. This issue addresses the need not only for parents but also for all pediatricians to be familiar with the technologies, the social venues, the biologic opportunities, and the hazards open to youth and age-appropriate chaperoning in the twenty-first century. Likewise, significant advances in approaching and talking with adolescents and with minimizing or eliminating the adverse consequences of some of these encounters have been made over the past decades. Again, these advances in our approaches are not just for parents and classroom teachers but also for pediatricians. Fortunately, not only have the causes of diseases impacting adolescents changed and but so too have opportunities to optimize prevention and treatment and to mitigate the short-term and long-term consequences of negative exposures. Finally, in the last two decades, much greater attention has been focused on the criminal practice of human trafficking—even though this activity has existed for decades or longer across the world. Particularly alarming in this regard is the sexual trafficking of teenaged children, whether they are adolescents from other countries brought to the United States, US adolescents being trafficked within America, or US teens being trafficked to other countries. Pediatricians must be aware of this abhorrent phenomenon as they may have an opportunity to recognize and intervene on the behalf of these young victims.

All pediatricians must be aware of the range of these potential exposures, diseases, therapies, and communication approaches. After reading this issue and practicing its take-away messages, today’s pediatricians will be better positioned to deliver contemporary guidance and care to today’s older pediatric patients.