You work as a prevention specialist and advocate in an agency that provides social services to adolescents (e.g., HIV testing, pregnancy testing). One of your teen clients, Nadir, a 16 year old Arab-American male, who identifies as homosexual, has tested positive for HIV and has not discussed his HIV status or his sexual orientation with his mother and father yet. His mother discovered the receipt for his anonymous test results in his pants' pocket and called demanding to know the results.

Using systems theory or other relevant theories, explain how this challenging situation could be an opportunity to build family support and a strong support system for the client. Remember that every situation presents some opportunity for growth.

Confessing your true sexual orientation or secrets to your parents is like confessing your crush, we can feel apprehensive and uncomfortable about their possible reactions to us. We all know that every parent has a different perspective on this issue. However, telling the truth is important in strengthening an individual's self-esteem and sense of personal power. And if we look at Nadir's situation from a Systemic perspective, we can come up with possible interventions that will help him and every young person, who is struggling to expose their sexual orientation to their parents.

The basic concept of this theory is "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts". Like Nadir's situation, we can not come up with an appropriate solution, if we do not tell our current situation to our parents. Instead, it will continue to be our secrets. However, if we tell each of our secrets to our parents or social workers they will have the opportunity to come up with a suitable solution that will help our situation. Like brewing coffee, you have hot water, ground coffee, cream and sugar. If you do not combine them, it will just remain an ingredient of coffee. But, if we combine them in the way of brewing we can make hot coffee.

Having effective communication builds understanding and trust. And if we are honest with ourselves and our parents, we will better understand and support each other. We know that there are many barriers between parent and child especially when it comes to sexual orientation. However, if we do not learn how to speak and bring problems to our parents or social workers nothing will happen to us. We will always remember, effective communication is key to all the problems we face. We can also help social workers to create better intervention and programs that will help young people who are facing such situations.