A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
Like other dystopian authors, Aldous Huxley held a pretty bleak view of society. In A Brave New World, his future looks something like this: We live to consume. We're brainwashed by advertisements and institutions that make us feel as though we're free, even as they wipe out any originality and creativity in us. We lack [...]
It is that intimate, magical chemistry that allows a mother to show even the youngest of babies how she is feeling. A grimace, a frown or a smile are all useful tools for helping a little one to learn what is approved of, and what isn't. But one of the country's leading child psychologists believes [...]
The town of Steubenville sits in a valley on the Ohio River. Like Weirton, just over the river in West Virginia, and many more towns nearby, Steubenville has been hollowed out and shrunk since the steel mills began to close in the 1980s. When the kids finish high school most of them leave for college [...]
"A plethora of research highlights the importance of getting a good night's sleep for physical and psychological well-being, yet in our society, people still seem to take pride in needing, and getting, little sleep," says Amie Gordon of the University of California, Berkeley. "And in the past, research has shown that gratitude promotes good sleep, [...]
'Family-school and community partnerships are re-defining the boundaries and functions of education. They enlarge parental and community capacity; they create conditions in which children learn more effectively. In these ways they take education beyond the school gates'.* The Family-School and Community Partnership Bureau recently commissioned a report into the effects parental engagement on children’s educational [...]
I fear we’re seeing the rise of a ‘strip tease’ culture in British schools, and British culture, with the British family unit left marginalised. It’s hyper-sexualised British culture in which women are objectified, objectify one another, and are encouraged to objectify themselves; where homophobic bullying is normalised; and young boys’ world view is shaped by [...]
I finally got around to reading Freakonomics by Steven Levitt & Stephen Dubner. It’s been since about 2005, and has been on my list of “to-reads” but it always seemed to get pushed to the side for another title. Anyway, for those who haven’t heard of it, the book is a collection of observations and [...]
There is nothing natural or inevitable about women wanting to cut up their faces or inject them with silicon. Until around the 1920s, the feminine ideal was decidedly matronly. Victorian models of femininity were based on moral virtue or character, which meant that there was nothing wrong with ageing. In fact, beauty was equated with [...]
"There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.” Nelson Mandela A new report released in Canberra on 15 March by the Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth (ARACY) entitled The Wellbeing of Young Australians, puts Australia’s youth on the middle to lower end [...]
Just a day before they were to take effect, limits on large sugary drinks in New York City have been invalidated by a judge, in a significant blow to one of the most ambitious and divisive initiatives of mayor Michael Bloomberg's tenure. In an unusually critical opinion, Justice Milton Tingling of the state Supreme Court [...]
