A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
It is normal for parents to argue, but the way these disagreements affect children varies greatly. What can parents and carers do to limit the harm caused by their rows? What happens at home really does affect children's long-term mental health and development. But it is not only the relationship between the parent and child [...]
Selfies can distort the face and make the nose look larger than it is, according to plastic surgeons who say they’ve seen an uptick in requests for cosmetic procedures from people who want to look better in selfies. “Patients under age 40 take out their phones and tell me they don’t like how they look,” [...]
Today's teens have a reputation for being accomplished, fluent, and effective social media users. But they learn these skills the way we learn most life lessons: through trial and error, by making mistakes and learning from the outcomes. While these trial-and-error experiences can be educational in many contexts, social media makes trials public and errors difficult to [...]
"Your kids are living in a world that you are not invited to be part of. And they know how to keep you out." That's the stark warning one teacher has issued to parents about their teens' use of social media, urging them to "wake up". Skipper Coates, from Pleasant Grove, Utah, asked her 14 [...]
Glued to screens and with nothing else in town to entertain them, Warwick youth carry their problems everywhere and there is no escape. Former Warwick State High School student and young leader Jacob Meiklejohn said many adults did not understand the unique challenges millennials faced in an age of social media. On the National Day [...]
A young child is gradually learning how to interact with other children in a safe play environment. The child had presented at SalvoConnect in Ballarat with severely stunted physical and cognitive development. Born in to a life of family violence, the young child had little social interaction with other children and had a strained relationship to [...]
An honest chat with children about healthy, consensual sex could not come any sooner. Time and again, society fails to educate young people — particularly young women — about sexual health. What’s more, in the United States, abstinence-only sex education is the rule, not the exception — and studies show it actually hurts kids as they grow into adolescence. [...]
Fake Instagram accounts, often referred to as “finstas” or “spam accounts”, have become the norm for many teens – but their reasoning for creating these is not as sinister as you think. I’ve spoken with 50 Australian families – including 118 children aged 1-18 – about technology use, and am currently conducting a follow-up qualitative [...]
Kathleen Cormier is trying to instil a sense of gratitude in her sons, aged 12 and 17. But sometimes she wonders if other parents have given up. Some of her sons’ peers, she says, are lacking in the basics of gratitude, such as looking adults in the eye to thank them. The saddest part, she [...]
Danny Bowman, 23, was obsessed with uploading selfies on social media when he was a teenager. "I wanted to fit in and I thought the best way to do that was to be good looking," he says. He would take selfies and analyse them for flaws - which he says he always found - and [...]
