A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
Charles Livingstone, Senior Lecturer and Head of Gambling and Social Determinants unit, School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine In Australia, advertising for online wagering is permitted. Such ads are subject to what the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) describes as “strict rules”. Many parents might think their “strictness” highly debatable. The Victorian Responsible Gambling [...]
Joanne Orlando, Western Sydney University Has your child’s screentime increased since COVID? If you were to estimate by how much would you say 20%, 30% or even a 50% increase? A newly released review comparing children’s screentime before and during COVID, shows children’s screentime spiked by a whopping 52% between 2020 and 2022. Increases were [...]
Sumudu Mallawaarachchi, Deakin University and Sharon Horwood, Deakin University From learning numbers to learning how to brush your teeth, it seems there’s a kids’ app for everything. Recent US statistics indicate more than half of toddlers and three-quarters of preschoolers regularly access mobile apps. So it’s no surprise there has been an explosion of options [...]
Kate Highfield, Australian Catholic University It is school holidays in Australia and, in many parts of the country, it’s also raining and bitterly cold. This means many children are stuck indoors and many parents will be grappling with how much “screen time” their kids are having. As as early childhood researcher and parent to a [...]
By Catherine Draper, University of the Witwatersrand It comes as no surprise that children are spending more time watching screens as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Parents and caregivers in many parts of the world – including South Africa, where I have done research on children’s healthy behaviours – have had a hard time [...]
By Dr Piers Gooding, Dr Rys Farthing and Emily Painter In 2018, a Melbourne high school mistakenly released the personal digital records of hundreds of students. Among the records were details of students’ “mental health conditions, medications, learning and behavioural difficulties”. This was bad enough but globally breaches of privacy like this can be much [...]
By Maria Corkin, University of Auckland The possibility that screen time during early childhood could cause poorer attention later in a child’s life is a major concern for both parents and researchers. Earlier studies have suggested links between preschoolers’ screen time and difficulties with attention. But there is by no means consensus among the research [...]
By Teresa Senserrick, Queensland University of Technology Human behaviour is complex. And yet approaches to road safety education are commonly far too simple, especially for young drivers. They are not only inexperienced but also biologically wired to be among those most at risk of crashing. It is time to explore a new, more proactive approach [...]
By Kathryn MacCallum, University of Canterbury and Cheryl Brown, University of Canterbury The pandemic has fundamentally altered every part of our lives, not least the time we spend on digital devices. For young people in particular, the blurred line between recreational and educational screen time presents new challenges we are only beginning to appreciate. Even [...]
The harmful impact Instagram has on teenage girls and their negative body image perceptions may just lie in the essence of the platform itself. Dr Jasmine Fadouly, a Research Fellow at the University of New South Wales, says that Instagram being an image-based platform, makes it ‘difficult to not be appearance-focused’. An internal Instagram [...]
