A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
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 [...]
Impulsivity is the tendency to act or decide quickly, without too much deliberation, usually in pursuit of short-term gratification. It’s a normal part of human behaviour (think about speeding through a yellow light or cracking a joke in a serious work meeting), but when it happens too often or too intensely, it can lead to [...]
“Stranger danger” has always been the go-to parenting mantra to let kids know to be careful with people they don’t know, especially if the “stranger” behaves inappropriately. The stereotype was the bad man in a van picking up vulnerable children off the street. But, as disturbing new research conducted at the Victorian Forensic Paediatric Medical [...]
Suku Sukunesan, Swinburne University of Technology There’s no shortage of people online looking to exploit and manipulate the vulnerable among us. One such group is anorexia coaches, or “anacoaches”. They are typically middle-aged, male sexual predators who go online to find impressionable young people to exploit under the guise of providing weight-loss “coaching”. I have [...]
Dr Niels Wouters and Professor Jeannie Marie Paterson With more than one billion users since 2017, TikTok is one of the fastest-growing social networks. Its audience base is rapidly expanding beyond Gen Z’s early adopters, now including boomers and retirees. Despite its growth, TikTok has been unable to stop a stream of rumours and leaks. [...]
