A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
Peter Carew, University of Melbourne and Valerie Sung, Murdoch Children's Research Institute During the coronavirus pandemic, have your kids been using headphones more than usual? Maybe for remote schooling, video chats with relatives, or for their favourite music and Netflix shows? We have to be careful about both the volume and duration of headphone use. [...]
Snapchat has announced a new feature called “Here For You” that promises to “provide proactive in-app support to Snapchatters who may be experiencing a mental health or emotional crisis”. The popular youth-oriented app is the latest to join a wave of social media platforms setting out to monitor and improve the well-being of their users. [...]
Like any eight-year-old, Ryan Kaji loves to play with toys. But when Ryan plays, millions watch. Since the age of four he’s been the star of his own YouTube channel. All up his videos have gained more than 35 billion views. This helped make him YouTube’s highest-earning star in 2018, earning US$22 million, according to [...]
If you have kids, chances are you’ve worried about their presence on social media. Who are they talking to? What are they posting? Are they being bullied? Do they spend too much time on it? Do they realise their friends’ lives aren’t as good as they look on Instagram? We asked five experts if social [...]
It's fairly settled by now that too much screen time isn't good for kids, but for specifics we have to turn to science. A new study from researchers at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center may have filled in some of the blanks, finding that preschool-aged children had lower levels of white matter in their [...]
The argument has raged back and forth in recent years on the presence and nature of a link between youth social media use and mental health outcomes. In an eight-year longitudinal study recently conducted by Brigham Young University, one finding stood out: the sheer amount of time spent using social media did not correlate to [...]
Reporting from Generation Next's Mental Health and Wellbeing of Young People seminar 2019, EducationHQ's Sarah Duggan wrote an article to relate the key messages from Kristy Goodwin's presentation, 'Managing Attention Span in the Age of Digital Distraction'. Kristy's main takeaway is that the ability to focus is a skill in its own right, and in [...]
Increased digital participation has provided many positives for young people with disabilities, but greater potential risks can also be found lurking online for those who live with a disability, according to latest research from the Office of the eSafety Commissioner. The potential risks – such as exposure to inappropriate content, excessive use, and image-based abuse [...]
Fitness and health tracking devices are becoming increasingly popular and a huge variety of wearable tech and apps now exist. Indeed, many smartphones and smart watches now come primed and ready to track our activity, sleep and nutrition. Research has for a long time highlighted how monitoring behaviours can help to lead to positive changes [...]
When it comes to excessive device use, there’s nothing wrong with young people – they’re just the first generation ever to grow up with unprecedented access to technology that's been specifically designed to exploit weaknesses in human psychology, says digital wellbeing and learning researcher and educator Dr Kristy Goodwin. According to Dr Goodwin, who spoke [...]
