A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
Adolescence is the life stage when mental illnesses are most likely to emerge, with anxiety disorders being the most common. Recent estimates suggest that over 30 percent of teens have an anxiety disorder. That means about one of every three teenagers is struggling with anxiety that significantly interferes with their life and is unlikely to [...]
Of all the responsibilities that come with thankless parenting an adolescent - taking unpopular stands and making unpopular demands - supervision of teenage behavior is usually close to the top of the list. “Sometimes we get so tired of keeping after our adolescent we wonder if it’s worth the aggravation!” I believe it is. In addition to [...]
Reproductive hormones that develop during puberty are not responsible for changes in social behavior that occur during adolescence, according to the results of a newly published study by a University at Buffalo researcher. "Changes in social behavior during adolescence appear to be independent of pubertal hormones. They are not triggered by puberty, so we can't [...]
New research shows adults who develop psychotic disorders experience declines in IQ during childhood and adolescence, falling progressively further behind their peers across a range of cognitive abilities. The researchers from King's College London's Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) and Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in the United States found falls [...]
Parents who require children to follow rules and keep a constant eye on their activities, endeavoring to know where they are, who they are with and what they are doing, run less risk of facing problems when their children enter adolescence, such as abuse of alcohol and other drugs. The likelihood of such problems becomes [...]
The adolescent years are when people's bodies are supposed to start the ascent to their physical peak. Teenagers are growing like beanstalks. Their hormones are raging. They're eager for new experiences. By all accounts, this should be among the most active periods in a person's lifetime. Except it turns out it's not. In an eye-opening study [...]
By now parents are familiar with the worrisome finding that the thrill-seeking centers of the adolescent brain can readily outmatch the teenage brain’s emerging rational control systems. I count myself among the adults who find this neurological account of adolescent recklessness to be both clarifying and confounding. It helpfully explains why really thoughtful teenagers sometimes [...]
Early intervention when children are very young – from birth to three years of age, while their brains and skills are developing rapidly – can dramatically improve life prospects. Basics such as good nutrition, language development, and physical, cognitive and social skills can be helped by family and supported by social and early-child development programs. [...]
Image: Mark Mawson/Getty Mollycoddled and cosseted or stressed and over-pressured. Energised and engaged or bored and turned off. Young people have so many labels and stereotypes slapped on them it’s a wonder these are not visible on their endless selfies. What is undeniably true is that the evidence suggests that rates of depression, [...]
Getty Images The same brain circuits that are activated by eating chocolate and winning money are activated when teenagers see large numbers of "likes" on their own photos or the photos of peers in a social network, according to a first-of-its-kind UCLA study that scanned teens' brains while using social media. The 32 teenagers, [...]
