A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
During a recent date night with my husband, my beloved babysitter let my 4-year-old daughter take a few (unpublished) pictures with a Snapchat filter that added blush and eyelashes while smoothing out her already blemish-free skin. My daughter was transfixed, and started referring to those pictures as “the pretty ones.” My jaw instantly dropped, as [...]
Children have endless access to video games via their devices and consoles, and for many it has become a key activity in their daily routine. According to the Digital Australia Report 2018, an astounding 97 per cent of homes with children have access to computer games and 60 per cent of households have five or [...]
Building on a well-established knowledge base more than half a century in the making, recent advances in the science of early childhood development and its underlying biology provide a deeper understanding that can inform and improve existing policy and practice, as well as help generate new ways of thinking about solutions. In this important list, [...]
Scene One: It’s December 2015, in Melbourne, and the Royal Melbourne Children’s Hospital releases the results of its first Australian Child Health Poll. Excessive screen time has emerged as the top ‘big problem’ for the health of Australian children and teenagers ahead of obesity; not enough physical activity; unhealthy diet; bullying; illegal drug use; family [...]
Pixabay Images Parents and policy makers have become obsessed with getting young children to learn more, faster. But the picture of early learning that drives them is exactly the opposite of the one that emerges from developmental science. The trouble is that most people think learning is the sort of thing we do [...]
Getty Images A recent piece in The Australian (“Technology’s effect on children’s brains isn’t black and white” 25/5) by journalist John White canvassed many views about the impacts of screen experiences on children’s brains. The sometimes conflicting views produced a confusing picture. There’s obviously an urgent need for continuing research (and a study on social media use and teen brains released [...]
By overcoming fears, children achieve a measure of independence, and may inoculate themselves from adult phobias. (Hanna Rosin) It’s hard to absorb how much childhood norms have shifted in just one generation. Actions that would have been considered paranoid in the ’70s—walking third-graders to school, forbidding your kid to play ball in the [...]
Getty Images One of the most common questions I get asked by parents about gaming addiction is ‘How can I tell if my child has a problem?’ While there are well documented physical, behavioural and psychological symptoms of gaming addiction, the risk of reading through these checklists is that parents can sometimes become unnecessarily worried about fairly normal [...]
Exposure to fine particulate air pollution during pregnancy through the first two years of a child's life may be associated with an increased risk of the child developing autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a condition that affects one in 68 children, according to a University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health investigation of children in [...]
Foetal alcohol spectrum disorders are a group of conditions that develop in children whose brains are permanently and irreversibly damaged before they are born. They can manifest in a range of ways, from learning difficulties to developmental delays, sensory overload, impaired memory, impulsiveness and co-ordination problems. The single factor shared by everyone on the spectrum [...]
