A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
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 [...]
Exposure to traumatic experiences in childhood can have a negative impact on the development of the brain when it’s most vulnerable. Cases of childhood maltreatment are more common than reported; conservative estimates show over 45,000 Australian children were exposed to maltreatment in 2015 and 2016. Adversity in childhood can include experiences such as emotional, physical, and sexual [...]
Severe mental illness is challenging enough for adults to manage. Many spend years seeking treatment before they find something that works. For children, the picture is even grimmer. New research suggests that the rate of suicide and suicidal thoughts among children is skyrocketing. What’s behind this crisis in child mental health? Here are five key [...]
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, [...]
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 1. "Where are you from?" This is a question I'm frequently confronted with, often within moments of meeting someone for the first time. Having been born in Melbourne, I am necessarily from Melbourne. Fact. Nevertheless, I am pressed ever further to divulge the elusive secrets of my mysterious antecedents. I imagine my inquisitor's [...]
Photo: Getty Images According to new research from Washington University School of Medicine, children whose mothers were more nurturing during the preschool years, rather than later on in childhood, have more robust growth in brain structures associated with learning memory and stress response, than kids with less supportive mums. As part of the study, [...]
74% of mothers have a favourite child CREDIT: REX Rsearchers have found that 74% of mothers and 70% of fathers admit to having a favourite child - and children say there is a bias towards the eldest one. Sociologists from the University of California performed a study which found the first-born appears to get [...]
Nina, 10, worries about terrorists and getting things wrong at school. Photo: The Sydney Morning Herald Ten-year-olds are at the top of their game, it's the time in their lives they are most likely to feel happy, confident and ready to take on the world. But by age 15, that resilience has plummeted. [...]
Courtesy of Chris Lee / hSRPLOpCGW6VE0MCC/RiF2qqhyaDl5Banljcbn9wmQg= We all have them: the "What were we thinking?" parenting moments. We let our kids sneak in after curfew because we don't want another battle. Or we stock our purse with candy to make it through errands. Or maybe we've been cleaning the forgotten guinea pig's cage [...]
