A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
When schools ask me to chat to parents, one of the things I often cover with them is how to – or how not to – use social media. I urge parents not to vent their anger around a school on Facebook as, if we’re being honest, it’s often an issue that has been blown [...]
Recent news of former NSW premier’s daughter Harriet Wran being charged with murder is another illustration of Australia’s growing problem with the drug ice. Wran, who is said to have been battling an ice addiction, has been charged with murder, attempted murder, and breaking and entering while armed with a knife, along with Michael Lee. Another [...]
Lets face it, watching the evening news bulletin rarely makes for cheery viewing, but in the last few months it seems to have been particularly harrowing. Plane crashes, war zones, suicides and urban shootings have seemingly dominated the headlines. As an adult I’ve found it hard to watch. As an educator I’ve found it harder [...]
The number of children who self-harm has increased by more than 70 per cent in the past two years to record levels, according to new figures. The Health and Social Care Information Centre said some 6,500 children – just under 6,000 of whom were female – aged 10 to 14 had been treated after deliberately [...]
We were pretty good at keeping computers and televisions out of bedrooms, but as technology developed we somehow missed that phones and tablets ARE computers. One of the main conversations I have with parents is about their exhaustion at parenting with so many devices in the home. Parents feel out of control. At my seminars [...]
Around this time each summer, many parents and children begin to get worried about returning to school and the potential for getting bullied again like last year. The summer offers a respite from school bullies, but does this break from bullying have to end because the summer ends? Schools today offer massive anti-bullying campaigns that [...]
Despite what the media might tell us, it appears that our teens may not be as out-of-control as some of us believe - or at least not in the ways we think they are. Try Googling “teens out of control.” At the time of writing that search query returned 58,200,000 results (in 0.29 seconds if [...]
Most youngsters believe their parents are oblivious to their web activities, while some admit to making fake social media profiles and fudging browser histories to deceive tech-savvy ones, a new report shows. Seventy per cent of children aged between 8 and 17 said their parents did not know about all their internet activities, a survey involving [...]
Who is teaching young people about sex and relationships in the digital era? Issue Today, pornography’s influence is everywhere. Porn influences mainstream advertising, music videos, fashion and popular culture. Australian children are growing up in a digital world dominated by sexualised imagery that reinforces inequity and the notion that women are objects to be controlled, managed and dominated. Use of pornography in [...]
Whose job is it to teach children about cyber-safety, online behaviour or digital citizenship? Parents seem to be waiting for schools to take the lead, whilst this is another area schools believe that parents have dropped the ball, and unfairly they’ll say, need to find time and resources to fit this into an already jam-packed [...]
