A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
Social media monitoring apps targeting programs like Facebook and Instagram are revealing alarming habitual behaviour and extreme levels of smart phone use. You may not realise it, but you are probably reaching for your smart phone with high frequency. It just takes a free app to give you the cold, hard statistics. "If you ask [...]
As a pediatrician, I get questions from parents almost weekly about how to monitor and moderate their children’s screen time, especially their use of social media. Parents want their kids to spend less time on their phones and more time connecting in real life. However, parents don’t seem as concerned about their own use of [...]
Trigger warning: this post contains descriptions of suicides that might be disturbing. If the content upsets or distresses you, please call Lifeline on 13 11 14. Just like that, Naika Venant was live. The 14-year-old girl was on Facebook, broadcasting from a bathroom at her foster home in southeastern Florida. Then, she was hanging from a scarf tied [...]
Cyberbullying can feel overwhelming to young people, parents and professionals, and it’s common to feel helpless or like there’s nothing in your control to deal with the situation. It can be difficult to know when to seek help, and who to get help from. So let’s take a step-by-step look at when and how to [...]
Lots of pretty girls are Facebook- or Instagram-famous; they're the new cool kids, the girls who have risen above the obscurity of suburbia thanks to social media's virality combined with the photo-doctoring magic embedded in apps like Instagram (or in external ones like Facetune or Pixlr). On Sydney's North Shore, for example, people talk about [...]
Has adolescence ever been harder for girls, as they enter a world where appearance rivals achievement, and judgement is only a social media comment away? Meet some young women who are navigating this tricky moment in their lives. According to Holly, 15: If I leave the house without make-up, I don't feel as much myself. [...]
As schools break up for the year, police and experts have warned parents to be on guard for cyber bullying, which spikes during the holidays. Police regularly witness an increase in cyber bullying among children when they're off school. "During school holidays kids have more access to, and more time with, the technology," NSW Police Acting [...]
Flickr Images Even as we are addicted to checking our Facebook or Twitter feeds and compulsively respond to the familiar ding of new email, we worry about its negative impacts. Cyber bullying, sexting, and victimisation occur. We are bombarded with images of friends who seemingly lead lives far more glamorous than our own. [...]
Thinkstock Images Parents from Shanghai to Chicago are proudly putting pictures of their children on social media. It might be taken for granted - but no previous generation of children will have had the experience of having their entire childhoods intensively and publicly documented in this way. Stories about online privacy are often [...]
JGI/Tom Grill/Getty Images/Blend Images Our love of social media seems to have grown and grown in the past decade, but recent studies show the tide may be turning for some platforms, with young people in particular ditching Facebook. One study claims that more than 11 million teenagers left Facebook between 2011 and 2014. [...]
