youth

Beauty pageants making inroads in australia….again!

Little girls preen, strut, pout, and beckon to the judges ‘come here baby’. They kiss their finger and press it to their backsides in a gesture indicating they are smoking hot. They are instructed to flirt and to hold their tummies in. A five-year-old begs not to have her eyebrows ripped out. Some girls are [...]

Lingerie football league’s first event … sport or buck’s night?

Lingerie Football League is hailed as the all-new Australian sport and we are supposed to celebrate? It wasn’t sport. It was a meat fest. It had the feel of a giant buck’s night. But it was on a sporting field so apparently that made it sport. I call on sporting bodies and our Government, to [...]

Macca’s website breached ad rules

CHILDREN'S advocates are claiming a victory in the fast-growing world of online marketing to kids, with McDonald's found in breach of industry standards over a website.  The Advertising Standards Bureau upheld the Cancer Council's complaint about the Happy Meal website, finding that it had breached several clauses of the voluntary code for advertising to children, [...]

Who’s the Parent?

For years there has been a line – albeit a semi-permanent, movable, sometimes defined, sometimes less so line – separating the role of teacher and parent. The term “in loco parentis” is used to define schools duty of care.  Often schools will offer parent information nights, offering advice on how best to meet the needs [...]

Hitting, slapping tied to later mental disorders

People who remember being pushed, slapped and hit as children are more likely to be diagnosed with depression, anxiety and personality disorders later in life, a new study suggests.   Canadian researchers estimated between two and seven percent of those mental disorders might be due to punishments inflicted in childhood, not including more severe forms [...]

Pinkification

There's been," says Abi Moore, a 38-year-old freelance television producer, "a wholesale pinkification of girls. It's everywhere; you can't escape it. And it needs to change. It sells children a lie – that there's only one way to be a 'proper girl' – and it sets them on a journey, at a very, very early [...]

Bully Psychology: Where Evolution And Morality Collide

In the most basic terms, bullying is about dominating – and we come from ancestors who were big into the dominance hierarchy. As Christopher Boehm, PhD, who literally wrote the book on it (Moral Origins), says, “Any species that has a social dominance hierarchy, like apes or monkeys or wild dogs or lions, has bullies.” [...]

Teenager leads successful petition to portray girls truthfully in teen magazines

Facing pressure from teen girls demanding truthful images of young women, Seventeen magazine has vowed to "celebrate every kind of beauty" and feature only photographs of real girls and models who are healthy.  Editor-in-chief Ann Shoket made the announcement in her editor's letter in the August issue, and her note marks a major triumph for [...]

Cosmetic surgery and parental insanity

Bras, braces, makeup are all rites of passage for many teen girls. But if you're a member of the Marshall family, so are boob jobs. Britney Marshall, a 14-year-old from Nottinghamshire, England, is the youngest girl of the Marshall family and the only one without breast implants. Her mother, Chantal Marshall, told the Sun, "Britney [...]

Facebook Study Explains Why We Still Spend So Many Hours Stalking Each Other

Researchers Daniel Hunt, Archana Krishnan, and David Atkin found that, “The entertainment motive was shown to be the most powerful predictor of how much time participants spent on Facebook,” per WebProNews. In basic terms, this means that during the study, Facebook was most often used when subjects were bored, opposed to connecting with individuals to [...]

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