Gendered misconduct on the rise, female teachers scared of being “deepfaked” and parents protecting badly behaved boys: this is high school in 2024. “But what if she sent them to him first?” Devastating words from a teenager that made me shudder. I used to visit schools and give presentations about consent and respectful relationships. At Read more
Preaching to teenagers has always been a challenge. But in the smartphone age, clergy need to realise that the odds of making a spiritual connection have changed — radically. Young people who spend as many as 10 or more hours a day focusing on digital screens will find it all but impossible to listen to Read more
Growing secularism among younger people is no secret. A 2019 Pew Research Center Survey of Americans aged 13 to 17 found that only 50 per cent believed religion was an important part of their lives, as opposed to 73 percent of their parents. This trend has caught the attention of the United States Conference of Read more
The 2016 Census suggested about a third of Australian teens had no religion. But ask a teenager themselves about religion, rather than the parent or guardian filling in the census form, and the picture is slightly different. According to our new national survey, at least half of teens say they are “religious nones” – those Read more
I never realised just how damaging our obsession with smartphones and our switched-on lifestyle was, nor how addictive screen time was, until I put my teenagers on an extended digital detox. The results were swift and shocking, raising the question of just what is happening to the selfie generation and whether we have more to fear Read more
I went for a run in the Domain – well a schlep, really. Yes, I know, exercise is vile but turns out to be less vile than taking antidepressants. Anyway on this particular day I found myself in the midst of hundreds of teenage boys in matching kit being made to run around, disconsolately. It Read more
When I think of my teen years, I mostly remember a dark road. When I turned 15 I got my license and, with a small sum of money my dad gave me after he sold my childhood home, I bought myself a real beater of a car that you could hear coming from blocks away. Read more
The same brain circuits that are activated by eating chocolate and winning money are activated when teenagers see large numbers of “likes” on their own photos or the photos of peers in a social network, according to a first-of-its-kind UCLA study that scanned teens’ brains while using social media. The 32 teenagers, ages 13-18, were Read more
Eighteen years ago, Lisa Miller, now the director of clinical psychology at Columbia University’s Teachers College, had an epiphany on a New York subway car. She had been poring over the mountains of data generated by a three-generation study of depressed women and their children and grandchildren. The biological trend was clear: Women with severe—and Read more
The more speaking engagements I do, the more convinced I am of the important role parents play in their teenagers sexual education…in fact, every part of their lives. As a parent of teenagers myself, I feel ‘in the thick’ of it every day; the emotions of their stage of life, the joy and pain, the Read more