Though the legal purchase age is 21 in Colorado and Washington, parents, educators and physicians say youths are easily getting hold of edibles infused with tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the psychoactive component that causes a high, and concentrates such as "shatter," a brittle, honey-colored substance that is heated and then inhaled through a special device.

Each poses serious risks to adolescents' physical and mental health.

"Underage kids have unbelievable access to nuclear-strength weed," said Andrew Brandt, a Boulder, Colo., software executive whose son got hooked while in high school.

With some marijuana products averaging 68 percent THC — exponentially greater than the pot baby boomers once smoked — calls to poison control centers and visits to emergency rooms have risen.

In the Denver area, visits to Children's Hospital Colorado facilities for treatment of cyclic vomiting, paranoia, psychosis and other acute cannabis-related symptoms jumped to 777 in 2015, from 161 in 2005.

The increase was most notable in the years following legalization of medical sales in 2009 and retail use in 2014, according to a study in the Journal of Adolescent Health published in 2018.

"Horrible things are happening to kids," said psychiatrist Libby Stuyt, who treats teens in southwestern Colorado and has studied the health impacts of high-potency marijuana.

"I see increased problems with psychosis, with addiction, with suicide, with depression and anxiety."

It is unclear whether all of this means years of generally stagnant pot use among children are coming to an end.

Surveys finding little change with pot since 2014 "may not reliably reflect the impact of legalization on adolescent health," the authors of that 2018 study concluded.

Washington's latest Healthy Youth Survey showed 20 percent of eighth-graders and nearly half of seniors "perceive little risk of regular marijuana use."

Many teens consider it less risky than alcohol or cigarettes.

As more than a dozen states from Hawaii to New Hampshire consider legalizing marijuana, doctors warn of an urgent need for better education — not just of teens but of parents and lawmakers — about how the products being marketed can significantly affect young people's brain development.

The limited scientific research to date shows that earlier and more frequent use of high-THC cannabis puts adolescents at greater jeopardy of substance use disorders, mental health issues and poor school performance.

The critics also insist that more must be done to maintain tight regulation of the industry. That's not been the case so far, they argue, with dispensaries opening near high schools in Seattle and with retail and medical pot shops in Denver outnumbering Starbucks and McDonald's locations combined. Continue reading

• Image: She Knows

Dr. Neelam Vashi, director of Ethnic Skin Center at Boston University's School of Medicine, published an article analyzing the new trend in Jama Facial Plastic Surgery last week.

"A new phenomenon, dubbed ‘Snapchat dysmorphia,' has patients seeking out cosmetic surgery to look like filtered versions of themselves…with fuller lips, bigger eyes, or a thinner nose," she said.

Among Snapchat's more popular features are its facial filters, which change users' appearance in a phone camera.

New filters are offered regularly. Some change a person's face to look like animals, superheroes, or inanimate objects.

Others create a more subtle, modified version of the users themselves - smoothing their skin, whitening their teeth, narrowing their face, enhancing their lips and eyes.

Before photo-editing was readily available for the public to use, Vashi wrote, people idolized the often-unrealistic beauty of celebrities, who were the only people with easy access to photo-editing technology.

But now that the general public has access to this technology, she said, it has altered their expectations of beauty.

Instead of bringing photos of celebrities to plastic surgery consultations, patients are bringing in pictures of themselves, with specific angles or lighting.

"I just see a lot of images that are just really unrealistic, and it sets up unrealistic expectations for patients because they're trying to look like a fantasized version of themselves," she told Inverse.

According to the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, more than half of clinicians in 2017 saw patients asking to "look better in their selfies."

Dr. Laura Cusamano, a postdoctoral fellow at Potomac Behavioral Solutions in Arlington, Va., works with patients struggling with body image and has seen the same trend.

She said the idealization of celebrities has morphed into users of social media idealizing altered images of themselves.

"In recent decades, American media has propagated a distorted view of beauty, privileging certain body types, skin tones, hair colors, and facial features. Beauty ideals have come in the form of celebrities, whose ‘perfect' images are often Photoshopped," she told CNA.

"With the advent of social media, the ability to alter one's appearance is literally at one's fingertips.

Applications like Snapchat provide the opportunity for users to discover the ‘perfect' image of themselves to share with their peers and the world." Continue reading

It states simply, "It is 100 years since our children left."

Historical accounts indicate that sometime in the 13th century, a large number of the town's children disappeared or perished, though the details of the event remain a mystery.

"The Pied Piper of Hamelin" is, as far I as have been able to determine, the only Grimm's fairy tale that is based substantially on a historical event.

Both the actual event and the Grimm's tale suggest an archetypal situation in which adults have allowed children to be seduced away into peril.

This tale is a disconcertingly apt metaphor for various social contagions that have overtaken collective life throughout the centuries.

Having witnessed the destruction and horror of World War II, the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung had much to say about what he termed "psychic epidemics."

Several times throughout his Collected Works, he stressed that such "mass psychoses" are the main threat facing humanity today.

"The gods have become disease," Jung famously wrote.

"Zeus no longer rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus, and produces curious specimens for the doctor's consulting room, or disorders the brains of politicians and journalists who unwittingly let loose psychic epidemics on the world".

When we smugly imagine ourselves above the influence of contents from the collective unconscious, then we are most susceptible to possession by them.

Currently, we appear to be experiencing a significant psychic epidemic that is manifesting as children and young people coming to believe that they are the opposite sex, and in some cases taking drastic measures to change their bodies.

"Rapid-onset gender dysphoria"

I am particularly concerned about the number of teens and tweens suddenly coming out as transgender without a prior history of discomfort with their sex.

"Rapid-onset gender dysphoria" is a new presentation of this condition that has not been well studied.

Current psychotherapeutic practice involves affirmation of a young person's self-diagnosis.

Although this practice will undoubtedly help a small number of children, I am concerned that there may be many false positives.

This topic first came to my attention in my practice.

A patient reported that her daughter was identifying as transgender.

I admired the way this mother attempted to support her child, and I marveled at the creativity of youth culture in challenging traditional conceptualizations of gender.

My view of this cultural trend as benign collapsed in an instant, however, when I learned that young women were having mastectomies as young as 14.

Realizing that the identity exploration of teenagers was being treated in a concretized way that would have drastic, permanent consequences for the young people involved immediately filled me with concern.

Further research online and through speaking with people only increased my alarm. Continue reading

• Lisa Marchiano, LCSW, is a writer, licensed clinical social worker, and certified Jungian analyst in private practice in Philadelphia. Lisa is on the faculty of the Philadelphia Jung Institute and lectures nationally on Jungian topics. She has a special interest in fairy tales and is writing a book on motherhood as an experience of psychological growth. She blogs at www.theJungSoul.com.
• Image: Twitter

After all, our parents are the most important people in our lives. We see them at close range more than we see anybody else.

They are the people who made us, who care for us most, who act as primary role models for us, who spend most time with us, and who we want most to love us.

So it makes sense that if they treat each other well and show us - their children - love and safe boundaries, then the odds are that most of us will turn out fine.

If they fall short on any of these areas - they show contempt for one another, they fight or blank each other, they can't make their relationship work so they split up, or they can't show us the love and safe boundaries we need - then it makes sense that the odds start building up against us.

How we see the world is bound to be framed first and foremost by what we experience at home.

And yet the prevailing view in government circles is that whether the parents are married or not, or stay together or not, isn't important.

What's most important, apparently, is whether they fight.

Parental conflict is certainly unpleasant and well known to have unpleasant consequences for children.

Yet our previous research has shown that only 2 per cent of parents quarrel a lot and only 9 per cent of parents who divorce quarreled a lot before they split up.

These numbers alone suggest that parental conflict is an insufficient explanation for the prevalence of teenage problems. In any case, children are often better off out of a high conflict relationship. Continue reading

Sources

• MercatorNet article by Harry Benson, Research Director of the UK-based Marriage Foundation.
• Image: Daily Mail Australia

In just the five years between 2010 and 2015, the number of U.S. teens who felt useless and joyless - classic symptoms of depression - surged 33 percent in large national surveys.

Teen suicide attempts increased 23 percent. Even more troubling, the number of 13- to 18-year-olds who committed suicide jumped 31 percent.

In a new paper published in Clinical Psychological Science, my colleagues and I found that the increases in depression, suicide attempts and suicide appeared among teens from every background - more privileged and less privileged, across all races and ethnicities and in every region of the country.

All told, our analysis found that the generation of teens I call "iGen" - those born after 1995 - is much more likely to experience mental health issues than their millennial predecessors.

What happened so that so many more teens, in such a short period of time, would feel depressed, attempt suicide and commit suicide?

After scouring several large surveys of teens for clues, I found that all of the possibilities traced back to a major change in teens' lives: the sudden ascendance of the smartphone.

All signs point to the screen
Because the years between 2010 to 2015 were a period of steady economic growth and falling unemployment, it's unlikely that economic malaise was a factor.

Income inequality was (and still is) an issue, but it didn't suddenly appear in the early 2010s: This gap between the rich and poor had been widening for decades.

We found that the time teens spent on homework barely budged between 2010 and 2015, effectively ruling out academic pressure as a cause.

However, according to the Pew Research Center, smartphone ownership crossed the 50 percent threshold in late 2012 - right when teen depression and suicide began to increase.

By 2015, 73 percent of teens had access to a smartphone. Continue reading

Sources

• The Conversation, article by Jean Twenge, Professor of Psychology, San Diego State University
• Image: Huffington Post

For counselling and support

• Need to talk? Free call or text 1737 any time
• Lifeline - 0800 543 354
• Samaritans - 0800 726 666
• Chinese Lifeline - 0800 888 880
  (for people who speak Mandarin or Cantonese)
• Youthline - 0800 376 633, free text 234 or email talk@youthline.co.nz
  (for young people, and their parents, whanau and friends)
• What's Up - 0800 942 8787
  (for 5-18 year olds; 1 pm to 11 pm)
• The Lowdown - visit the website, email team@thelowdown.co.nz or free text 5626 (emails and text messages will be responded to between 12 noon and 12 midnight)
• SPARX - an online self-help tool that teaches young people the key skills needed to help combat depression and anxiety.

A report from UK think-tank Education Policy Institute (EPI) states that children in the UK have a higher rate of extreme usage (37.8 percent of all UK 15 year olds) than other countries.

Only Chile reported more.

The think-tank examined the relation between social media use (including online time) and mental illness:

While twelve percent of children who spend no time on social networking websites on a normal school day have symptoms of mental ill health, that figure rises to 27 percent for those who are on the sites for three or more hours a day.

There's no clear indication as to whether the extra time online was a catalyst for mental health issues, or if it was the other way around.

The majority of children, whether extreme users or not, reported anxiety whenever there wasn't an internet connection.

Nevertheless, these are indicators of association and do not necessarily prove that social media causes harm to young people's well-being.

For example, it could be that someone already experiencing a mental health problem is more likely to use social media, or that there are other relevant factors.

Extreme internet users are far more likely to be bullied as well; 18-percent reported they'd had negative things spread about them versus only 7-percent of those who reported being online three hours or less during school days.

The study also cautioned against simply restricting a child's access, claiming that this could actually hurt kids in the long run by preventing them from learning the skills they needed to cope with stressful events online.

Instead, parents and schools should be more concerned with teaching children to cope. The researchers even ask Parliament to get involved:

The role of government should be to work with the industry, schools and families to help improve young people's emotional well-being and resilience and to ensure children are taught and supported to learn digital skills as they start to navigate social media for the first time. Continue reading

Sources

• The Next Web article by Tristan Greene
• Image: PsychCentral

He also told their teachers to be aware of the bullying problem.

"I ask you, in silence: In your schools, in your neighborhoods, is there someone that you mock? That you make fun of because they look a little funny because they are a little fat?

"Is there someone you like to embarrass and hit because of this? Think about this. This is called bullying." Francis said.

Many of the young people Francis was speaking to will be confirmed this year.

He made a special appeal to them in particular.

He asked them to use their confirmation to "make the promise to the Lord to never do this".

They must "pray that it doesn't happen in their schools, neighborhoods, or parishes".

After asking them to promise this and being dissatisfied with the energy behind their response, Francis asked them again and again if they would promise not to bully and if they'd ask for Jesus to help them.

Finally they they roared out their answer.

"Yes!"
Francis was satisfied.

Source

• Catholic Online
• Crux
• Image: Catholic News Agency

Maybe.

"Turn it off," she said. "I can't watch."

My 11-year-old niece closed her eyes against the screen, blocking out the kids with no shoes, raincoats or lunch. My sister shrugged: "Don't pretend you can't see it. Do something."

For the next six months, my niece sold foot-rubs and baking. She charged her mother $2 for vacuum cleaning, and when she got $50 for her birthday, put the lot towards her KidsCan fund.

Last year, she transferred $150 to the charitable trust that helps children whose lives bear no resemblance to her own.

I have never been more astonished. Or, it turns out, ignorant.

In 2016, Volunteering Auckland registered 711 people aged between 10 and 19 years - a 60 per cent increase on its 2013 figures.

The youth cohort is now the organisation's third largest (the largest is 20-29-year-olds, those stereotypically self-absorbed millennials).

"I've been with Volunteering Auckland for 21 years," says general manager Cheryll Martin. "I've always known the other side of the story about young people. They are the most innovative, energetic, passionate resource for our community. But they want connections and a feeling of belonging.

"What I'm seeing, is they're not getting that personal connect from their devices. They're
actually starting to look up from their devices."

I was 32 when I got my first cellphone. My niece got her first at 12. Nobody under the age of 18 has lived in a world without Google and this is just-the-way-things-are. But what if teenagers want - and need - more?

The modern adolescent has never had more "friends". Conversely, they have never felt so isolated. Families are scattered, wealth is distributed unevenly and teenagers must compete to survive, let alone thrive.

Their world is changing hard and fast and they're following it live and as it happens. They know about the Syrian refugee crisis and the Paris terror attacks.

They know that, in December, a 12-year-old American girl live-streamed her suicide. And they knew, long before "Roastbusters" entered the parental vernacular, that there were teenagers who got drunk at parties and others who took out their phones and filmed what happened next.

What they're less clear about: how to make sense of all this. Continue reading

Sources

• NZ Herald, article by Kim Knight, a writer for NZME's Canvas and Weekend magazines.
• Image: Berkeley Office of Ethics

A flood of new research offers explanations for some of these mysteries. Brain imaging adds another kind of data that can help test hypotheses and corroborate teens' own accounts of their behavior and emotions.

Dozens of recent multiyear studies have traced adolescent development through time, rather than comparing sets of adolescents at a single point.

The new longitudinal research is changing scientists' views on the role parents play in helping children navigate a volatile decade. Once seen as a time for parents to step back, adolescence is increasingly viewed as an opportunity to stay tuned in and emotionally connected.

The research makes it possible to identify four important phases in the development of intellectual, social and emotional skills that most teens will experience at certain ages. Here is a guide to the latest findings:

Ages 11 to 12
As puberty takes center stage, tweens can actually slip backward in some basic skills. Spatial learning and certain kinds of reasoning may decline at this stage, studies show.

Parts of the brain responsible for prospective memory, or remembering what you are supposed to do in the future, are still maturing. This may be why a teen may seem clueless if asked to give the teacher a note before school.

Coaching tweens in organizational skills can help. Parents can help build memory cues into daily routines, such as placing a gym bag by the front door, or helping set reminders on a cellphone. They can share helpful tools, such as task-manager apps.

Parents can help foster sound decision-making, thinking through pros and cons and considering other viewpoints.

Children who know by age 10 or 11 how to make sound decisions tend to exhibit less anxiety and sadness, get in fewer fights and have fewer problems with friends at ages 12 and 13, according to a 2014 study of 76 participants published in the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making. Continue reading

Sources

• Article by Sue Shellenbarger, the creator and writer of the The Wall Street Journal's "Work & Family" column, in The Wall Street Journal.
• Image: Free Printable Behavior Charts

The 32 teenagers, ages 13-18, were told they were participating in a small social network similar to the popular photo-sharing app, Instagram.

In an experiment at UCLA's Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center, the researchers showed them 148 photographs on a computer screen for 12 minutes, including 40 photos that each teenager submitted, and analyzed their brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI.

Each photo also displayed the number of likes it had supposedly received from other teenage participants — in reality, the number of likes was assigned by the researchers. (At the end of the procedure, the participants were told that the researchers decided on the number of likes a photo received.)

"When the teens saw their own photos with a large number of likes, we saw activity across a wide variety of regions in the brain," said lead author Lauren Sherman, a researcher in the brain mapping center and the UCLA branch of the Children's Digital Media Center, Los Angeles.

A region that was especially active is a part of the striatum called the nucleus accumbens, which is part of the brain's reward circuitry, she said. This reward circuitry is thought to be particularly sensitive during adolescence.

When the teenagers saw their photos with a large number of likes, the researchers also observed activation in regions that are known as the social brain and regions linked to visual attention.

In deciding whether to click that they liked a photo, the teenagers were highly influenced by the number of likes the photo had. Continue reading

Sources

• MercatorNet, from an article by Stuart Wolpert, a media contact at UCLA.
• Image: DNA

The Pope administered the sacrament of Reconciliation to 16 teenage boys and girls.

It was part of a three-day Jubilee for Teens, for young people aged between 13 and 16, which is an initiative of the Holy Year of Mercy.

The 16 teenage boys and girls whose confessions the Pope heard had been chosen at random from the throngs of banner-waving, rucksack-carrying young people present.

Francis was joined by 150 priests in hearing the confessions in front of St Peter's Basilica.

In a message published earlier this year in preparation for the Jubilee for Teens, Pope Francis wrote: "Don't just prepare your rucksacks and your banners - but your hearts and minds as well."

At a Mass at Sunday, Pope Francis told 90,000 young people that, because of their friendship with Christ, they are never alone.

"Even if you disappoint him and walk away from him, Jesus continues to want the best for you and to remain close to you; he believes in you even more than you believe in yourself."

"The biggest threat to growing up well comes from thinking that no one cares about us, from feeling that we are all alone," the Pope said.

"The Lord, on the other hand, is always with you and he is happy to be with you."

Moreover, Jesus calls young people to follow him, just as he did the first disciples, the Pope added.

"Jesus is waiting patiently for you. He awaits your response. He is waiting for you to say 'yes'."

Pope Francis told the young people: "Your happiness has no price".

"It cannot be bought: it is not an app that you can download on your phones nor will the latest update bring you freedom and grandeur in love."

"That is because love is a free gift which calls for an open heart," he said.

"It is a noble responsibility which is life-long; it is a daily task for those who can achieve great dreams!"

Sources

• Vatican Radio
• Catholic News Agency
• Image: Vatican Radio

When it comes to teenagers and social media, many of the headlines and much of the prevailing conventional wisdom—including within our churches—is that social media is a danger and a threat.

This not only defies much of the current research on the subject, it often completely misses the realities, longings, and faith practices of teenagers.

In his excellent book, Beyond the Screen, Andrew Zirschky provides welcome guidance to doing youth ministry in a digital age. Drawing on the latest research and Zirschky's twenty years of experience in youth ministry, Beyond the Screen illuminates the emerging ways we connect, relate, gather, believe, and practice faith in our digitally-integrated world.

I consider it one of the best books not just on practicing youth ministry but any kind of ministry in a digital age.

What I appreciated most in Beyond the Screen is the empathy Zirschky expresses for teens.

As they live into this new reality, they face demands and pressures that even those ministry leaders like me, who are just a generation older but relatively conversant in digital technology, can miss.

This is not a book about how to use social media to lure more teens into your youth group. Instead, this book is something far more needed: it is about supporting and loving teens as they make their way in a networked world, where adolescence is lived out across digital and local networks, much of it quite publicly, and at light speed.

Teens are at the vanguard in the church of this digitally-integrated life and faith. They are often the most technologically savvy people in our churches.

And so, they are leading the way—whether they, or we, know it or not— about how we are the church today and into the future. Continue reading

• About Keith Anderson — Keith Anderson serves as pastor at Upper Dublin Lutheran Church in Ambler, Pennsylvania. He is the author of a new book on ministry leadership in a digital age, The Digital Cathedral: Networked Ministry in a Wireless World, and co-author, with Elizabeth Drescher, of Click 2 Save: The Digital Ministry Bible. Connect with Keith at pastorkeithanderson.net and on Twitter @prkanderson.

Newly released figures from the Office for National Statistics show that 23 young women under the age of 18 out of every 1,000 became pregnant in 2014, compared with 47 out of 1,000 in 1998. The estimated number of teenage pregnancies fell from 24,306 in 2013 to 22,653 in 2014.

So teenagers appear to be having less unprotected sex. But why?

The impact of technology
One theory put forward to explain the drop is that teenagers are spending more time in their bedrooms on social media and less time meeting up, getting drunk and doing things they may later come to regret.

Prof David Paton, an economist at Nottingham University Business School, told the Telegraph: "It does potentially fit in terms of timing. People [appear to be] spending time at home - rather than sitting at bus stops with a bottle of vodka they are doing it remotely with their friends ... Nobody really knows why we've got this sudden change around about 2007 to 2008."

Clare Murphy, director of external affairs at the abortion provider British Pregnancy Advisory Service (Bpas), added: "The plummeting level of teenage drinking, for example, may be reducing the likelihood of unprotected sex, and teenagers are also increasingly socialising online, limiting the opportunities for sexual activity."

Teenage drinking levels
The drop in teenage pregnancies is accompanied by evidence of decreases in drinking and drug-taking in the UK, particularly among those aged 16 to 24.

The proportion of young adults who reported that they did not drink alcohol at all increased by more than 40% between 2005 and 2013.

The rise of social media
Ofcom said last year that 16-24-year-olds spent more than 27 hours a week on the internet - almost three times the amount it was in 2005. Continue reading

Sources

• The Guardian, the beginning of an article by Nadia Khomami, a news reporter at the Guardian.
• Image: Mail Online

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 particularly with recurrent—depression had daughters at equally high risk for the psychological disorder.

At puberty, the risk was two to three times greater than for other girls. But the data seemed to show that the onset and, even more so, the incidence of recurring bouts with depression, varied widely.

Miller couldn't discern why. Raised in a close-knit Midwestern Jewish community, she had already looked for what she says psychologists rarely bothered to seek—religious belief and practice—and found some mild benefit for both mothers and children, but nothing that stood out among the other variants, such as socio-economic status.

Then came the subway ride.

"There I was, on a Sunday—quite invested in this question, wasn't I, going up to the lab on a Sunday," recalls Miller in an interview.

She was in a subway car crowded at one end and almost empty at the other, because that end was occupied by a "dirty, dishevelled man" brandishing a piece of chicken at everyone who boarded while yelling, "Hey, do you want to sit with me? You want some of this chicken?" The awkward scene continued for a few stops until an older woman and a girl of about eight—grandmother and granddaughter, Miller guessed—got on.

The man bellowed his questions, and the pair nodded at one another and said, "Thank you," in unison, and sat beside him. It astonished everyone in the car, including Miller and the man with the chicken, who grew quieter and more relaxed. Continue reading

Source and Image:

• Macleans

They drive at high speeds.

They stand around outside loud parties and smoke weed in front of the cops.

They guzzle liquor. They insult their parents - or lie to them - and feel no remorse, because, of course, their parents are idiots.

It is easy to blame peer pressure or wilfulness, but scientific studies suggest that at least some of this out-there behaviour has a physiological tie-in: brain mapping technologies show that the average teenager's brain looks slightly different from an adult's.

The biggest differences lie in the prefrontal cortex - a part of the brain associated with reasoning - and in the networks of brain cells that link the cortex to regions of the brain that are less about reasoning and thinking and more about emotion.

Using such tools as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET), scientists have peered into teen brains and found that typically, until a person hits his early to mid-20s, his prefrontal cortex is still rapidly changing.

So are the cell endings and chemical connections that link the cortex to parts of the brain associated with gut impulses.

When people are around 15 or 16 years old, many brain cells in the cortex die off while others are created, and new connections form among them.

A lot of the basic cognitive abilities - advanced reasoning, abstract thinking, self-consciousness - rapidly expand during this time, says Laurence Steinberg, a Temple University psychology professor.

"The connections within the brain don't fully branch out until age 22 or so.

"The kinds of capabilities that connectivity contributes to - emotion regulation and impulse control - probably plateau in the early to mid-20s." Continue reading

Sources

• The Guardian
• Image: Stuff

First I should be late, irked that they never told me London was so big.

Then, looking for my pad and pen, I ought to throw a hissy fit because I've lost my bag (the new one they bought me for my birthday).

Then, as they begin talking about their exciting new book Teenagers Translated, I should be texting friends under the table while picking the icing off Janey's carrot cake.

If she looks annoyed, I ought to say, "I am listening," and roll my eyes.

At the end I would need to sign off with a casual "Nice story, bro," and ask for a lift to a friend's house.

Finally, when starting this article last thing at night and realising I haven't listened to a word they've said, I'd need to sidle up to either of them brushing their teeth and demand they help me.

If the answer is "no", I should stamp off screaming, "OK, fine, make me fail!"

"I think many parents recognise facets of this behaviour," says calm, reflective Grew, when I put this scenario to her.

"Our aim is to provide a tool kit for parents to deal with the tempestuous emotions of the teenage years."

Parenting classes and manuals are a big industry these days.

But Downshire and Grew's book (subtitle: How to Raise Happy Teens) stands out due to its powerful core idea: neuroscience can explain the chaotic impulses and emotions of the evolving teenage brain. Continue reading

Sources

• Essential Kids
• Image: Marillac

How to raise happy teenagers]]> 60157 https://cathnews.co.nz/2013/04/09/coping-with-cyber-bullying/ Mon, 08 Apr 2013 19:12:48 +0000 http://cathnews.co.nz/?p=42475

What can be more painful to a parent than losing a child to suicide? The problem of cyberbullying was brought to national attention several years ago by the passing of 13-year-old Megan Meier, who committed suicide subsequent to cyberbullying by Lori Drew, the mother of another girl. Despite years of public campaigns and passage of Read more

Eating disorders are characterised by unhealthy or extreme views of one's weight and/or shape, which leads the young person to engage in severe, restrictive and dangerous eating and/or exercise behaviours. These behaviours in turn impact on the child's life in a such a pervasive and significant way that it impacts on their ability to function in their daily lives.

Eating disorders are most common among females and while they can start at any age, teenagers between 13-18 years seem to be most at risk (TPTPR). An important question for parents is then, how do you identify and eating disorder and how to do you go about helping your child?

What are the types eating disorders?

There are several types of eating disorders, with the most recognised being Anorexia Nervosa and Bulimia Nervosa.

Anorexia Nervosa is characterised by significant weight loss with an accompanying intense fear of gaining weight or becoming ‘fat'. People with Anorexia Nervosa see their bodies in a distorted way, typically believing they are fat even when they are extremely underweight.

Bulimia Nervosa is characterised by seemingly uncontrollable episodes of eating to excess, followed by behaviours aimed to rid the body of the calories ingested, such as undertaking excessive exercise, taking laxatives and vomiting.

Even if your child does not quite fulfill the symptoms of Anorexia Nervosa or Bulimia Nervosa, two significant risk factors for developing a more serious eating disorder are:

● Disordered eating: For example, restrictive dieting, fasting, self-induced vomiting, avoiding food groups, use of diet pills. Australian and New Zealand research indicates that engaging in moderate dieting behaviour puts young people at a six-fold risk of developing an eating disorder. Disordered eating is in fact the most significant indicator that your child could be developing an eating disorder. Continue reading

Sources

• Sydney Morning Herald
• Image: The Telegraph

Fiva Faalau, who graduated with a PhD from Massey University's Albany campus last week, says while her study of 45 Samoan teenagers revealed diverse family structures and parenting styles, some parents need to be more understanding of the needs of young people.

This means balancing the tradition of parental control and protectiveness with teen desire for freedom and trust - changes she says are essential to curb rising suicide, self-harm and alcohol abuse among Pasifika youth.

Continue reading