Parents – stop panicking. Teens use secondary Instagram accounts not to be sneaky, but to show their “non-polished” selves and connect with small groups of true friends.
Rather than telling young people not to sext, we should encourage them to think about sexting as part of a broader negotiation of intimate relationships.
Teen sexting is on the rise. Boys and girls are equally likely to share sexually explicit imagery but girls report feeling more pressure to sext and more judgement about how they do it.
While parents are growing more concerned about their children’s easy access to porn, they often don’t realize just how ‘hardcore’ and violent it has become and how early their kids are seeing it.
Adolescents have important developmental work to do. Despite what worried grownups think, taking needless risks isn’t the goal for teens. Being risky is part of exploring and learning about the world.
Parents should ask their teens to show them how they use social media and how it works so they can have conversations about what the risks are and how to reduce them.
According to a new analysis, the number of US teens who felt “useless” and “joyless” grew 33 percent between 2010 and 2015, and there was a 23 percent increase in suicide attempts.
The amount of time teens have spent working and participating in extracurricular activities has held steady in recent years. There has, however, been one big change in their lives: smartphones.
Willow Bay, USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism
New research shows that families in Japan and the US struggle in very similar ways with how technology is affecting their lives, their relationships and each other.
Teenagers aren’t just lazy. Their sleep hormones aren’t calibrated to let them get up and go until later in the morning – which has academic and health consequences when school starts too early.
Understanding where teens learn about sex and how that influences them can help us find ways to encourage healthy sexual behaviors, such as using condoms and birth control.
Evolutionary psychology could explain why the memories and friendships formed during these years seem more vivid, potent and meaningful than those from any other stage of life.
Learning about a friend’s suicide attempt appears to transform a distant idea into something very real. Should this change the way we talk about suicide?
Some parents worry their teens’ obsession with dark fiction means they’ll grow up and overthrow the government – like Katniss Everdeen in Hunger Games. How real is this concern?
Professor, Canada Research Chair in Determinants of Child Development, Owerko Centre at the Alberta Children’s Hospital Research Institute, University of Calgary