4 Practical Tips for Improving Communication with Your Moody Teen

a post by Daniel Flint for the World of Psychology blog



One of the complaints I hear most from clients and friends with teens is that their kids don’t communicate like they used to. What was previously a sweet little kid is now an angsty teen!

If you have found yourself dealing with a teen or pre-teen who is increasingly non-communicative and closed off, consider trying some of these practical tips to improve your parent-child relationship.

Continue reading and discover the advice I should have had 40+ years ago with five of them going through it! To be fair one of them was not much trouble and another left home at age 16 (and four days).

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Social media use may harm teens' mental health by disrupting positive activities, study says

a post by Leah Asmelash for CNN Health [with grateful thanks to Tara at ResearchBuzz: Firehose]

Social media use has been linked to depression, especially in teenage girls. But a new study argues that the issue may be more complex than experts think.

The research, published Tuesday in the journal The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, involved interviews with almost 10,000 children between the ages of 13 and 16 in England. The researchers found that social media may harm girls' mental health by increasing their exposure to bullying and reducing their sleep and physical exercise.

"Our results suggest that social media itself doesn't cause harm, but that frequent use may disrupt activities that have a positive impact on mental health such as sleeping and exercising, while increasing exposure of young people to harmful content, particularly the negative experience of cyber-bullying," study co-author Russell Viner of the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health said in a statement.

In other words: Social media itself might not be to blame for mental health issues; rather, it takes away from girls' sleep quality and exercise while exposing users to cyberbullying, and that's what leads to lower well-being and problems with mental health.

Bob Patton, a lecturer in clinical psychology at the University of Surrey, said this means strategies focusing only on reducing social media use as a tool to improve well-being or mental health might not help.

"Building strategies to increase resilience to cyberbullying and that promote better sleep and exercise behaviours may well be what is needed to reduce both physical and psychological harms," Patton, who was not involved in the research, said in a statement.

For boys, the impact on their mental health seems to be due to other reasons, so further research is needed, the authors said.

Continue reading

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Body Dysmorphic Disorder's Impact on Kids Today

a post by Tyler Jacobson for the World of Psychology blog



The teenage years are hard on kids’ sense of identity and self-esteem, especially as their bodies and minds are changing and growing at a rapid rate. As a parent, it may feel like you are jumping through mental and emotional hoops, doing your best to build up your child while still maintaining discipline. However, adolescents who struggle with body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) may need more help than most parents may realize.

Body Dysmorphic Disorder Strikes at a Vulnerable Age

Body dysmorphic disorder is a mental disorder that leads individuals to constantly think about their perceived appearance flaws. These flaws may be small and therefore unobservable by others, but for someone with BDD, those perceived defects in their appearance can be all-consuming.

According to research, this disorder often strikes sometime during either childhood or the later adolescent years, with 16 being the average age of those diagnosed. Since teens are often going through many difficult changes during this time period, their BDD may go unnoticed by parents or simply seen as an extension of teenage angst. However, a child’s body dysmorphia and overall obsessive unhappiness with their appearance may not be their only mental health issue.

Continue reading

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Research Links Sleep Deprivation to Risky Behaviors in Teens

a post by Tyler Jacobson for the World of Psychology blog



It’s a battle that goes on in most households nearly every morning—the alarm goes off, and teens struggle to get out of bed while harried parents try to hurry them along. We are just glad to get them out of the door and on their way to school, never giving more than a passing thought to their sleep deprivation. But maybe we should. New research now shows that sleep-deprived teens are more prone to risky behaviors than their peers who get a full night’s rest.

When considering factors that contribute to teen drug use, drinking, and other risky behavior, few parents, if any, suspect that sleep deprivation has anything to do with it. Sure, we might notice that our teens sleep longer or go to bed later than we’d like but that’s as far as we get.

Continue reading and discover some statistics that you may not want to read about if you are the responsible adult in the life of a teenager.

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A Counterintuitive Approach to Your Irritable Teen

a post by Lynn Margolies for the World of Psychology blog

Some things about raising teens are counterintuitive. Like knowing that when they’re irritable or angry and you feel rejected, it may not work to tell them you feel hurt by how they’re treating you. And knowing that if you tell them you feel bad about a mistake you made that affected them, it may ruin the positive effect of taking responsibility.

Revealing vulnerable feelings can backfire in certain situations and bring on or exacerbate irritability and anger in teens. Such feedback is typically a good thing and serves to repair or deescalate conflict in relationships. Saying that you feel bad about how you affected the other person is often an essential part of an apology that works. And making people aware of the impact they’re having on you when they’re lost in their own reactions can allow them to see your humanity and “come to,” as well as help kids develop emotional intelligence when empathic skills are needed. But with certain teens and parents, it can be a different story.

Continue reading

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ASU graduate creates website aimed at online safety for teenagers

via ResearchBuzz Firehose: Nicole Greason for Arizona State University news

In spring 2016, Jessica Swarner, then an Arizona State University junior majoring in political science and journalism, saw an alarming story about a young girl’s use of a messaging app.

According to the story, a 13-year-old girl from Virginia was killed by an 18-year-old man she had met on Kik, a mobile instant messaging app. Her parents had been unaware of their daughter’s use of the app and the dangers that could lurk there.

“It really scared me because I had a younger sister in high school at the time who was using Kik,” said Swarner, who graduated in May 2017 with a bachelor's degree and honors from Barrett, The Honors College at ASU.

Swarner already was doing research on cyberpsychology in a lab at ASU focusing on people’s attachment to their mobile phones, online communities, and cyber security, but when she saw this story, it really hit home. She decided to take her research into the realm of parental supervision of minor children’s Internet use, the safety of mobile apps, and online security.

What she found out is that many parents have little or no knowledge of what their children are doing online. In fact, according to a 2016 National Cyber Security Alliance study, 30 percent of teens said their parents were not aware at all or not very aware of their online activities. The same study showed that 57 percent of parents said they were unaware of what their children were doing online.

Continue reading

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Security, respect and culture in British teenagers' discourses of knife-carrying

an article by Marek Palasinski (Based at Department of Psychology, Lancaster University, UK) published in Safer Communities Volume 12 Issue 2 (2013)

Abstract

Purpose
The aim of the paper is to provide an overview of English adolescents' views on knife-carrying and offer a potential framework for challenging their implicit tolerance of the phenomenon.

Design/methodology/approach
A sample of 25 adolescents from three large English cities (London, Birmingham and Manchester) was interviewed about knife-carrying at seven youth community centers and their narratives were analyzed by drawing on the classical discourse analysis and the concept of narrative repertoires.

Findings
The adolescents constructed the social and legal consequences of knife-carrying as normal, trivial and inevitable.

Research limitations/implications
Talking to a stranger with a voice recorder about the sensitive subject of knife-carrying appeared to be problematic, which probably had an inhibitory effect despite the conversational warm-up and assured anonymity.

Practical implications
Cautioning against creating common sense associations between knife-carrying and irresponsibility or deviance, the paper emphasizes the need for the focus on the low controllability and unpredictability of the knife.

Originality/value
The paper presents scholars and outreach workers with an intimate glimpse of how personal responsibility for knife-carrying and its potential consequences could be diminished by removing the agency from the carrier and rhetorically placing it in society.

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School leavers to be given six-month course in 'job skills'

via Telegraph Education News by Graeme Paton
Thousands of school leavers will be given a crash course in the three-Rs, inter-personal skills, writing CVs and preparing for interviews under Government plans to cut the number of jobless teenagers.
Continue reading
And ask, as several people have in groups on LinkedIn, how we have come full circle back to YTS.

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Heterogeneous Firm Responses to Rising Teenage Wages

an article by Dean R. Hyslop, David C. Maré, Steven Stillman and Jason Timmins (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand) published in LABOUR Volume 26 Issue 4 (December 2012)

Abstract

Substantial youth minimum wage changes in New Zealand between 2000 and 2007 raised teenage average wages by 5-10 per cent relative to those for adults.

We use Statistics New Zealand’s Linked Employer-Employee Database (LEED) to examine whether firms’ teenage labour demand responses to these changes are greater for firms with higher teenage-employment share.

We find evidence that high teen-employers reduced their teen employment relative to other firms and had lower survival rates over the period.

However, firms that entered the main teen-employment industries had higher teen-employment shares than continuing firms. The results are consistent with endogenous technology adoption in response to non-marginal changes in relative wages.

JEL classifications: J21, J23, J31, J38

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