A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
“Stranger danger” has always been the go-to parenting mantra to let kids know to be careful with people they don’t know, especially if the “stranger” behaves inappropriately. The stereotype was the bad man in a van picking up vulnerable children off the street. But, as disturbing new research conducted at the Victorian Forensic Paediatric Medical [...]
Suku Sukunesan, Swinburne University of Technology There’s no shortage of people online looking to exploit and manipulate the vulnerable among us. One such group is anorexia coaches, or “anacoaches”. They are typically middle-aged, male sexual predators who go online to find impressionable young people to exploit under the guise of providing weight-loss “coaching”. I have [...]
Dr Niels Wouters and Professor Jeannie Marie Paterson With more than one billion users since 2017, TikTok is one of the fastest-growing social networks. Its audience base is rapidly expanding beyond Gen Z’s early adopters, now including boomers and retirees. Despite its growth, TikTok has been unable to stop a stream of rumours and leaks. [...]
Claire Pescott, University of South Wales Many eight- to 12-year-olds are now heavy users of social media such as Instagram and Snapchat – even though most platforms require users to be 13 or over. However, concern over young people’s use of social media tends to focus on older teenagers or young adults – rather than [...]
Joanne Orlando, Western Sydney University COVID has led to children spending more time on screens using social networks, communication apps, chat rooms and online gaming. While this has undoubtedly allowed them to keep in touch with friends, or connect with new ones, during the pandemic, they are also being exposed to increased levels of online [...]
Snapchat has announced a new feature called “Here For You” that promises to “provide proactive in-app support to Snapchatters who may be experiencing a mental health or emotional crisis”. The popular youth-oriented app is the latest to join a wave of social media platforms setting out to monitor and improve the well-being of their users. [...]
Like any eight-year-old, Ryan Kaji loves to play with toys. But when Ryan plays, millions watch. Since the age of four he’s been the star of his own YouTube channel. All up his videos have gained more than 35 billion views. This helped make him YouTube’s highest-earning star in 2018, earning US$22 million, according to [...]
If you have kids, chances are you’ve worried about their presence on social media. Who are they talking to? What are they posting? Are they being bullied? Do they spend too much time on it? Do they realise their friends’ lives aren’t as good as they look on Instagram? We asked five experts if social [...]
The argument has raged back and forth in recent years on the presence and nature of a link between youth social media use and mental health outcomes. In an eight-year longitudinal study recently conducted by Brigham Young University, one finding stood out: the sheer amount of time spent using social media did not correlate to [...]
Reporting from Generation Next's Mental Health and Wellbeing of Young People seminar 2019, EducationHQ's Sarah Duggan wrote an article to relate the key messages from Kristy Goodwin's presentation, 'Managing Attention Span in the Age of Digital Distraction'. Kristy's main takeaway is that the ability to focus is a skill in its own right, and in [...]
