A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
Teachers - is there something missing in how you are connecting with your students - those kids in Years 5 to 9 who sometimes seem to be in a world of their own? Do they appear to be at times fidgety, uninspired, unsure and at other times loud, challenging and emotional? The 'middle years' period [...]
A couple of weeks ago I attended a lecture at the Sydney Opera House. Speaking was Professor Martin Seligman, the founding father of what has been termed Positive Psychology. His research has led him to devise a model that he has termed the PERMA model for wellbeing. P = Positive Emotions Seligman cites the [...]
Famous for his book Raising Boys, author and Generation Next speaker Steve Biddulph has just published a new book Raising Girls. He wrote the book out of concerns for increased mental health issues which many girls now face and are facing earlier and earlier. "Anxiety and depression have doubled in the last 10 years. Girls' [...]
In the age of instant information, globe-spanning viral videos and the world wide web, can a thoroughly wired country become a porn-free zone? Authorities in Iceland want to find out. The government of the North Atlantic nation is drafting plans to ban pornography, in print and online, in an attempt to protect children from a [...]
I believe sexualisation is a deeper and more lifelong issue, perhaps even endemic - and harmful - to gender relations throughout history. Objectification of women was at the core of the feminist struggle. But today, from a completely different quarter, the nature of sexuality for all of us is being modified. For example, boys are [...]
Australians love a drink, and some see no problem at all with drinking to excess. But now doctors, police and paramedics have called "time", warning that alcohol-fuelled violence has reached crisis levels. "We are not facing a crisis, we're in a crisis. It's occurring right now." Read the statistics and it's hard to argue with [...]
Worldwide 793 million people still cannot read In countries such as Kenya, Nepal and America children are getting together and discovering the world of the written word. For many of them it is opening new doors, not only to the joy of reading but it is also building within themselves a sense of self worth, [...]
A call for consistency in messaging to girls: Girlfriend February 2013 Many girls and young women look to girl’s magazines for advice on life, relationships, bodies, health and sexuality. But too often they receive conflicting advice and mixed messages and even, sometimes, outright contradiction. Take for example, information provided in the sealed section of Girlfriend [...]
An ancient warning system in the brain fails to fire in older people making them especially vulnerable to fraud, finds a US study. The brain region called the anterior insula is activated when young adults look at pictures of untrustworthy faces, but fails to respond when older adults see the pictures, reports Professor Shelley Taylor [...]
If we needed any more reason to believe that social media is doing almost exactly the opposite of what it set out to – making us less instead of more social and more instead of less fragmented – here’s a good one. A new study finds that there’s another element to social media’s growing list [...]
