News Stories

“Only about 1% of the variability in young people’s mental wellbeing can be explained by social-media or smartphone use. One British study suggests that eating breakfast regularly is more than three times as important.” Put bread in the toaster, and then read more in The Economist. ☕️🍞

This article in The Washington Posts starts with three secrets teens and tweens are keeping from their parents (like how taking away one device doesn’t make a difference if they can access others), and ends with four requests (like how they’d like to talk to their parents about sexting). 

This article by NPR provides a list of behaviors to look for in your child to help determine whether they are too dependent on the screen. At the same time, it reports on a study showing that “limits on screen time…were not necessarily associated with positive outcomes in children.” In fact, the opposite was found.

The popular photo-sharing app Instagram is far more than a photo-sharing app for most girls. It’s how they learn who like them and what their peers really think of them. It’s where they “can obsess over their friendships, monitoring social ups and downs in extreme detail. They can strategically post at high traffic hours when they know peers are killing time between homework assignments.” This November 2017 Times article is a gold mine.

👎 Bad Facebooking = “…giving in to cravings for another digital content snack.”

👍 Good Facebooking = “….deepen bonds with your immediate circle, cement you into a larger community, keep old relationships from dying out, foster connections with those aligned by interest or circumstance and trigger real-world meetups.” This TechCrunch article is packed with insight.

This Wired article offers a few technical tips for parents, but much of the advice mirrors our own: Adjust as needed, be an example, and communicate constantly. 

Though there are some technical pieces of advice in this wonderful article in Wired, the focus is on regular conversations between parents and kids. Dave Lewis, a global security advocate at Akamai Technologies, is quoted extensively. Our favorite: “Parents should act as positive guardians.”

UNICEF met with partners for a one-day event discussing the intersection between digital media and privacy, ways to foster positive online participation, and how the Internet supports civic engagement and the right to be heard. All good stuff covered by Forbes, because 1 in 3 of the next billion users online will be under the age of 18. #whoa 

If you needed one more reason to cyberback those you see being cyberbullied, this is it: They may be bullying themselves to see who will stand up for them. Reports on this new trend called “self bullying” have been picking up the last couple of weeks. At the end of this USA Today article, a study author suggests that parents and educators talk openly about the phenomenon. 

Watch a group of 15- to 17-year-old girls candidly discuss the stresses they experience around social media with an ABC reporter. The discussion concludes when their mothers, who secretly watched the discussion from another room, join their daughters. The moms were shocked by some of what they heard. Maybe you will be, too.