News Articles

By Lisa Damour
Courtesy of the New York Times

The arrival of spring is often prime time for hay fever, but adolescents seem to be able to develop an allergy to their parents, either intermittent or chronic, at any time of the year. This allergy usually has a sudden onset around age 13 and can last for months or, in some cases, years. While it’s no fun to become the parent who cannot order food or hum along to a song without irritating his or her own child, we’re better able to ride out […]

The good news about today’s youth: 7 positive trends show them behaving more virtuously than earlier generations

By Kristy Cooper
Courtesy of Good News Network

Have teens gotten a bad rap in recent years? They are typically characterized as self-involved, reckless, and only interested in “sharing” on their phones, but the youth of today, in reality, are actually behaving more virtuously than they have in a long time.

Statistics tell an optimistic story. From smoking and drug use to unwanted pregnancies and abortions, the trends today show most teenagers making good choices. They are even volunteering in their communities more […]

Four tips that will increase your child’s happiness.

By Marilyn Price-Mitchell Ph.D.
Courtesy of Psychology Today

Learning how to set and maintain emotional boundaries is an important part of growing up. It is also a key to developing relationships that are supportive, caring, and respectful. These kinds of positive relationships create the foundation for lifelong happiness.

Unfortunately, many adults have difficulty setting their own emotional boundaries, let alone teaching their children. The reasons are simple. Setting boundaries is uncomfortable, forces us to speak for ourselves, and seldom results in a “thank you” from others. Yet, it is one of the […]

Experts say kids are growing up with more anxiety and less self-esteem.

By Rachel Ehmke
Courtesy of Child Mind

Many parents worry about how exposure to technology might affect toddlers developmentally. We know our preschoolers are picking up new social and cognitive skills at a stunning pace, and we don’t want hours spent glued to an iPad to impede that. But adolescence is an equally important period of rapid development, and too few of us are paying attention to how our teenagers’ use of technology—much more intense and intimate than a 3-year-old playing with dad’s iPhone—is affecting them. In […]

Teaching adolescents how to manage self-confidence is important to do

By Carl E Pickhardt Ph.D.
Courtesy of Psychology Today

The two most common self-confidence drops I see during adolescence are at the beginning, in Early Adolescence (9-13) when separating from childhood, and at the end, in Trial Independence (18-23) when leaving home to operate more on one’s own terms. In both cases, the young person must get used to functioning on a significantly expanded playing field of life experience than she or he encountered before.

At these first and last stages of adolescence, as the scope […]

By Marilyn Price-Mitchell Ph.D.
Courtesy of Psychology Today

We understand the benefits of mentoring young people when we hear the powerful stories of teens whose lives have been changed by a single, caring adult. If you listen, those stories are everywhere. Like me, you likely have a story of a mentor from your own youth.

What we know about mentoring is that it matters to positive youth development. Now, one of the largest mentoring studies ever conducted continues to support this thinking and links mentoring to a reduction in bullying.

A five year study sponsored by […]

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has found that students who have never had sex rate significantly and consistently better in nearly all health-related behaviors than sexually active peers.

The report examined a large array of health behaviors of high school students according to their self-reported sexual activity, including dating violence to substance abuse, to drunk driving, to carrying weapons. The major conclusion from the report is quite stark:

• Virgin students rate significantly and consistently better in nearly all health-related behaviors than their sexually active peers. They do so by remarkably stunning measures.

Just one more piece of evidence that waiting to […]

By Maria Konnikova
Courtesy of The New Yorker

This summer, American Psychologist, the official journal of the American Psychological Association, released a special issue on the topic of bullying and victimization. Bullying is, presumably, as old as humanity, but research into it is relatively young: in 1997, when Susan Swearer, one of the issue’s two editors, first started studying the problem, she was one of the first researchers in the United States to do so. Back then, only four states had official statutes against bullying behavior, and the […]

By TORIA SHEFFIELD
Courtesy of Bustle.com

Achieving our goals is seldom easy. It’s why knowing how to stay motivated is so incredibly important when it comes to getting what we want in the long term. And in a world with more distractions than ever before — from non-stop web access to constant texting — it can be all the harder to stay focussed and not just give in to what’s easier in the moment.

I’ve often struggled with motivation, whether it’s been related to my career, my health, […]