Description: You cannot have missed the increasing level of discussion and concern regarding the possible impacts of social media use on the mental health of teens and youth in recent years. The available new coverage of this topic ranges widely from articles that seek out and dive into recent, population level research on social media… Read more »
Posts Categorized: Intervention: Children and Adolescents
Big Picture on Child Abuse: Risk and Protective Factors
Description: Imagine, just for a moment, that we have just now decided to take seriously and to do something about physical child abuse. With any ‘from scratch’ effort to design an intervention a first step is to see what you can find out about both risk and protective factors in relation to whatever it is… Read more »
What Are and Are Not Causes of Obesity?
Description: Consider this general statistic: in the years between 1975 and 2016 the rate of obesity globally has almost doubled. Why might this be? Without doing any online digging, just think about what you have heard and about what you know about factors that contribute to obesity and about how these factors have increased, multiplied,… Read more »
Screen Time is Too Vague a Variable
Description: How much time should toddlers and preschoolers be allowed to spend in front of screens, including televisions, computers, tablets, smartphones etc.)? Based on detailed reviews of current research the advice of the Canadian Pediatric Society used to be no more than 1 hour a day due to the lack of physical or cognitively challenging… Read more »
Treat Anxiety in Children Like a Phobia
Description: Face your fears! Sounds like a pretty basic piece of advice but for children with deep anxieties over often basic things like eating or being alone offering them such advice does not tend to work. There are therapeutic approaches that can work. Exposure Therapy, based on classical conditioning and linked to the much-discussed work… Read more »
Kids and Small Screens: The Big Picture
Description: Way way back when I was a child there was a limited amount of television programming aimed at young children (The Friendly Giant, Mr. Dress-up, but no Sesame Street). That’s sort of programming was aired on weekday mornings (so for preschoolers) and, at least on the CBC, was run without ANY ads. Even in… Read more »
Last Time for Standard Time?
Description: OK, as we approach the date (November 6, 2022) when provinces and states in North America that switched to daylight saving time in the spring switch BACK to standard time consider these pop-quiz questions. If we HAD to pick one time (daylight saving or standard) and make it our permanent time, which would be… Read more »
Teens as Developmental Mine Canaries
Description: It has been theorized that the ancient historic wholesale movements of people out of Africa, into Europe and over land bridges to North America were initiated not by group elders but by adolescents who decided that their futures were better pursued in places other than where they were. The thought is that others followed,… Read more »
Smartphones, Social Media and Loneliness: Time to Act?
Description: What comes to mind when you read or hear a statement that starts with the words “young people these days….”? There has been a lot of press over the research finding that young people (born around or since 1995) are expressing and experiencing significantly higher levels of stress, anxiety and loneliness even when compared… Read more »
The Psychology of Covid-19: Impacts on SES and Children
Description: How does Covid-19 effect children? Wait! Before you answer, set aside the fact that children are less likely to experience serious negative symptoms should they contract the Covid-19 virus. Think of children at the population level (as a group or groups). Now, how does or might the Covid-19 pandemic as a while effect children?… Read more »
Books for Success!
