‘Shutting the gate after the horse has bolted’ parenting - I don’t know about you, but I’m often guilty of it. I’d been meaning to put an Internet filter on my 11 year old son, Joe’s computer for ages. Joe is on the autism spectrum and approaching puberty so I knew it was only a matter of time before he became curious about sex. "I must do it," I probably said half a dozen times, "but tomorrow." ... As parents we are charged with protecting our kids from danger, but when they become teenagers it can be difficult to know which line to tread. Teenagers expect, and indeed are entitled to, some independence. Read full article
An academic paper released in 2012 suggested that teenagers may in fact need only just more than seven hours sleep to perform well in standardised tests. The article was not written by sleep researchers but by economics researchers who used statistical analysis to come up with this proposal. However the paediatric sleep community has refuted this suggestion. Read full article
It’s common for parents to worry about their teenagers getting enough sleep. Like adults, teenagers’ sleep requirements vary between individuals, depending on how well they function on a certain amount of sleep. But as a general guideline, most teenagers function well on about nine hours sleep per day, says Dr Sarah Blunden, founder of the Australian Centre for Education in Sleep and Director of the Paediatric Sleep Clinic in South Australia. This article covers how much sleep teenagers need and some tips to help them get more of it. Read full article
Breakthroughs in neuroscience can help us better parent the teens in our lives. They may tower over us physically and be our intellectual match, but teenagers have brains that are very much a work in progress. This informative article gives parents a guide to the changes happening in the teen brain and explains their connections to teenage behaviour. Read full article
I recently came across a blog post about the potential for mobile phones to weaken kids’ conversational skills. The post at the 21st Century Fluency Project (originally posted by Katherine Bindley at Huffington Post) talked about the positive and negative influence of mobile phones and technology in general on the ability of children and teenagers to communicate effectively.
The topic caught my eye as my 12-year-old son was going to be receiving his first mobile phone for Christmas. Read full article
Professor Nick Allen, at the School of Psychological Sciences, The University of Melbourne, has conducted studies into the influence of family dynamics on depression in teenagers. Speaking at the Australian Psychological Society’s recent conference on Theory to Practice: Positive Development and Wellbeing, Professor Allen presented research that follows young teenagers from ages 12 to 18 and looks at family communication styles prior to the development of depression symptoms. Through early observations and then periodic follow up over several years, Professor Allen and his colleagues have identified patterns of adult and child communication that predict the likelihood of a teenager developing depression. Read full article
I am writing this post a day before my eldest son’s Higher School Certificate results are released. I’m still living in blissful ignorance but we’re expecting results in the disappointing to disastrous range. That’s okay. Yes really okay. My son and I sat down the other day and worked out a contingency plan in case we’re faced with the disaster scenario. He, however, is dreading telling others his results, and now wishes he’d worked harder. That’s a lesson he had to learn. What have I learned this year? Here are a few random thoughts. Read full article
Toxic parent communication stoppers that are guaranteed to turn teens off – and your better response to keep them talking. Let’s face it, talking with an adolescent can be like walking through a minefield. At any moment you could be asking what you thought was a simple, sincere question only to find it triggering an explosive response ... Here are seven things you should avoid asking an adolescent because they are guaranteed to be big “turn offs” and how to pose those trickier questions another way so you’re more likely to get a better response from your kid (or at least keep her standing in the same room with you). Read full article
With a new Australian study indicating that 1 in 12 adolescents self-harm, it’s important for parents and carers to keep informed about self-harm and what it can mean for their child ... Self-harm or self-injury refers to a person deliberately inflicting physical harm on themself to cope with or communicate their distress ...Why Do Children Self-Harm? Read full article
Ever planned a fun day out with the children and then had your plans go out the window? I can think of two recent examples not quite meeting the idyllic family outing I had in mind. In hindsight, I am laughing and I’m still glad we forged ahead despite whingeing and helpful critiquing from the teenagers in the back of the car. We have three boys, now aged 15,13 and 9 - so you can probably imagine it’s a challenge to plan a family outing that meets everyone’s taste and criteria. Read full article
