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By Daniel Romer

Now that the Internet has been with us for over 25 years, what are we to make of all the concerns about how this new medium is affecting us, especially the young digital natives who know more about how to maneuver in this space than most adults?

Although it is true that various novel media platforms have invaded households in the United States, many researchers still focus on the harms that the “old” media of television and movies still have on youth. The effects of advertising on promoting the obesity epidemic highlight how so much of those messages are directed to children and adolescents. Jennifer Harris noted that children ages 2 to 11 get nearly 13 food and beverage ads every day while watching TV, and adolescents get even more. Needless to say, many of these ads promote high-calorie, low-nutrition foods. Beer is still heavily promoted on TV with little concern about who is watching, and sexual messages are rampant across both TV and movie screens. None of this is new, but the fact that these influences remain so dominant today despite the powerful presence of new media is testament enough that “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”

When it comes to the new media, researchers are more balanced. Sonia Livingston from the UK reported on a massive study done in Europe that found a lot of variation in how countries are dealing with the potential harms on children. But when all was said and done, she concluded that the risks there were no more prevalent than those that kids have confronted in their daily lives offline. What has changed there is the talk about the “risks,” without much delving into whether those risks actually materialize into harms. Many kids are exposed to hurtful content in this new digital space, but many also learned how to cope with them.

2013 E3 – XBOX ONE Killer Instinct B. Uploaded by – EMR -. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

The perhaps most contentious of the new media influences is the emergence of video gaming, either via the Internet or on home consoles. The new DSM-5, which identifies mental disorders for psychiatrists, suggests that these gaming activities can become addictive. Research summarized by Sara Prot and colleagues suggests that about 8% of young people exhibit symptoms of this potential disorder. At the same time, we still don’t know whether gaming leads to the symptoms or is just a manifestation of other problems that would emerge anyway.

Aside from the potential addictive properties of video games, there is considerable concern about games that invite players to shoot and destroy imaginary attackers. Many young men play these violent video games and some of them are actually used by the military to prepare soldiers for battle. One could imagine that a young man with intense resentment toward others could see these games as a release or even worse as practice for potential harmdoing. The rise in school shootings in recent years only adds to the concern. The research reviewed by Prot is quite clear that playing the games can increase aggressive thoughts and behavior in laboratory settings. What remains contentious is how much influence this has on actual violence outside the lab.

On the positive side, other researchers have noted how much good both the old and new media can provide to educators and to health promoters. It is helpful to keep in mind that many of the concerns about the new media may merely reflect the age old wariness that adults have displayed regarding the role of media in their children’s behavior. In a recent review of the effects of Internet use on the brain, Kathryn Mills of University College London pointed out that even Socrates was skeptical of children learning to write because it would reduce their need to develop memory skills. Here again, the more things change, the more they remain the same.

Daniel Romer is the Director of the Adolescent Communication and Health Institutes of the Annenberg Public Policy Center. He directs research on the social and cognitive development of adolescents with particular focus on the promotion of mental and behavioral health. His research is currently funded by the National Cancer Institute and the National Institute on Drug Abuse. He regularly serves on review panels for NIH and NSF and consults on federal panels regarding media guidelines for coverage of adolescent mental health problems, such as suicide and bullying. He is the author of Media and the Well-Being of Children and Adolescents.

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By Johanna Slivinske

Think for a moment, back to when you were a teenager. What were you like? What did you enjoy doing? In what did you excel? The positive activities in which we partake in adolescence shape our adult lives. In my case, playing the clarinet in band and competing in extemporaneous speaking on the speech team molded me the most, and became my personal strengths.

Music and the creative arts continue to influence my writing and speaking, and many of these facets of my professional life can be traced back to strengths developed and built upon in my youth. Another strength was the fact that I had a loving, kind, and caring family. This provided me with a solid foundation for life, and in a sense, these protective factors in my life made me resilient. However, strengths can also be found in unexpected venues, perhaps peering through the cracks of hardship.

1.   Adolescents might find strengths through their failures in discovering that they are able to get back up after falling. When teens fail, and continue to try despite the failure, they show a level of resilience, diligence, and perseverance.
2.   The communities of adolescents, even if less than perfect, can be a source of strength. Creating dialogues about community leaders may benefit teens that need role models in their lives. It can help them figure out whom they aspire to be similar to in character and in positive personal qualities. A community leader can be anyone who functions as a responsible person in the community, or anyone else who cares about the well-being of the community as a whole.
3.   Acting out behaviors may be viewed through a strengths lens if those behaviors are a response to traumatic experiences such as community violence or sexual assault. The nonproductive response of acting out behaviors during adolescence may be reframed therapeutically as a survival mechanism or a stepping-stone leading toward a more productive path of healing and growth.
4.   Instead of viewing quirks, eccentricities, or diagnoses as negative qualities, these may sometimes be perceived as qualities that foster the creation of unique perspectives and promote divergent ways of understanding the world.
5.   When everyday necessities are lacking from adolescents’ lives, they may learn to be resourceful. Resourcefulness may entail surviving under extremely stressful circumstances or learning how to “make due” with limited resources. Teens may have learned how to cook for themselves, or they may have asked friends to share clothing with them. These are examples of using the strength of resourcefulness under difficult circumstances.

When working with adolescents and their families, it is essential to focus not only on their problems, but also on their strengths. This may sometimes present as a challenge, but if you search intensely, with an open mind, strengths may be identified and built upon as a solid foundation for life. This contributes to the fostering of resilience in adolescents and their families.

Hidden or obscured strengths, when perceived in a positive manner, may serve as methods of coping or means of survival during times of stress. Even when strengths are obvious to professionals, adolescent clients may not be aware of their own strengths, and may benefit from therapists’ ability to identify, recognize, and name them. Through working with adolescents, it’s possible to identify strengths and help them learn more about themselves and what makes them unique, so that they can grow to become productive members of their communities.

Johanna Slivinske is co-author of Therapeutic Storytelling for Adolescents and Young Adults (2014). She currently works at PsyCare and also teaches in the Department of Social Work at Youngstown State University, where she is also affiliated faculty for the Department of Women’s Studies.

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Bestselling author Suzanne Collins (pictured, via) is writing a new young-adult series. According to The New York Times, the untitled project will be her “most autobiographical work to date,” using  family members’ names and illustrations inspired by family photos.

This new project will focus on war, a theme present in her two series, The Underland Chronicles and The Hunger Games. Collins’ grandfather, uncle, and father all served in military careers, and the novelist will write about war for teenage audiences.

Collins explained: “I specifically want to do this book, one as a sort of memory piece kind of honoring that year for my family, and two, because I know so many children are experiencing it right now — having deployed parents. And it’s a way I would like to try and communicate my own experience to them.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Alexandra D’Arcy is a sociolinguist by training and specializes in the study of language variation and change. She is an Assistant Professor in Linguistics and the Director of the newly formed Sociolinguistics Lab at the University of Victoria. This is the third installation in her new monthly column so be sure to check back next month.

Like. Who likes it? When I ask this of my students a few bashful hands do get raised, but largely the question is met with scorn, derision, and unabashed judgment. And my students aren’t alone in these sentiments. Popular media is replete with complaints concerning this latest scourge on the English language. Newspapers, magazines, television news, talk shows, blogs and comics regularly decry its ‘weed-style’ growth and its ability to ‘drive out […] vocabulary as candy expels vegetables’ (Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair, January 2010). Like, however, is misunderstood.

We have very strong beliefs about why we don’t like like: it makes us seem vacuous and inarticulate. We also know who the primary offenders are: young people, and adolescent girls in particular. And we know who to blame: not just Californians but Americans. We are convinced that like is new, meaningless, and ultimately, a blight on the English language.

There are, however, a number of reasons to actually like like, or, at the very least, to respect it (or simply to hate it a little less than we currently do). I know the urge to scoff is strong, but I ask you to bear with me and suspend judgement for a moment… or at least until you follow my next blogs. You never know, you just may come to appreciate that perhaps like has a place in the language after all.

Consider, for example, that like isn’t new. ‘Ungrammatical’ uses have been a part of English for at least 200 years. In 1840 De Quincey railed against the vulgarity of like, stating that utterances such as ‘Why like, it’s gaily nigh like to four mile like’ were typical of uneducated speech. Sound familiar? More recently, like was a staple of the beat and the jazz counterculture movements of the 1950s and 60s.

Nor is like uniquely American. Today, octa- and nonagenarians in UK villages use it regularly, saying such things as ‘It was only like a step up to this wee loft’ and ‘We were like walking along that road’. We also have recordings of first generation New Zealanders saying things such as ‘Like until his death, he used to write to me frequently’ and ‘Like you’d need to see the road to believe it.’ Are these speakers emulating the Valley Girls and Surfers of California?

Lastly, teenagers aren’t the only users of like. Adolescents and early twenty-somethings do use it more than say, 40-year-olds, but the use of like crosses all age barriers. Of course, there’s nothing noteworthy about that at all. In any language change adolescents are at the forefront, and like has been developing new meanings and uses in English since at least the 1800s. The truth is that we were all adolescents at some point. So if we’re going to point our fingers at today’s teenagers, we should think about what we were saying when we were their age.

Coming next: like and its place in English grammar.

0 Comments on Liking (or least understanding) Like: Part 1 as of 1/1/1900

Anxiety and panic often first appears in adolescence, making effective treatment, while still young, imperative. The Treatments That Work series explains the most effective interventions for a particular problem in user-friendly language.  In Mastery of Anxiety and Panic for Adolescents, Riding The Wave: Therapist Guide, by Donna B. Pincus, Jill T. Ehrenreich and Sara G. Mattis, the aim is to help adolescents with panic disorder and agoraphobia.  In the excerpt below the authors focus on the importance of parental involvement in effective treatment.

Research on the importance of including parents in child and adolescent anxiety treatment has grown substantially during the past decade.  Numerous studies indicate that children and adolescents have the most significant and lasting gains in anxiety treatment when parents are involved.  Recent systemic research has suggested that incorporating parents more centrally into the treatment of children and adolescents with anxiety disorders may enhance treatment effectiveness and maintenance (Ginsburg, Silverman, & Kurtines, 19915; adds, Heard, & Rapee, 1992).  Ollendick and King (1998) highlight the need for intensive parental involvement when treating children with fears and anxiety.  They suggest that parents might be regarded as co-therapists, responsible for the implementation of procedures developed by the therapist and for giving children or adolescents ample praise and positive reinforcement for brace behavior.  Although this may seem common-sense, a review of the literature reveals that involving parents directly in the treatment process has been the exception rather than the rule (Braswell, 1991)…Since the parent is one of the most significant persons in an adolescent’s life, and an adolescent’s avoidance of activities often causes considerable disruption in most families, the inclusion of parents in the active treatment process should yield greater clinical benefit…

General Tips for Parental Involvement

As an adolescent is learning new concepts and tools for dealing with his panic attacks, it is very helpful to have parents on the “same page” as their child.  This can be accomplished by teaching both the adolescent and his parents a “common language” regarding the most appropriate tools to use during a panic attack.  For example, during a panic attack, a parent might suggest that the adolescent “restructure his maladaptive panic thoughts” or “notice the triggers of panic attacks” and “not avoid the feelings.”  While it is important for an adolescent to know how to cope most effectively with a panic attack, it is also crucial that parents also understand how to help most effectively.  Thus, including parents in a portion of treatment sessions ensures that they will be able to help reinforce concepts that the adolescent learned in therapy.

Many parents of adolescents with panic disorder (PD) are worried that their child might be in significant distress during a panic attack, and my inadvertently reinforce the child’s avoidance of places or situations that might trigger panic.  It is important that parents are educated about the nature of anxiety and panic, the fact that anxiety won’t hurt or harm their child, and the importance of nonavoidance of physical sensations and of situations that might trigger panic attacks.  Although parents are typically given handouts and reading materials regarding the nature of anxiety and panic, it is also helpful to have parents join part of the session, to teach these importance concepts in person.

A common fear of parents of adolescents with panic is whether getting rid of their adolescent’s PD will make them feel “less close” to their child.  Parents state that, unlike many adolescents who are trying to separate from their parents, their teenager tries to “stay close” to them out of fear of getting a panic attack and having to deal with it alone.  This often makes parents feel a sense of importance and emotional closeness to their teenager.  When attempting to treat PD, it is important to discuss with the adolescent and his parents other way that they might maintain a close relationship if panic attacks were no longer occurring.

Although parents can be involved in treatment in many ways, it is important to first discuss the plan with the adolescent and parent(s), so that both parties are comfortable and aware of the plan.  In addition, the inclusion of parents at the end of sessions does not mean that they must be informed about everything the adolescent talked about in therapy; only the important treatment concepts need to be conveyed.

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