Tag: Teens

Almost two-thirds of children worry ‘all the time’

Article by BBC News:  Research among 700 children aged 10 and 11 for the mental-health charity Place2Be suggests almost two-thirds worry “all the time”.  Here’s what 10 and 11 year olds worry about the most…

Read… www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-38861155

Florida joins New York and Virginia in requiring yearly mental health courses to public middle and high school students

Florida public schools will be required to teach at least five hours of mental health instruction to all students in sixth through twelfth grades every year.
— Read on abcnews.go.com/US/florida-require-mental-health-courses-public-schools-beginning/story

The Best Thing You Can Do To Help a Depressed Friend

Whenever your friend explains what has happened or how they feel, you don’t need to always follow-up with a story of your own.

Knowing the right thing to say to a friend who’s in a dark place can be challenging. We want to help but may be afraid to say the wrong thing.

Whether your friend is suffering from depression, anxiety or abuse, the single most important thing you can do is, make yourself available.

Research confirms that just reaching out is critical.

Here are five ways to help, with no strings attached.

1. Keep checking in.

Reach out via text or phone call, and do it more than once. Make sure your words are nonjudgmental.

Choose what you say wisely especially when texting. Using a ton of smiley face emojis won’t help them feel better. It could actually do the opposite, making the person feel that you’re minimizing what they’re going through.

2. Meet them where they are.

Meet them where they are, as-in don’t pressure them to “get out”, or do anything else they’re not quite ready to do.

Allow them some space to direct the conversation and discover their own coping skills.

3. Remind them of things that make them happy.

Bringing up memories that you think are funny may not be a good idea; be certain that the memory is equally happy for them.

Be patient and kind, hopefully the conversation will help get them back to a somewhat positive head-space.

4. It’s not about you.

Whenever your friend explains what has happened or how they feel, you don’t need to always follow-up with a story of your own.

It may be tempting to share similar experiences in an effort to prove how much you can relate to their pain. But talking too much about yourself can be counter intuitive.

5. Don’t just say you’re available, prove it.

Continue to reach out even if they don’t respond at first.

Never just say, “Let me know if you need anything” or “I’m here if you need me“. You don’t want to make your friend feel that they’re bothering you.

Individuals suffering from depression or having suicidal thoughts are great at hiding their feelings. It’s just easier for them to say, “I’m OK”.

You don’t always have to have an answer, just listening is the most important help you can give.

What Is Sextortion?

According to the FBI, sextortion cases are up 60 percent in the last five years.

It can happen in a matter of minutes, but the trauma can stay with victims forever.

Unlike cyberbullying, which most parents know about and discuss with their teens, sextortion isn’t on a lot of parents’ radars, leaving kids unguarded and vulnerable to attacks.

Read more…

The Bully at Home; When it’s More Than Just Sibling Rivalry

When people talk about toxic family members, they usually speak about a dad they don’t get along with, or a mom who is too controlling. But toxic family members can include siblings too.

Siblings should be friends to lean on, shoulders to cry on, and occasionally scapegoats to put the blame on. However, if you’re now an adult and your relationship growing up harbored more bad than good, such as constant arguments, emotional/verbal abuse, or never-ending competition; you may want to take a step back and ask if it’s worth it to repair the sibling relationship you’ve been dealing with since childhood.

The following six signs will help you determine if it was more than meaningless sibling fights.

  1. You were constantly the butt of all jokes.

Abuse comes in many forms — from name calling, endless insults, hitting, to sexual harassment and more. If you find that your sibling grew up constantly belittling you with harsh words, that’s verbal abuse.

When a married couple argue constantly and rarely have a calm, loving moment, it often ends in divorce. But when siblings fight on a regular basis, too many times it’s dismissed as innocent sibling rivalry.

2. Majority of arguments were over insignificant topics.

If you fought daily, even over something as little as the TV remote, that is a sign of an unhealthy relationship. Not every little thing should cause a fight.

For young girls, when one of the first male relationships in her life (with a father or brother) is toxic, it can be devastating. Name-calling and making negative comments about her physical appearance can cause her to have poor body image and low self-esteem.

This type of sibling rivalry can have long-term effects on your mental and physical health.

3. You constantly felt controlled or manipulated

It’s common for an older sibling to manipulate a younger one. It gives them a sense of power.

This control could have been used for the better, like encouraging the younger sibling to try the same sport as, but more often than not it’s used for sinister reasons.

4. Lack of Trust

Could you trust your sibling with your secrets? If not, the “sibling bond” was never there.

You may have wanted to confide in your sibling as opposed to a parent. But they waited for the perfect time to spill the beans to the rest of the family or embarrass you in front of friends.

If you couldn’t count on your sibling to keep it a secret, it wasn’t a trustworthy relationship.

5. You stressed about your toxic sibling even when they weren’t around

It’s common to think about a blowout fight the day after it happens; however, if you constantly carried negative thoughts when your sister or brother weren’t around, that’s a different story.

Our family and friends should bring out the “best” side of us. But if bad thoughts of your sibling outweigh the good and negatively affected your schoolwork or job performance, it’s likely you had a toxic sibling relationship.

6. Interactions are still forced

It’s not a good sign if you’re all grown-up and you still prefer to stay away during the holidays.

If you only run into them at family gatherings and have no desire to make plans with them any other time, it’s likely your relationship never outgrew a toxic stage.

Just because they are a family member doesn’t mean that it’s a relationship built on mutual love, respect and support for one another.

You are family by blood and that may be the only connection your relationship is thread together by.

It’s completely normal to want to know “why” the relationship was so toxic. But be empowered with the knowledge that you may never understand why.

“When you are living in constant anxiety never knowing or being able to predict how any engagement is going to turn out, it is time to love yourself enough to let go.”

~Genevieve Shaw Brown, ABCnews.Go.com

Does Your Child Have a Fear of Silence? It could be Sedatephobia!

“Silence”, it is said, ‘speaks a thousand words’. But to some people, silence can be downright scary. There is a term for this phobia: Sedatephobia. People suffering from Sedatephobia cannot withstand silence; they constantly need noise and human interaction.

The word originates from Greek ‘Sedate’ meaning ‘silent or sleeping or dead’ and Phobos meaning the Greek God of fear, or dread or aversion.

Sedatephobia was relatively unheard of 50 years ago. However, today, it is a fairly common phobia. Expert hypnotists and psychotherapists are seeing large numbers of Sedatephobic individuals in their offices and they believe that these numbers will continue to rise in the coming decades.

For Sedatephobic individuals, darkness might not be scary, but the silence and lack of noise can bring on a full blown panic attack. This constant neediness can be very harmful to the individual.

Symptoms of fear of silence

Excessive noise can be debilitating and can bring on headaches. However, it is silence that can cause various symptoms in a Sedatephobe. Power cuts can be especially trying to such people, since they are left without technology, noise, music or movies around to comfort them.

When left in silence, the phobic might have a full blown panic attack which may be characterized by following symptoms:

  • Shivering, shaking, trembling
  • Having dry mouth and sweaty palms
  • Inability to speak or express themselves: feeling detached from reality and having thoughts of death or dying
  • Feeling numb, feeling like crying or fleeing
  • Experiencing rapid heartbeat, nausea, gastrointestinal distress etc

Sometimes, a person with Sedatephobia can also feel afraid in a group when people stop talking or there is a lull in the conversation.

Exam times can be especially hard for these individuals. Spending time in a library or even trying to sleep alone can be a scary time for the sufferers of fear of silence phobia.

Causes of Sedatephobia

Like all other specific phobias, the fear of silence is usually caused by a traumatic or negative episode in the phobic’s life. Some phobics, for example might have been locked up or abused by an adult,(some having been kept in basements or closets for punishment where no outside sound reaches them).

The feelings the child has experienced then can get permanently etched on his/her mind. News of a loved one’s death or other traumatic/negative episode associated with silence can also bring on this phobia.

Many experts believe that technology has also given rise to the constant need for sounds around humans.

For some people, it is impossible to meditate or sit in a quiet room for even a few minutes as they always need their phone, music, TV, or the noise of traffic around them.

To be left in silence can mean being “hunted down by supernatural beings or things that go bump into the night”. It also brings the fear of the unknown.

Most sufferers of Sedatephobia also tend to have inherent anxieties. They may inherently have monophobia (the fear of being left alone). The fear of ghosts is also associated with this phobia.

Other causes of the fear of silence phobia include adrenal insufficiencies, depression, hormonal imbalances, and delusional paranoia.

Treating and overcoming the phobia

Family members can play an important role in helping an individual overcome his/her fear of silence.

Talking about the fear to a loved one (or in group therapy) can provide relief to some extent. Else it is best to seek professional help from a professional Therapist or Psychiatrist.

Today, many modern therapies like CBT (or cognitive behavior therapy), NLP or neurolinguistics programming and systematic desensitization therapies are known to help reduce anxiety experienced by Sedatephobia.

All these treatments can help one get to the root of the fear of silence phobia and help the sufferer overcome it once and for all.

Source and original article by: Jacob Olesen. https://www.fearof.net/fear-of-silence-phobia-sedatephobia/

Male Sex Abuse Survivors Delay Disclosure For Twenty Years On Average

At least 1 in 6 men and boys have been sexually abused or assaulted.

Talking about any type of abuse takes a lot of strength. Today, female victims of sexual assault and abuse may be more comfortable speaking publicly about their experiences and because of that, we’re having the conversation more often. But is it the same for male survivors?

Being a male survivor of child sex abuse is still very taboo and greatly under-reported.

According to 1in6.org and the Center for Disease Control, At least 1 in 6 men and boys have been sexually abused or assaulted.

I’m embarrassed to say that the assault of men and boys, honestly wasn’t on my radar as much as the abuse of girls. Now, I’m laser-focused on prevention so that parents (especially single-moms) aren’t blind-sided.

Four practical ways to help protect your child from pedophiles:

#1 – Have the conversation more than once

Sexual abuse may be an uncomfortable subject for many parents but its literally a matter of life or death. Just because you had ‘the talk’ with your son when he was eight, don’t assume he’d be completely comfortable telling you right away if something happened.

For males, the shame can be unbearable and not worth being judged or not believed.

Keep talking about it! Use various resources if you have to, educational videos and books are still a thing.

The purpose of having the conversation several times, is to make it a familiar, common subject in your household. If something ever happened, your son will know that it’s not his fault, which will help him get past the shame and disclose an incident sooner than later.

#2 – Beware of misconceptions

I was always concerned that while teaching my children to respect their elders, they might perceive that rule as; never question an authority figure or adults are always right. Which we all know is definitely not true!

Psychologists say, the abuser/predator is usually someone close to the family. Help your child understand that not all adults mean them well.

Male survivor.

#3 – Don’t ignore red-flags

It can be easy to miss typical warning signs because depressed individuals are great at hiding their feelings.

Parents, if you have a fleeting thought or inkling that something could be wrong… GO WITH THAT. Get nosey, don’t wait until something happens to comb through your child’s phone and tablet.

It may be helpful to teach your child (of any age), that whenever a person says, “don’t tell anyone“; they’re either about to do something wrong or have already done something wrong.

When it comes to our children, it’s better safe than sorry. No one gets an automatic “trust badge” just because they’re in a noble profession.

Male survivor.

Remember, no one is a pedophile until they’re caught and convicted.

#4 – Never judge a book by its cover

Don’t be caught off guard! Just because someone has a noble title such as; Bishop, Doctor or Police Officer doesn’t automatically make them trustworthy. We would like to think-so, but we don’t live in a perfect world.There are good and bad people in every city, country, religion, ethnicity, and so-on.

Let’s forget credentials, forget the squeaky clean background check, forget that he was once voted mentor-of-the-year, never mind that he’s a former NFL player and now coaches your son.

I’m not saying you should be paranoid, but realistically, things can happen when we least expect it.

Here’s a quick reminder of a few abuse cases that made headline news:

  • Mary Kay Letourneau – former schoolteacher, two counts of felony second-degree rape.
  • Jerry Sandusky – former college football coach, Penn State, convicted of rape and child sexual abuse.
  • R. Kelly – R&B Singer, as of July 2019 singer is facing charges of multiple counts of child pornography, criminal assault, conspiracy to obstruct justice, child sex trafficking and rape of a minor.
  • Larry Nasser – former USA Gymnastics national team doctor and physician at Michigan State University. Convicted serial child molester.

Sexual Abuse & Assault of Boys & Men | Confidential Support for Men

FACT: At least 1 in 6 men have experienced sexual abuse or assault, according to leading research. Read about the statistic, find helpful information, chat with a trained advocate through the 24/7 national helpline, join a weekly online support group, view male survivors’ stories, etc. You’re not alone. Visit: https://1in6.org/

Male survivor.

Council to offer millennials a course in ‘adulting’

Millennials are getting a hard time right now. Barely a day passes without some reference to young people having a sense of entitlement and lacking in life skills.

Cooking, managing your money, and being able to change a tyre are just some of the basic skills many young folk aren’t armed with when they enter adulthood. 

But one council is looking to change all that by offering millennials a crash course in adulting. Read more…

Parents Guide To How Teens Bypass Parental Controls

Here is a list of tactics that your kids have done, attempted to do, and will do in the future, all in order to get to content that you don’t want them to see!

-Long-read

You trust your kids, but you also know that with kids you need to take the proper precautions at home and away, to make sure that they stay safe and do not venture into the seedy world of internet porn and other dangerous or inappropriate social media.

Now, you may be an IT guru – and even work as a software engineer knowing network routing, DNS, IP encryption, and you may have even built your own router at home so you can have full control over what happens. If you are OR you are a Parent with little technical ability, this is for you!

Netsanity, for example, makes the process much easier with point and click Apple iOS parental controls, and Android parental controls along with knowledgeable support and a cloud-based, easy to use parental dashboard, built for new “tech parents.”

Is this you?

Do you sleep well at night knowing that your 14 or 16 year old is on their tablets or iPhones, safely surfing ESPN and looking at cute YouTube videos of dancing monkeys and the latest teen bands?

Do you worry that the safe browser you installed is actually being used to surf the Internet (it’s not!)

Are you confident that your teen will never go into chat rooms, attempt to surf pornography, or engage in very inappropriate social media apps that shield them from parents? Are you wondering how to track text messages on their devices?

You have prevented them from bypassing texts and have controls that prevent them from snapping pictures of themselves and sharing that on the internet? Well of course you did all that, right?

If that sounds like you, or someone close to you and your kids, read on!

First let us preface the following, and state for the record – most kids are great kids and most listen to mom and dad.

They want to please us and don’t intend to get in trouble. They test our boundaries but when push comes to shove, they are a true blessing.

A good analogy we give parents is this: imagine your 16 or 17 year old driving a car. They are perfect drivers; they follow the speed limit, don’t text and drive, and never speed. They are the model of perfection behind the wheel. So what happens when a drunk driver comes around a corner and hits them broadside? They can end up in the ER and they were completely innocent?

Well online, we face that every second of everyday. While you kids may use good practices and follow your rules, they can still get hurt – very hurt. So it is very important that you know as much as you can and what can happen when curiosity turns into danger.

Unlike the example of the other driver who is drunk, you can take common sense steps to remove many tactics your teens will try to get behind the wheel.

Kids are as viral as a cool YouTube video. Once one finds a new app or cool site, it spreads instantly – around the world. Kik, MeetMe, and Snapchat are just a few examples.

When we were young, instantly meant 6 months – LOL! Now, within seconds, kids can get access to anything before you even knew what happened.

Which brings us back to topic at hand – how do stay ahead of them, at least long enough to get through important years until they go away and learn all those great things in college!

Your teen has a lot more time to thwart your efforts and circumvent your parental controls. So while you work and do “life”, they are like beavers building a dam, one step at a time until they have won!

The first thing to note is nothing is 100% foolproof with electronic devices and the internet. If you want 100%, here is free advice: sell all of your internet devices and phones, grab your kids and head to a quiet ranch in Montana or Wyoming – I hear its beautiful there! Stay there until their age of majority and you will be all set! Now, if that is not YOUR plan, let’s proceed.

Here is a very small list of tactics that your kids and teens have done, attempted to do, and will do in the future, all in order to get to content that they don’t want you to know they saw! These are not in any particular order but over many years of observations, interviews, and learning the hard way, these are certainly ones to be aware of. Many are Apple iOS specific, since they are very popular, but many apply generically to any home.

PC Parental Controls

What: You installed Norton/Symantec/Microsoft parental controls on their Laptops. Your teen can’t go to websites that you filter and you get a nice report saying how responsible they truly are, while they Google search for football and how to clean my room better!

They will/can: Dual boot your laptop and install whatever operating system they want. So when they use the computer they are using their version and do whatever they want. Any 14+ teen can and have done this.

Prevent By: Be vigilant and get access to PC regularly. Don’t assume anything. Add a password to BIOS so you control what happens. Watch your reports. If the reports say they were on it for 30 minutes a day, and little Johnny was surfing all weekend, you may have an issue. Force PC to be used in a public place like the kitchen

Home Router and Wi-Fi

What: You go to Best Buy and buy a shiny $200 router with fancy parental controls. You click a few green buttons and it says you are all set! Now the kids can’t get to anywhere bad because the green lights told you that!

They will/can: Laugh at you first! Then, they will google the default password for that router. There is an 80% chance that you left it default and hence they will quickly have admin access to it.

Once there, they will create a 2nd admin account so they can use that one moving forward. If you happen to realize your mistake and set the admin password, too late as they have already built a back door! Game, Set and Match. Now, they will create a new hidden SSID for Wi-Fi that only they know.

They will set their laptops and smartphones to connect to that Wi-Fi SSID and surf away unrestricted while you and spouse, are filtered by your $200 router. Oh, if you are the 20%, don’t pat yourself on the back just yet 😉 They can install a 2nd Wi-Fi router, behind your cable modem; set a hidden SSID and do same thing again. They can buy one on EBay for $10 and hide it in the closet where you will never see it!

Prevent By: If going the router way, make sure you use strong passwords and get daily/weekly reporting on activity – some will email you if there are changes. Get rid of or change the main cable company Wi-Fi so all internet flows through the new router and not the one Time Warner, AT&T, Comcast, or Verizon dropped off!

Also, for the little hackers in your life, make sure that nothing is plugged in to the Ethernet port on your hub or cable modem that you did not put in there yourself.

OpenDNS:

What: OpenDNS is a great and free service that allows you to point your DNS to their DNS for the entire home so regardless of the internet-connected devices in home, all is safe.

DNS stands for Domain Name Service and if you are not technical, think of it as the old white pages. Simply, when you request to go to Google.com or Yahoo.com, DNS will lookup that domain and give your computer the corresponding IP address for that website so your computer or iPhone can find it.

When you use OpenDNS, your home will use their DNS to find sites and since you as a parent can edit which websites belong to which categories and you can filter your home based on that. Using OpenDNS is a good first step, but not a panacea. Read on.

Your teen will/can bypass OpenDNS: Simply use other public DNS servers on their iPhone, iPad, iTouch, XBOX 360, Nintendo DS, PC, Mac, etc. and bypass OpenDNS. Also, as mentioned before, they can install their router unbeknownst to you, and bypass it that way.

Prevent by: Secure their physical devices by making sure devices that can be secured from network changes are secured via a strong password.

Watch the reports closely to make sure that traffic patterns for your house make sense and if your teens are on Instagram 24/7 and there is no Instagram domains in your reports, that is an indication that your DNS is being bypassed.

For Apple mobile devices, you can install a service like Netsanity which will force all traffic through their service and prevent from configuration changes from being changed.

Bypassing Wi-Fi altogether

What: Teens completely bypass Wi-Fi and access the internet via their iPhones or smartphones with a carrier data plan

Your teen will/can: Who needs Wi-Fi anyway! If your teen has a smartphone with a data plan, all of your fancy footwork above trying to secure your internet Wi-Fi is irrelevant. They will just turn off Wi-Fi and surf the web and use apps that you disallow by going over their carrier 3G or 4G/LTE network. They won’t do it all the time so you don’t catch them, but they will be able to use apps that you pretend to block or websites and chat rooms that you filter.

Prevent by: Your options are severely limited at this point. First, know if they have a data plan and watch the usage via your carrier’s site. Verizon, AT&T and others allow you to watch data used. If the kids are at home and they are eating the data while they should be using free Wi-Fi, you know why.

Again, installing a parental control profile from Netsanity will protect the device regardless if it’s on Wi-Fi or the carrier’s network. Lastly, physically grab the device and educate your teen that the use of internet enabled devices is a privilege and not a right so abuse will lee dot them potentially losing their device!

Texting even though you don’t have a texting plan

What: Teens don’t use the traditional SMS/Texting that has been around for 20 years. There are hundreds of free texting apps, many are crafty and are designed to be hidden from parents.

Your teen will/can: Download a free internet-based texting app. That app will assign a random telephone number and they will give that out to their friends. Then, the teen can text without ever using the carrier’s SMS. Also, with an Apple iOS device, they can use iMessage which is built in and free, and does not come from your carrier. Their texting targets also need to be on an iOS platform, but it’s fairly common.

Prevent by: If using a home router or OpenDNS, make sure you block as many of those domains as you can. Make sure you have access to your child device(s) 24/7 and know their passcodes. Occasionally checking their phones will give you some indication of what they are doing for texting alternatives. On an Apple iOS device, have them use your iCloud account. That will allow you to see each iMessage to come in and out from their devices.

Game consoles and other internet devices

What: Lately everything is being connected to the net. So one must be even more vigilant to make sure your most precious ones are protected. Nowhere is this most true than game consoles and portable game players.

Your teen will/can: Bypass your parental controls. Almost all have browsers and ways to access the net. If you lock down the PC but forget to do same with the XBOX, you have not secured anything. We have seen many teens pretend they are playing Animal Crossing, but really they are on the web in a chat room.

Prevent By: Making sure that the parental controls are enabled and you restrict any changes via the console. Make sure notifications are enabled as well so you know when changes are attempted.

To summarize, the above is a tiny fraction of what kids routinely do to bypass parental controls. There are many more which are much more technical. Certainly to avoid giving them any more ideas, we will not write about them here. However, do not be laissez-faire about their safety and be proactive.

Allowing unfiltered internet in your home and on your kid’s smartphone and other mobile devices can be dangerous and its their job to test the limits and be curious.

Our job is to make sure they stay safe and don’t make bad choices which can harm them for years to come.