EFFERVESCENCE

Saturday, July 27, 2024

Adolescent Well-being: Global Trends, Insights, and Future Directions

More than ever before, our world now has the largest ever population of adolescents in human history, with people between the ages of 10 and 19 ranging to around 1.2 billion. As such, it is important for us to ensure that each of these individuals finds supportive and caring ecosystems through attentive policies that allow them to maximize their full potential. The development of such a policy requires that we first pay attention to the contexts that adolescents find themselves in, and understand the direction in which adolescent well-being is headed.

Even as healthcare standards have improved across the world, with well-being becoming more accessible than ever before, existing gaps ensure that several adolescents lack access to quality healthcare and safe environments, which are critical prerequisites to staying healthy. According to estimates, around 1.2 million adolescents die from easily preventable causes, such as poor hygiene facilities, and a lack of hygiene facilities.

In the case of adolescent girls, the event of the onset of puberty brings additional complications, as millions of girls lack proper information about menstrual health, in addition to being restricted by social and material conditions that limit their educational and economic opportunities. Consider, for instance, that child marriage is still the leading cause of adolescent girls between 15 and 19. According to the World Happiness Report, it is around the age of 12 that girls start reporting lower life satisfaction than their male counterparts, and this rift keeps on widening with time.

Such conditions take a toll on their mental health too. A global crisis haunts the world today, wherein adolescents are grappling with anxiety, stress, and depression, such that self-harm is the leading cause of death for adolescents between the ages of 15-19. These challenges are further worsened due to pervasive stigma, in addition to the lack of mental health resources. In addition to being under immense social pressure owing to academic performance, body image, and socioeconomic status, Mental health is further deteriorating owing to the dangerous risks of substance abuse that teenagers are susceptible to, with over one-third of teenagers consuming alcohol in not-ideal situations.

The path to a healthier future is then built on developing systemic solutions that can target these problems in their diverse manifestations across countries. Given that the well-being of adolescents depends on the informed choices we make today, acting responsibly is imperative. Only then would countering these unhealthy trends be possible. This requires empowering young people to advocate for healthy lifestyles by helping them develop their skills and confidence, in addition to furnishing them with the right resources.

Sources

https://www.unicef.org/health/adolescent-health-and-well-being

Outdoors Optimism: The Rising Relevance of Nature Schooling for Adolescents

We live in a digital world. As a result, there has been a drastic divide between young people and their natural surroundings, as they are glued to their screens and remain confined to urban construction. Given that technology is only going to advance and assume an even greater role in our lives, the time that individuals spend online is only going to increase, thereby inducing a myriad of developmental and psychological problems.

In this light, there is a new movement on the horizon that insists on the critical importance of nature schooling for children and teenagers. Realizing how mass-produced technology has negatively impacted the well-being of teenagers, in terms of how they remain constantly plugged-in to some electronic device, this movement seeks to return teenagers back to nature by making them spend a greater amount of time outdoors. The benefits propounded by this movement include enhanced physical and mental health, greater engagement with our natural environment, and a more robust development of our sensor, cognitive, and motor skills.

Countering the indoor-ification of early childhood and adolescence, wherein individuals remain preoccupied with concerns such as academics, testing, and technology, nature schooling is an alternative method of education that insists that teenagers spend a healthy amount of time of their daily schedules outside in nature. As such, such schooling types incorporate natural awareness into their curriculum about the arts, sciences, mathematics, language skills, and music training pedagogies.

Such a pedagogy is driven by the core principle that reading, comprehension, and other critical thinking and metacognitive skills are better developed if the children indulge in meaning-making in the outside world, and develop an awareness of how they engage with the world using different senses and faculties through interactive experiences. Not only is this great for perceptual development, but it also allows individuals to expand their horizons by immersing themselves in diverse natural habitats and communities, such as gardens, fields, riversides, hillsides, etc. Further, such schooling is also incredibly helpful in cultivating social skills in teenagers, including cooperation, communication, collaboration, empathy, and a sense of belonging.

As physical, mental, academic, and environmental challenges continue to mount copious levels of stress and anxiety on teenagers, by embracing natural schooling, they can thrive into resilient individuals who are equipped to take care of their well-being.

Sources

Friday, June 21, 2024

Voices of a Generation: Teens Speaking Out and Making a Difference

The rapid pace that marks changes in our world has ensured that teenagers are no longer dependent on their parents for expertise or advice. Living in the age of information, teenagers are exposed to a wide variety of perspectives that can enable them to develop their opinions about the world after gauging a holistic view of something. This is perhaps one of the reasons why our world today witnesses so many more teen leaders than have been seen ever before.

Whether it is Malala Yousafzai or Greta Thunberg, teenagers and young adolescents are leading the charge in raising their vehement concerns against the rampant injustices prevalent in our world. Therefore, the generations of today refuse to be silent and are impassioned to make a difference, driven as they are by their inclusive dreams of a better world. This is why older generations need to come to terms with the fact that the rules of the world have changed and that the younger generations refuse to simply sit back and relax.

As a result of this, teenagers can no longer be simply dismissed as naive or immature, but their opinions demand considerate engagement. Because of teenagers who are leading social justice movements, we inch towards a world that believes that age is just a number when it comes to passion and creating impact. Importantly, it is not just famous teenagers who are causing progressive impact, instead, countless teenagers are tackling a plethora of intersecting issues in their own communities, ranging from social justice to environmental protection. It is not just social media that their opinions are limited to, but they take their opinions to their classrooms, to family dinners, and even to their neighbourhoods, trying to create change through discourse.

Often running low on resources, the teenagers of today compensate for low resources with their energy, and dedication. Their unyielding sense of purpose allows them to stir up the status quo in the hope of a better future. The fact that teenagers are hopeful and not bogged down by a sense of futile cynicism ensures that they refuse to keep quiet and settle down. Instead, they believe that their passion will fruitfully change the world.

Therefore, instead of being termed rebels without a cause, the teenagers of today are fearless advocates for the cause of equality. This bodes well for the future of our planet: our generation will leave the world a better place than we found it.

Sources:

https://www.news18.com/news/lifestyle/are-social-issues-troubling-your-teen-ways-to-enhance-your-teenagers-mental-health-6504505.html

Saturday, June 8, 2024

Press Play: Exploring the Role of Video Games in Teenage Life

Over the last couple of decades, video games have exerted a dominant presence on the horizon of teenage life, such that they have transformed from mere instruments of entertainment into channels that facilitate social interaction and personal development.

To begin with, video games offer immersive experiences and are most often predicated on great storytelling. For example, the Emmy-award-winning TV limited series The Last of Us is based on a universally acclaimed action-adventure videogame series of the same name. Video games then instead of being spectacles of senseless enjoyment allow players to experience diverse contexts and settings, in addition to exposing them to a wide range of perspectives and narratives. In fact, some might even argue that video games are educational experiences much in the same way that magazines or books are.

Owing to this, more and more young people are playing video games, and over time the skewed gender dynamics of video game players have improved too, such that young girls have slowly become as enthusiastic about video games as young boys. As teenagers do not limit themselves to specific genres of video games, but instead play a wide range of genres, it allows teenagers to imbibe different ways of thinking about the world. Gaming therefore has become a major social experience for teens, and contributes to community formation, allowing peers across the world to come closer to each other and form meaningful social bonds. Further, gaming contributes to an enrichment of the cognitive skills of teenagers, in addition to honing their reflexes and decision-making skills, by requiring them to improve their hand-eye coordination and make split-second decisions.

There are legitimate concerns about video games, with the most important of them being how video games are often violent and gory, and therefore desensitize teenagers to violence. Arguments from this perspective also claim that because video games directly implicate teenagers as players in their violent worlds and require them to make violent decisions, they are more harmful than violent TV shows and movies. Additionally, teenagers come in contact with strangers over the internet, and therefore their sense of safety and well-being is threatened in insidious ways.

Therefore, a nuanced understanding of video games helps us foreground that while it is easy to villainize video games in themselves, demonization is not very helpful. Instead, it is important for us to equip teenagers with critical thinking skills to allow them to nurture healthy gaming practices.

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Exercising Minds, Exercising Bodies: Foreground the Necessity of Daily Exercise

The world is not an easy place to be a teenager: it is a phase filled with a plethora of increasing pressures that strain a teenager’s body, mind, and soul. Therefore, it becomes imperative to ensure that teenagers remain mindful of their health and well-being in this crucial part of their lives before they come of age.

Given the formative nature of the teenage years, habits learned during this time are more likely to stay with an individual well into adulthood. Therefore, the teenage years are the perfect time to develop the habit of exercising daily.

It is important to remember that teenagers need at least 60 minutes of physical activity to ensure optimum wellness. Such activity should include a healthy mix of aerobic exercises, muscle-strengthening, and bone-strengthening exercises. Examples of such activities include running, swimming, jumping rope, dancing, gymnastics, roller skating, cycling, hiking, or playing outdoor games.

Such exercises are crucial in preventing conditions such as chronic stress, high blood pressure, or high cholesterol, all of which lead to heart attacks and strokes later in life. Other physical benefits of exercise include how it helps in the improvement of blood circulation, as well as in fixing our sleep cycle. Further, regular exercise also helps revitalize our immune system by increasing our body’s resistance to colds, flu, and other such viruses.

It is important to understand how the positive effects of exercise are not limited to the body alone but spill into the realm of our mental health as well. This is because exercise has a proven effect in terms of improving our self-image as well as helping us fight anxiety and depression, in addition to increasing our optimism. This is because exercise triggers the release of endorphins in our body, thereby shaping our psychological states.

Given how a lot of teenagers are conscious of their skin, exercise is instrumental in helping us with our skin too. This is because physical exercise boosts circulation in our body, thereby improving the delivery of nutrients to our skin, in addition to removing toxins from cells. Further, the increased delivery of oxygen to our body because of enhanced circulation also increases the production of collagen, which is the connective tissue responsible for smooth, elastic, and plump skin.

Here, it is important to remember that there is absolutely no such thing as too much exercise. Often, teenagers, once they begin exercising, are so swept away by the activity that they forget the healthy limits of exercise, and are therefore obsessed with the gym as well as with the idea of burning extra calories.

This is why it is important to regulate the amount of exercise we undertake in order to derive the most optimal benefits from it.

Sources

Framing Teenage Perspectives: A Glimpse into Free-Range Parenting

In 2008, much to the shock of most parents who read the article, Lenore Skenanzy published an article, "Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone". Gaining significant media traction since then, it has become a key media text in helping us understand a marked shift in parenting styles in the 21st century.

Skenanzy's style of parenting is a radical shift away from the extremely involved nature of helicopter parenting, in which parents constantly interfere in each and every aspect of their children's lives with the assumption that their interventions are automatically beneficial for the child. As opposed to helicopter parenting, Skenanzy's style of parenting is known as free-range parenting, which is defined as extending children the freedom to make choices for themselves, act on their own agency, and experience the consequences of their own actions.

Despite whatever it is believed to be in the popular imagination, free-range parenting is not automatically about neglecting your children's needs or being uninvolved in their lives. In the article too, Skenanzy writes that before letting her son ride the metro on his own, she made sure to train him adequately, taught him to read the map, and even gave him extra money should he need it for any reason.

Let's then discuss these parenting styles from a teenager's point of view. Given that teenagers, broadly speaking, are in the process of forming their identities and figuring out who they are and what they want to be, it is crucial to give them the relative space to explore different facets and decide what appeals to them. This is, of course, not to say that parents should let their children be like how birds abandon their young ones. Instead, the goal here is to offer limited parental supervision depending on the contextualized situation of the child, and how mature they are.

Therefore, for teenagers to realize the concepts of agency and accountability, parents need to nurture freedom of thought and action in them to help them ease off the monumental pressure they face. As a teenager myself, I am aware of the heterogeneous pressures faced by us in different areas of our lives that strive to crumble any potential of joy from our lives. Despite receiving fierce criticism about how this method is equivalent to neglect, I believe that such a parenting style is deeply liberating in nature, because it creates an organic sense of self-confidence by teaching teenagers to trust their instincts.

I believe that no teenager wants to fear their parents. Instead, they want to develop healthy relationships based on mutual trust and confidence. In this context, free-range parenting emerges as a viable parenting style that seeks to let children develop at their own pace and follow their own visions of who they want to be.

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Inter-Species Companionship: How Pets Add Magic to Teenage Life

Teenagers across the world crave the love and warmth offered by the companionship of a pet, as they continue pestering their parents to have a dog, cat, rabbit, or fish, with them. This is because teenagers derive pleasure and joy from interacting with animals and engaging with the cuteness that they exhibit.

Pets are also a wonderful lesson in responsibility, given how they depend on their humans to offer them care and look after their daily needs. This includes feeding responsibilities, making sure that they get adequate exercise, as well as cleaning after their litter. By participating in such essential care work, teenagers are able to cultivate a sense of responsibility and foster a sense of purpose in life.

This is why inter-species companionship is an important lesson in empathy, as it allows us to step beyond our selfish perspectives, and extend love and kindness to beings that have nothing in common with us. This is a lesson most needed by teenagers in some of the most formative years of their lives.

Having pets then allows teenagers to forget about their stress and anxieties during the time that they devote to their pets and indulge in carefree frivolity and play with their pets. Given that middle and high school years are turbulent times, involving multivalent pressures and intense expectations, pets become a crucial support system that offers teenagers a sense of stability to navigate such high levels of stress.

Owing to the urgent need for self-validation that most teenagers experience because of undergoing physical transformations owing to puberty, as well as because of having fluctuating interpersonal relationships with their peers, having a pet allows teenagers to find external validation in the unconditional love showered on them by their pets. This further allows teenagers to develop a healthy sense of self, helping them feel confident in their own skin.

Several research studies have proven how adolescents are deeply influenced by their pets. For example, a 2019 study undertaken by Lynn J Piper and Clarissa M Uttley demonstrates how pets not only improve the socialization capacities of children but also have positive effects on their emotional development as well as their physical health. Significantly, the study also exhibits how adolescents who are at risk because of factors like homelessness and mental health problems derive a whole host of benefits from canine-assisted therapy.

Therefore, having pets allows teenagers to weave lasting threads of joy and emotional resilience, as pets add magic to life, and make our adolescent years full of love and laughter.

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