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Pew Research Center's Social & Demographic Trends Project

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For boys and girls, day-to-day experiences and future aspirations vary in key ways

Anxiety and depression are on the rise among America's youth and, whether they personally suffer from these conditions or not, seven-in-ten teens today see them as major problems among their peers. Concern about mental health cuts across gender, racial and socio-economic lines, with roughly equal shares of teens across demographic groups saying it is a significant issue in their community.

Fewer teens, though still substantial shares, voice concern over bullying, drug addiction and alcohol consumption. More than four-in-ten say these are major problems affecting people their age in the area where they live, according to a Pew Research Center survey of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17.

When it comes to the pressures teens face, academics tops the list: 61% of teens say they feel a lot of pressure to get good grades. By comparison, about three-in-ten say they feel a lot of pressure to look good (29%) and to fit in socially (28%), while roughly one-in-five feel similarly pressured to be involved in extracurricular activities and to be good at sports (21% each). And while about half of teens see drug addiction and alcohol consumption as major problems among people their age, fewer than one-in-ten say they personally feel a lot of pressure to use drugs (4%) or to drink alcohol (6%).

The pressure teens feel to do well in school is tied at least in part to their post-graduation goals. About six-in-ten teens (59%) say they plan to attend a four-year college after they finish high school, and these teens are more likely than those who have other plans to say they face a lot of pressure to get good grades.

Girls are more likely than boys to say they plan to attend a four-year college (68% vs. 51%, respectively), and they're also more likely to say they worry a lot about getting into the school of their choice (37% vs. 26%). Current patterns in college enrollment among 18- to 20-year-olds who are no longer in high school reflect these gender dynamics. In 2017, 64% of women in this age group who were no longer in high school were enrolled in college (including two- and four-year colleges), compared with 55% of their male counterparts.

In many ways, however, the long-term goals of boys and girls don't differ significantly. About nine-in-ten or more in each group say having a job or career they enjoy would be extremely or very important to them as an adult (97% of girls and 93% of boys say this). And similar shares of girls and boys see getting married (45% and 50%, respectively) and having children (41% and 39%) as priorities for them, personally, when they grow up. Still, boys are considerably more likely than girls to say having a lot of money would be extremely or very important to them (61% vs. 41%).

While boys and girls face many of the same pressures - for example, they're about equally likely to say they feel pressure to get good grades - their daily experiences differ in other ways. Girls are more likely than boys to say they face a lot of pressure to look good: About a third of girls (35%) say this is the case, compared with 23% of boys. And a larger share of girls than boys say they often feel tense or nervous about their day (36% vs. 23%, respectively, say they feel this way every day or almost every day). At the same time, girls are more likely to say they regularly get excited about something they study at school: 33% of girls say this happens every day or almost every day, versus 21% of boys. And while small shares of girls (7%) and boys (5%) say they get in trouble at school daily or almost daily, girls are more likely than boys to say this never happens to them (48% vs. 33%).

In addition to these gender differences, the survey also finds some differences in the experiences and aspirations of teens across income groups. About seven-in-ten teens in households with annual incomes of $75,000 or more (72%) say they plan to attend a four-year college after they finish high school; 52% of those in households with incomes between $30,000 and $74,999 and 42% in households with incomes below $30,000 say the same. Among teens who plan to attend a four-year college, those in households with incomes below $75,000 express far more concern than those with higher incomes about being able to afford college.

And while a relatively small share of teens overall say they face a lot of pressure to help their family financially, teens in lower-income households are more likely to say they face at least some pressure in this regard.

There are also differences by household income in the problems teens say exist in their communities. Teens in lower-income households are more likely to say teen pregnancy is a major problem among people their age in the area where they live: 55% of teens in households with incomes below $30,000 say this, versus 38% of those in the middle-income group and an even smaller share (22%) of those in households with incomes of $75,000 or more. Compared with teens in the higher-income group, those in households with incomes below $30,000 are also more likely to cite bullying, drug addiction, poverty and gangs as major problems.

A note on racial and ethnic differences among teens

The survey suggests that, in some ways, the attitudes and experiences of teens may vary along racial and ethnic lines. However, because of small sample sizes and a reduction in precision due to weighting, estimates are not presented by racial or ethnic groups.

Teens in lower-income households also have different assessments of the amount of time they spend with their parents. Four-in-ten teens in households with incomes below $30,000 say they spend too little time with their parents, compared with about one-in-five teens in households with higher incomes.

These are among the key findings of a survey of 920 U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 conducted online Sept. 17-Nov. 25, 2018. Throughout the report, "teens" refers to those ages 13 to 17.

A majority of teens say they plan to attend a four-year college after high school

About six-in-ten teens (59%) say they plan to attend a four-year college after they finish high school; 12% plan to attend a two-year college, 5% plan to work full time, 4% plan to enroll in a technical or vocational school and 3% plan to join the military. Another 13% of teens say they are not sure what they'll do after high school.

Girls are more likely than boys to say they plan to attend a four-year college after finishing high school: 68% of girls say this, compared with about half of boys (51%). Differences in the shares of boys and girls who say they plan to attend a two-year college, enroll in a technical or vocational school, work full time or join the military after high school are small or not significant.

Among teens with at least one parent with a bachelor's degree or higher, as well as those in households with annual incomes of $75,000 or more, about seven-in-ten say they plan to attend a four-year college after high school. By comparison, about half of teens whose parents don't have a bachelor's degree or with household incomes below $75,000 say the same.

Some 65% of teens who say they plan to attend a four-year college after high school say they worry at least some about being able to afford college. Similarly, 70% express at least some concern about getting into the college of their choice.

Perhaps not surprisingly, concerns about affording college are more prevalent among teens in lower-income households. Among teens who say they plan to attend a four-year college, about three-quarters (76%) in households with incomes below $75,00o say they worry at least some about being able to afford it, compared with 55% of those in households with incomes or $75,000 or more.

Having a job or career they enjoy is at the top of teens' long-term goals

Looking ahead, virtually all teens say they aspire to having a job or career they enjoy: 63% say this would be extremely important to them, personally, as adults, and another 32% say it would be very important. Most teens also say helping other people who are in need would be extremely (42%) or very (39%) important to them when they grow up.

Teens give lower priority to marriage and kids. About half (47%) say getting married would be extremely or very important to them as adults, and 39% say the same about having children.

When it comes to fortune and fame, 51% of teens say having a lot of money would be extremely or very important to them, while relatively few (11%) say the same about becoming famous.

For the most part, boys and girls have similar aspirations. Roughly equal shares of boys and girls say getting married, having kids, and having a job or career they enjoy would be extremely or very important to them as adults. But boys (61%) are far more likely than girls (41%) to say having a lot of money when they grow up would be extremely or very important to them.

Teens' aspirations are also fairly consistent across income levels, with similar shares in each income group saying having a job or career they enjoy, helping others in need, having a lot of money and becoming famous would be extremely or very important to them as adults.

However, teens in households with incomes below $30,000 are less likely than those in households with higher incomes to prioritize marriage and children. Some 56% of teens in households with incomes of $75,000 or more and 46% in households with incomes between $30,000 and $74,999 say getting married would be extremely or very important to them when they grow up, compared with 31% of those in the lower-income group. And while about four-in-ten in the higher- and middle-income groups (43% each) say having children would be extremely or very important to them, 27% of those in the lower-income group say the same.

Academics are at forefront of the pressures teen face

Most teens (61%) say they personally feel a lot of pressure to get good grades, and another 27% say they feel some pressure to do so.

Compared with getting good grades, about half as many say they feel a lot of pressure to look good (29%) and to fit in socially (28%). Roughly one-in-five say they face a lot of pressure to be involved in extracurricular activities and to be good at sports (21% each), while smaller shares say they feel a lot of pressure to help their family financially (13%), to participate in religious activities (8%), to be sexually active (8%), to drink alcohol (6%) or to use drugs (4%).

Boys and girls, as well as teens across income groups, generally feel similar levels of pressure in each of these realms, but there are some exceptions. Girls are more likely than boys to say they feel a lot of pressure to look good (35% vs. 23%). And teens in the lower- and middle-income groups are more likely than those in higher-income households to say they feel at least some pressure to help their family financially (42% and 38%, respectively, vs. 28%).

In some ways, teens' day-to-day experiences vary by gender and income

When asked how often they have certain experiences or feelings, four-in-ten teens say they feel bored every day or almost every day, while about three-in-ten say they feel tense or nervous about their day (29%) or wish they had more good friends (29%) with the same frequency. Roughly a quarter of teens say they get excited by something they study in school (26%), come across people who try to put them down (24%) or worry about their family having enough money for basic expenses (23%) every or almost every day.

Smaller shares say they regularly feel targeted by law enforcement (7%) or get in trouble at school (6%). In fact, 54% of teens say they never feel targeted by law enforcement, and 40% say they never get in trouble at school.

Concerns about their family having enough money for basic expenses differ greatly by income: 36% of teens in the lower-income group and 29% of those in the middle-income group say they worry about this daily or almost daily, whereas 13% of teens in higher-income households say the same.

Gender differences are also apparent, particularly when it comes to experiences in school. Girls are more likely than boys to say they get excited every or almost every day by something they study in school (33% vs. 21%), and they're less likely to get in trouble at school. About half of girls (48%) say they never get in trouble at school, compared with 33% of boys. In addition, higher shares of girls than boys say they feel tense or nervous about their day on a daily or almost daily basis (36% vs. 23%).

Parents are more likely to say they don't spend enough time with their teens than teens are to say the same about their parents

When it comes to the amount of time they spend with each other, parents and teens diverge in their assessments, with parents far more likely to say it's not enough. Among parents who live with their teens, 45% say they spend too little time with their teenage children; a quarter of teens say the same about the time they spend with their parents. Most teens (65%) say they spend the right amount of time with their parents, while 9% say they spend too much time.

Teens from lower-income households are the most likely to say they spend too little time with their parents: Four-in-ten teens in households with annual incomes below $30,000 say this, compared with roughly one-in-five in households with higher incomes. These same income differences are not evident among parents, however. Similar shares of parents across income levels say they spend too little time with their teenage children.

Among parents who live with their teens, fathers are more likely than mothers to say they spend too little time with their teenage children (53% vs. 39%).

Majority of teens say they get a hug or kiss from their parents almost daily

When asked about interactions with their parents, about six-in-ten teens (59%) say they get a hug or kiss from their parents every day or almost every day. Roughly three-in-ten (31%) say they get help or advice from their parents with homework or school projects on a daily or almost daily basis, and 19% say they regularly get into arguments with their parents.

Girls and boys are about equally likely to say they get a hug or kiss from their parents every day or almost every day, as are teens from different socio-economic backgrounds.

The share of teens who say their parents help them with homework or school projects every day or almost every day is considerably lower than it was two decades ago. A Public Agenda survey conducted in 1996 found that, at that time, about half of teens (48%) reported daily or almost daily involvement from parents in their schoolwork.

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Most U.S. Teens See Anxiety, Depression as Major Problems

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For boys and girls, day-to-day experiences and future aspirations vary in key ways Anxiety and depression are on the rise among America's youth and, whether they personally suffer from these conditions or not, seven-in-ten teens today see them as major problems among their peers.

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What’s happening to our kids? Depression, anxiety crisis deepening in U.S.

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American children’s mental health is worrying experts, with one in five kids suffering from a diagnosable mental, emotional or behavioral disorder.

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Teenagers are budding with sexual energy. Mix that with cell phones and it can be a complicated combination. According to a JAMA Pediatrics from last April that analyzed 39 studies of just over 110,000 under 18-year-olds (the mean age was 15.16 years, but ages ranged from 11-17 years)- it was found that roughly 15% of teenagers send sexts and 28% receive them.

It is so important to have an open line of communication with preteens and teens about the issues around revealing photos and videos (yes, videos-some teens send short sexually explicit videos to one another). Today's TTT is all about just the facts. In a pragmatic way, try sharing with your teens and preteens what the laws are in your state-and, starting with this example case can also be helpful.

In 2015, two 16-year-olds from North Carolina were arrested and charged with multiple felony counts of sexual exploitation of a minor under the state's child pornography laws. Their crime? The boyfriend and girlfriend sent nude photos to each other via text. They were charged as adults, faced four to ten years in prison and would have to register as sex offenders if convicted. The kids agreed to plea bargains that reduced their charges to misdemeanors. Still, a very scary situation. The teens were doing what some sexually curious boyfriends and girlfriends do-the last thing they wanted was to get in trouble and to break a law.

North Carolina does not have any sexting laws-in fact, half of states do not have sexting laws. If the couple had been in a state with sexting laws, such as Arizona, Florida or Arkansas, they would have most likely been charged with something such as a misdemeanor and given the chance to prove their intent was not criminal. Sexting legislation is designed to deter teens from sexting with consequences including education and less severe sentences.

Below the TTT weekly questions, I've included part of the Cyberbullying Research Center's chart that shows sexting laws for each state across the country. Here are some questions to get you started:

Are you aware that it is against the law to send and receive nude pictures, even if they are from your significant other?

If you were creating laws on this topic, how would you do it?

If you were to write a letter to a younger student, what advice would you give them about issues surrounding the taking and dissemination of revealing and suggestive photos and videos?

The chart below is from Cyberbully.org and was created, and is regularly updated, by Sameer Hinduja, Ph.D., & Justin W. Patchin, Ph.D. co-directors of the Cyberbullying Research Center. To see more detail and description of laws go to https://cyberbullying.org/sexting-laws .

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Teenagers are budding with sexual energy. Mix that with cell phones and it can be a complicated combination. According to a JAMA Pediatrics from last April that analyzed 39 studies of just over 110,000 under 18-year-olds (the mean age was 15.16 years, but ages ranged from 11-17 years)- it was found that roughly 15% of teenagers send sexts and 28% receive them.

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If you mindlessly scroll through Instagram or Facebook whenever you get a few seconds of downtime, you're far from alone. But have you ever wondered how all those images of other people's bodies - whether your friend's holiday snap or a celebrity's gym selfie - could be affecting how you view your own?

Much has been made over the years about how mainstream media presents unrealistic beauty standards in the form of photoshopped celebrities or stick-thin fashion models. Now that influencers fill up our feeds, it's easy to imagine that social media, too, is all bad when it comes to body image.

But the reality is more nuanced, and there may be ways to curate your Instagram feed to make you feel happier in your own skin - or, at least, stop you feeling worse.

You might also like:
● Is social media bad for you? The knowns and unknowns
● Why it pays to declutter your digital life
● How much is 'too much time' on social media?

It's important to note that research into social media and body image is still in its early stages, and most studies are correlational. This means we can't prove whether, for example, Facebook causes someone to have negative feelings about their appearance, or whether people who are concerned about their appearance are more likely to use Facebook.

That being said, using social media does appear to be correlated with body image concerns. A systematic review of 20 papers published in 2016 found that photo-based activities, like scrolling through Instagram or posting pictures of yourself, were a particular problem when it came to negative thoughts about your body.

But there are many different ways to use social media - are you just consuming what others post, or are you taking, editing and uploading selfies? Are you following close friends and family, or a laundry list of celebrities and influencers?

Research suggests that who we compare ourselves to is key.

"People are comparing their appearance to people in Instagram images, or whatever platform they're on, and they often judge themselves to be worse off," says Jasmine Fardouly, a postdoctoral researcher at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

In a survey of 227 female university students, women reported that they tend to compare their own appearance negatively with their peer group and with celebrities, but not with family members, while browsing Facebook. The comparison group that had the strongest link to body image concerns was distant peers, or acquaintances.

Fardouly puts this down to the fact that people present a one-sided version of their life online. If you know someone well, you'll know they're only showing the best bits - but if they're an acquaintance, you won't have any other information to go on.
Negative influence
When it comes to the wider circle of influencers and accounts you follow, not all types of content are equal.

Research suggests that "fitspiration" images in particular - which typically feature beautiful people doing exercise, or at least pretending to - might make you harsher on yourself.

Amy Slater, an associate professor at the University of West England, Bristol, published a study in 2017 in which 160 female undergraduates viewed either #fitspo, self compassion quotes, or a mix of both, all sourced from real accounts on Instagram. Those who viewed only #fitspo scored lower on self-compassion, but those who viewed the compassionate quotes (e.g. "You're perfect just the way you are") were nicer to themselves - and felt better about their bodies.

For those who viewed both the #fitspo and the self-compassion quotes, the benefits of the latter appeared to outweigh the negatives of the former.

Another study published earlier this year involved showing 195 young women either body-positive content from popular accounts like @bodyposipanda, photos showing thin women in bikinis or fitness gear, or neutral images of nature. The researchers found that exposing women to #bodypositive Instagram content appeared to boost their satisfaction with their own bodies.

"Those two things together are starting to build a little bit of a story that there may be some content that actually is useful for body image," says Slater.

But there may be a downside to body-positive images, too: they're still focusing on bodies. The same study found that women who'd seen the body-positive photos still ended up objectifying themselves - measured when, after looking at the images, the participants were asked to write 10 statements about themselves. The more the statements focussed on their appearance rather than their skills or personality, the higher that participant scored on self-objectification.

That means when someone wrote "I am beautiful" it got lumped in with negative things people said about their bodies. But those people could be taking a broader view of where their beauty comes from, including internal as well as physical attributes, says Slater.

Either way, this fixation with looks is a criticism of the body-positive movement that does seem to hold true. "It is about loving the body, but it is still very much about a focus on appearance," says Fardouly.
Self(ie) love
When it comes to posting our own pictures on social media, selfies tend to be the focus.

For a study published last year, Jennifer Mills, an associate professor at York University, Toronto, asked female undergraduates to take a selfie on an iPad and upload it to either Facebook or Instagram. One group could only take a single picture and upload it without editing, but the other had a chance to take as many as they wanted and retouch their selfie using an app.

Mills and her colleagues found that all the selfie takers felt less attractive and less confident after posting than when they'd walked into the experiment - even those who'd been allowed to edit their photos to their heart's content. "Even though they can make the end result look 'better', they still are focused on aspects of what they don't like about the way they look," she says.

Some of the participants wanted to know if anyone had liked their photo before deciding how they felt about having posted it, although looking at interactions wasn't part of the study.

"There's this rollercoaster of feeling anxious and then getting reassurance from other people that you look good," says Mills. "But that probably doesn't last forever, and then you take another selfie."

In previous work published in 2017, researchers found that spending a lot of time perfecting selfies could be a sign that someone is struggling with body dissatisfaction.

Still, some big holes remain in the research on social media and body image.

Most of the work so far has focused on young women, as traditionally they have been the age group most affected by body image concerns. But research including men is starting to show they're not immune. For example, a study found that men who reported looking at male #fitspo content more frequently said they compared their own appearance to others more often and cared about having muscles more.

Longer term research is also an important next step, because lab experiments can only provide a snapshot of any possible effects. "We don't really know whether over time [social media] has a cumulative effect on people or not," says Fardouly.

So, for now, how should you curate your own social media feeds if you don't want to come away feeling bad about your body?

Mills has one takeaway that should work for everyone: put down your phone.

"Take a break and engage in other activities that have nothing to do with appearance and comparing yourself to other people," she says.

The next best thing would be to think critically about who you follow - and, if you find yourself facing an endless stream of appearance-focussed photos next time you scroll, add some nature or travel into the mix.

After all, giving up social media altogether is probably too big of an ask for most people - especially while the long term effects of using it are still unclear. But finding inspiring landscapes, delicious food, and cute dogs to fill your Instagram feed might just help you remember there's more to life than what you look like.
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The complicated truth about social media and body image

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If you mindlessly scroll through Instagram or Facebook whenever you get a few seconds of downtime, you're far from alone. But have you ever wondered how all those images of other people's bodies - whether your friend's holiday snap or a celebrity's gym selfie - could be affecting how you view your own?

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I've Talked With Teenage Boys About Sexual Assault for 20 Years. This Is What They Still Don't Know

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Laurie Halse Anderson, author of the novel "Speak," has talked with boys across the country for 20 years. This is what she's learned

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Asa Butterfield ( Hugo, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas) plays Otis, a teenager living in a geographically indistinct community that looks like New England but sounds like an episode of Skins (it was actually filmed in Wales). The bane of his life is that his mother (Anderson) is a sex and relationships therapist who festoons their house with phallic art and warns his school friends about marijuana use leading to early-onset impotence. Otis has a long-burning crush on Maeve (Emma Mackey), an enigmatic rebel living alone in a caravan site (British for trailer park) who wants to use Otis's parentage for profit: She sees his potential as the school's sex guru.

Never mind that Otis is a virgin so scarred by his family history that he can't even masturbate. Moordale High is populated entirely with horny and hopelessly confused students in need of a counselor. Everyone, in the words of Otis's best friend, Eric, is "either thinking about shagging, about to shag, or actually shagging," and is also doing it 21st-century style, with mass texts and dick pics and humiliating gifs. Laurie Nunn, the playwright who created the show, employs old-school archetypes, too: Students are shoved into lockers and robbed of their lunch money, and the hierarchy of who's cool leans on meanness and money. But Sex Education 's anxieties are modern ones, spanning porn and transphobia and erotic fiction about intergalactic alien sex.

Otis falls almost accidentally into his new hobby when he talks down a bully who's taken too many Viagra pills and is panicking in an abandoned bathroom stall. Otis's serene manner and empathetic advice impress Maeve, who starts hawking his time to the school's more sexually dysfunctional students (which is all of them). Butterfield is winsome and endearingly flappable in portraying Otis's personal life, but he exudes an odd kind of calm when he's issuing guidance. His clients call him a "sex savant," or a "Care Bear," or a "mum man," or "that weird sex kid who looks like a Victorian ghost." But he does help them, in the end.

And, by extension, he helps viewers. Like Big Mouth, Sex Education has all kinds of advice to offer regarding the confusing and impossibly complicated realm of modern sexuality. The show is graphic, gross, and inherently earnest: No matter how mortifying Otis might find his mother, he's internalized her refusal to judge anyone. Anderson, who most recently has embodied gravitas and aloofness on series including The Fall and War and Peace, seems to revel in the comic potential of her role as Jean, not to mention the opportunity to play a middle-aged woman with an extraordinarily healthy sex life. Jean's story lines, although not as frequent as they could be, add still more dimensions to the ways in which Sex Education comments on desire.

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The Thoughtful Raunch of 'Sex Education'

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Asa Butterfield ( Hugo, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas) plays Otis, a teenager living in a geographically indistinct community that looks like New England but sounds like an episode of Skins (it was actually filmed in Wales).

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There is little evidence screen use for children is harmful in itself, guidance from leading paediatricians says.

Parents should worry less as long as they have gone through a checklist on the effect of screen time on their child, it says.

While the guidance avoids setting screen time limits, it recommends not using them in the hour before bedtime.

Experts say it is important that the use of devices does not replace sleep, exercising and time with family.

It was informed by a review of evidence published at the same time in the BMJ Open medical journal, and follows a debate around whether youngsters should have time on devices restricted.

Most of the evidence in the review was based on television screen time, but also included other screen use, such as phones and computers.

Meanwhile, a separate study has found that girls are twice as likely to show signs of depressive symptoms linked to social media use at age 14 compared with boys.

'No evidence of being toxic'

The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH), which oversees the training of specialists in child medicine, has produced the guidance for under-18s.

It said there was no good evidence that time in front of a screen is "toxic" to health, as is sometimes claimed.

The review of evidence found associations between higher screen use and obesity and depression.

But the college looked at this and said it was not clear from the evidence if higher screen use was causing these problems or if people with these issues were more likely to spend more time on screens.

The review was carried out by experts at University College London, including RCPCH president Prof Russell Viner.

The college said it was not setting time limits for children because there was not enough evidence that screen time was harmful to child health at any age.

Instead, it has published a series of questions to help families make decisions about their screen time use:

Is your family's screen time under control?

Does screen use interfere with what your family want to do?

Does screen use interfere with sleep?

Are you able to control snacking during screen time?

Dr Max Davie, officer for health promotion for the RCPCH, said phones, computers and tablets were a "great way to explore the world", but parents were often made to feel that there was something "indefinably wrong" about them.

He said: "We want to cut through that and say 'actually if you're doing OK and you've answered these questions of yourselves and you're happy, get on and live your life and stop worrying'.

"But if there are problems and you're having difficulties, screen time can be a contributing factor."

Dr Russell Viner, president of the RCPCH, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme "screens are part of modern life", adding: "The genie is out of the bottle - we cannot put it back."

He said: "We need to stick to advising parents to do what they do well, which is to balance the risks and benefits.

"One size doesn't fit all, parents need to think about what's useful and helpful for their child."

Parents should consider their own use of screens, if screen time is controlled in their family, and if excessive use is affecting their child's development and everyday life, he added.

What do parents say?

A number of parents have been in touch with the BBC to say they disagree with the guidance and feel it does not go far enough.

"There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that screen time is damaging school performance and sports performance and dangerously addictive," says Andy, whose son is 14.

Andy said he had restricted his son's screen time to Friday after school and Saturday, and, despite some "grumbling", there had been an improvement in school performance.

For tips on how to limit excessive screen time, click here.

'Grey area'

The recommendation that children should not use the devices in the hour before bedtime comes because of evidence that they can harm sleep.

The devices stimulate the brain, and the blue light produced by them can disrupt the body's secretion of the sleep hormone melatonin.

While there are night modes on many phones, computers and tablets, there is no evidence these are effective, the college said.

Overall, it found the effect of screen time on children's health was small when considered next to other factors like sleep, physical activity, eating, bullying and poverty.

It said there was a lack of evidence that screen time is beneficial for health or wellbeing.

Its guidance recommends that families negotiate screen time limits with their children based on individual needs and how much it impacts on sleep, as well as physical and social activities.

For infants and younger children, this will involve parents deciding what content they watch and for how long they use the devices.

As children get older, there should be a move towards them having autonomy over screen use, but this should be gradual and under the guidance of an adult, the college said.

Dr Davie added: "When it comes to screen time I think it is important to encourage parents to do what is right by their family.

"However, we know this is a grey area and parents want support, and that's why we have produced this guide.

"We suggest that age-appropriate boundaries are established, negotiated by parent and child, that everyone in the family understands."

The college called for better quality research to understand more about how the content on devices, and the context in which they are used, affects health outcomes.

Tips for parents:

Mealtimes can be good opportunities for screen-free zones

If children's screen time use seems out of control, parents should consider intervening

Parents should think about their own screen use, including whether they use devices unconsciously too often

Younger children need face to face social interaction and screens are no substitute for this

Source: RCPCH

Social media and young people

The study on social media use and young people was carried out by experts at University College London and published in EClinicalMedicine.

It involved nearly 11,000 young people answering questionnaires on their social media use, online harassment, sleep patterns, self-esteem and body image.

It is separate to the RCPCH guidance on screen use and the review that informed it, neither of which looked at social media use.

Experts not involved in the social media study said it added to existing evidence that heavy social media use may be harmful for mental health.

But they called for more research to better understand if it causes depression, or if depressive people are more likely to use social media excessively.

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Parents can 'worry less' about screen time

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There is little evidence screen use for children is harmful in itself, guidance from leading paediatricians says. Parents should worry less as long as they have gone through a checklist on the effect of screen time on their child, it says. While the guidance avoids setting screen time limits, it recommends not using them in the hour before bedtime.

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Hate speech is all over the internet. Fueled by trolls, extremists, false information, and a group mentality, this kind of cruelty against a religion, ethnicity, sexual identity, gender, race -- or anything, really -- has reached a fever pitch. And while some kids will be attacked, and some may be swept up in the powerful rhetoric, the vast majority of kids will be victims of everyday, casual exposure. Just by playing a game on the internet, looking up a definition, or maybe checking out some music, they'll encounter some of the most vile and offensive words and images that can be expressed in the comments section of a YouTube video, a meme in their feed, or a group chat. The intensity of these ideas, the frequency with which kids see them, and the acceptance by so many that it's just part of internet life mean that it's critical to talk to kids about this difficult topic. They'll be much better equipped to handle whatever comes their way when they can talk to you about all aspects of hate speech: what it is and why it's hurtful, what to do when they encounter it, and even what to do if they're drawn to it.

Hate speech is actually legal under the First Amendment -- unless it specifically targets someone, includes threats and harassment, or creates a hostile environment (such as at school or work). But the line between what's OK and what's absolutely unacceptable is still very much up for debate in the digital age. And when you think about it, today's kids are guinea pigs for the giant social experiment of free and open public speech. On one side are mainstream sites like Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube trying to walk the tightrope between freedom of expression and decorum. Their unsuccessful attempts to tamp down the hateful rhetoric on their platforms send a mixed message to kids. Are tech companies really that dedicated to free speech, or do they just want more users? On the other side are fringe sites like Gab and 4Chan whose no-holds-barred forums test the boundaries of free speech -- which the companies defend as fiercely as their offensive views. But when kids see the horrific race-, religion-, and gender-based attacks committed in the real world by members of online extremist groups, they must wonder why adults can't stop these hate crimes.

Let's be clear: The internet didn't create hate speech. Although it may change some people's minds, the internet (and specifically social media) simply provides a place for people to express themselves. But the idea that exposure to hateful ideas is a necessary evil for the right to say whatever you wish doesn't account for the role of the internet itself. The online world is rife with false information, which is easily created, easily distributed, and easily believed by those who want their own hateful ideas confirmed. And remember, tech companies profit off connecting and engaging people -- and nothing gets people going like inflammatory ideas.

Somewhere in this mix are your kids, who are stumbling into online spaces that are confusing, scary, and shaky. We can't -- and shouldn't -- rely on the tech companies to figure it out. We don't have that much time. And plus, they have too much skin in the game. Ultimately, hate speech is an area where sharing your own family's values -- around compassion and tolerance, appropriate communication, and empathy toward other -- sets a stable path forward for your kids to follow even in unsettled times. Here are some ideas for you to discuss with your kids and tips to handle hate speech.
Conversation starters
What is hate speech? Look up the definition of hate speech and talk about whether your kids have encountered it. It may have been just a word, or it may have been in a video or a meme. How can you tell if someone is trying to be funny or their words are intended to hurt?

How does hate speech affect people? How would you feel if you were a member of the group targeted by cruel language? Does it matter if you're exposed to it a lot or a little? Are people with different social statuses -- for example, a popular kid vs. a loner type -- affected differently?

What's the difference between hate speech and cyberbullying? If someone is trying to hurt someone, or knows that they're hurting someone, and does it repeatedly, that's cyberbullying. When someone expresses vicious views about a group or toward an attribute of a group, that's hate speech.

What's your role in online hate speech? Do you feel safe calling out the person or people using hate speech? Would it make you feel cooler to do that, or would it make you feel uncool -- like you're not part of the group? Would you block people using hate speech? Would you ignore them? Would you stand up for the person or group of people being targeted?

How far does the right to free speech go? Is there a clear boundary between free speech and hate speech? What is it? Should people have the right to say and do whatever they want online? If people's feelings are hurt or they're offended, they can just go on a different site, right?

Does hate speech lead to hate crimes? Convicted killer Dylan Roof, accused murderer Robert Bowers, and others accused of hate crimes left clues to their murderous views online. Should there be a place for people with extremist leanings to gather and share their ideas online, even if they're offensive and threatening? Or not?

What responsibility -- if any -- do technology platforms have? Should Instagram, for example, be held accountable to victims of hate crimes committed by users who posted hate content? Should they try to bring people together, either through dedicated spaces, new algorithms, or other methods?

Why are certain people attracted to hate groups? It's natural for tweens and teens to want to join groups, and sometimes groups devoted to hurting others make certain kids feel more powerful. Kids who have pent-up anger or insecurity about other things in their lives may be attracted to groups that feel protective and united. Can you imagine why someone might be swayed by hate speech rhetoric?
Practical ways to manage hate speech

Report it. Hate speech violates most sites' terms of service. You can report people without their knowing that you're the one who turned them in.

Block it. You can block people who use hate speech, but this can be tricky socially for some kids.

Don't share it. Forwarding any form of hate speech is wrong -- but it can also get you into trouble because it can be traced back to you.

Call it out. If your kids feel confident enough to confront the hate speech poster without fear of attack, then they should do it.

Nurture the values of empathy and compassion in your kids. Challenge them to consider how other people feel and how they would want to be treated.

Read age-appropriate news from reputable sources. Try these best news sources for kids.

Hate often stems from ignorance. Media designed for your kids' ages can help them learn about history and people's struggles in terms that they can understand and relate to. Try our lists Books About the Holocaust, Books About Racism and Social Justice, and Books That Promote Tolerance and Diversity.

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Hate speech is all over the internet. Fueled by trolls, extremists, false information, and a group mentality, this kind of cruelty against a religion, ethnicity, sexual identity, gender, race -- or anything, really -- has reached a fever pitch.

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October 2018 | Volume 76 | Number 2
The Promise of Social-Emotional Learning Pages 52-57

Richard Weissbourd

In spring of 2016, a group of students at a Boston-area high school staged a walkout to protest what they characterized as daily misogyny and sexual harassment at their school and incidents of sexual assault among students. They noted that girls were often called "bitch," "whore," and "slut." Boys catcalled and groped girls in the hallways, including standing at drinking fountains to leer at girls as they leaned over to drink (Handy, 2016; Lander, 2017). That same spring, girls from a Jesuit high school in Colorado walked out to protest the school's inaction over online harassment from boys at their school, including rape threats on Twitter and jokes about sexual assault (Hernandez, 2016).

At least in these cases students were actually speaking out. Research by Making Caring Common (a project I lead at the Harvard Graduate School of Education) indicates that large numbers of students remain silent in the face of this kind of harassment. As one 16-year-old girl told us, "One thing that I think all girls go through at some age is the realization that their body, seemingly, is not entirely for themselves anymore ... the unfortunate thing is that we all just sort of accept it as a fact of life."

The deep infection of sexual harassment and misogyny in workplaces and communities across this country has erupted into a national conversation-one appallingly overdue. But we can't stop sexual harassment and misogyny in adulthood without addressing its deep roots in gender roles and expectations in childhood. Moreover, rates of sexual harassment and misogyny in middle and high schools are themselves unconscionably high. And the problem is not just girls being harassed by boys; boys are also sexually harassed by girls, and students of varying gender or sexual identities are disproportionately harassed. Yet schools often utterly fail to deal with the problem.

Pervasive-and Harmful

According to a recent national survey by Making Caring Common, a frightening 87 percent of 18- to 25-year-old women report having endured at some point in their past at least one of the following: being catcalled (55 percent); touched without permission by a stranger (41 percent); insulted with sexualized words (like "slut" or "bitch") by a man (47 percent); insulted with sexualized words by a woman (42 percent); having a stranger say something sexual to them (52 percent); and having a stranger say they were "hot" (61 percent). Half of the men in this survey reported that they'd harassed a woman in at least one of these ways in the past. Undoubtedly, some of these incidents happened when the women were in middle school, high school, or college.

We know this problem is pervasive in secondary schools. According to one survey, almost half of U.S. students in grades 7-12 reported experiencing sexual harassment in the previous year; 87 percent reported harmful effects-such as absenteeism and poor sleep-from that harassment (Hill & Kearl, 2011). Words like "bitches" and "ho's" are commonplace in school hallways across the country. Many teens still label girls as "good" or "bad," with "good" girls defined as friends or romantic prospects and "bad girls" defined as "sluts" or "ho's." Those labelled "bad girls" are especially fair game for harassment.

Even the terms many boys and young men use to describe consensual sex these days-"I hit that," "I nailed that," "I crushed that"-are unnervingly degrading and violent. As girls and women have made impressive gains in school and work over the last 30 years, it seems that many boys and young men are increasingly bent on diminishing and sexualizing them.

Such misogyny can cause many kinds of harm. It can leave girls and women with lasting fears or shame that get in the way of their success in school, the workplace, and other areas of life, eroding their well-being. It can also corrode men's capacity to have meaningful relationships with both females and males, to be ethical, and to be fully human. Left unchecked, it might easily slide into sexual assault.

Seven Ways to Tackle the Problem

Helping students learn to empathize with people of the other gender and treat them respectfully is certainly a key part of social-emotional learning. So what can educators do? First and most fundamentally, they must make the prevention of misogyny and sexual harassment a priority for schools. That means clearly identifying the nature of the problem, giving both staff and students key tools and strategies for dealing with it, monitoring progress, and committing to real accountability.

This doesn't mean that already strapped schools need to expend significant resources and time. Schools can take many actions that are inexpensive and low-burden for staff. Consider the following seven strategies (some of which are expanded on in Making Caring Common's recent report on this issue, " The Talk").

1. Collect Data on Harassment and Misogyny in Your School

Schools need basic information to guide their work on sexual harassment and misogyny and to hold themselves accountable for reducing these problems. As the saying goes: What gets assessed, gets addressed. Making Caring Common has created a tool that school leaders can use to audit their schools. This audit asks school leaders to consider such questions as, Do school staff intervene when students use sexually degrading language or a phrase like "that's so gay?" When they do intervene, are they effective? Do school staff, as well as coaches and other adults interacting with students, have training in how to talk with students about misogyny and harassment? Does every student have a school adult that he or she is comfortable talking to, whom they could go to if they are harassed?

In working with many schools over three decades, I've seen that most schools don't know the answer to many of these questions. That in itself should be a wake-up call. To find the answers, schools can conduct brief student and staff surveys once or twice a year, then form a committee-made up of students and staff-to review the data, form an action plan, monitor progress, and try new strategies if the problem doesn't get better.

2. Give School Staff Training and Support

All school staff need basic training in how to address common forms of misogyny and sexual harassment. Despite the pervasiveness of these problems in schools, a majority of young people responding to our survey had never had a conversation with a school adult about catcalling or making sexist comments to or about girls.

Unfortunately, many school adults appear to lack the confidence and skills to have these conversations. In numerous classes and workshops, we've posed this scenario to teachers and other adults:

A high school teacher overhears three boys talking in the cafeteria. As a girl walks by their table, one of the boys says that he "hit that" last week. Another boy mentions that he just broke up with his girlfriend, and that he doesn't want to go to a party because he might see her with other guys. "Hit on all her friends," one of his friends advises him. "A couple of them are total sluts."

When I ask participants in classes and workshops how they would handle this situation, many say they would want to say something, but wouldn't know what to say. Others say they would say something, but they express little confidence that their words would be effective. Women, especially, fear they will be "written off." There may be other reasons some educators don't intervene, including the common view that such talk is just "boys being boys."

Training should give school staff members practical tools that they can remember and easily use when confronting misogyny and harassment. A training session might present scenarios reflecting common situations-such as overhearing the boys in the cafeteria or hearing a student saying "that's so gay"-and have staff role-play the situation, trying out different responses. For example, in the cafeteria scenario, a staff member might ask the students questions that would cause any thoughtful human being to stop and ponder, such as "How is making a sexist comment different from making a racist comment?" or "Why is this a way that you and your friends bond?" Making Caring Common has developed brief scenarios and guides to facilitate discussion that are available on our website. Teachers might take it a step further and consider together how they could react to common ways students they intervene with are likely to respond, such as by saying, "We're just joking" or "You don't understand." A teacher might encourage students to think about how these types of jokes can reinforce widespread sexism and sexual degradation in our culture, or how others might interpret such comments as supporting and permitting harassment and degradation.

Of course, even if school staff intervene, offensive comments aren't likely to suddenly stop altogether. Powerful social forces throughout history and across cultures have encouraged males to degrade females and driven students to harass gay, lesbian, and transgender students. But passivity not only condones such comments, it can also diminish young people's respect for us as adults and role models. And even if teens don't acknowledge or act on our words in the moment, they often still register our words and internalize them more as they mature.

3. Go Beyond "Be Respectful" to Define Sexual Harassment and Misogyny

It's critical for schools and parents to go beyond vague platitudes like "be respectful" and seize opportunities in schools-not just in sex ed classes, but also in advisories, appropriate afterschool programs, and written materials-to clearly describe what constitutes sexual harassment and misogyny. Many teens and young people simply don't know the range of behaviors that are harmful.

For example, 62 percent of female respondents to our survey of 18- to 25-year-olds reported that they would feel "offended," "scared," or "angry" in response to being catcalled-but a third of male respondents thought that girls would be "flattered." Many teens also aren't clear on what constitutes sexual assault. According to our research, large numbers of teens have never talked with either parents or teachers about what sexual assault is. High percentages of respondents had never had a conversation in school about the importance of "not pressuring someone to have sex with you" (56 percent), about not having sex after the other person has said "no" (62 percent), or about not having sex with "someone who is too intoxicated or impaired to make a decision" (57 percent).

Educators might start by asking students to define these terms, clarifying any misunderstandings, and providing common examples of harassment and misogyny (such as catcalling or commenting on someone's appearance when those comments might be unwanted). Personal accounts, when appropriate, or stories from the news and other sources can help clarify why behaviors that seem innocent to some students can produce lasting pain and confusion. All students should also have time with an informed, nonjudgmental adult, both privately and in groups, to raise any questions and concerns they have related to misogyny and harassment.

4. Talk to Teens About What to Do If They're Harassed

Many teens and young adults don't know what to do if they're harassed or degraded with gender-based slurs, whether it's being called "slut" or "bitch" jokingly by a friend or being harassed by someone they don't know. It's vital to help students develop strategies to protect themselves-and reduce the chances of the offender harming someone else.

For example, in a sex education class or advisory period, teachers might brainstorm with students possible ways they can shift from what they typically would do if they're harassed (such as suffer in silence) to what they should do. For example, would they feel comfortable confronting the person harassing them; confronting the harasser later with a friend along; or talking to a teacher, school counselor, or another respected adult at school? If "it depends," what does it depend on? Students should have chances to role-play different situations to help them explore various contexts and strategies, including what specific words they might use in confronting a perpetrator.

5. Mobilize Student Leaders

Because they understand peer dynamics, are more likely to witness harassing behaviors, and often carry more weight than adults in intervening with peers, students themselves are often in the best position to prevent and stop sexual harassment and misogyny among their peers. Students also commonly know the leverage points that can bring about change, and they are often keenly sensitive to tone. Many young people, for example, will call their friends "bitches" jokingly, a situation that's quite different from someone who's not a friend using the word as a weapon. Although both scenarios can be harmful, in intervening against harassment it's important to sense differences in tone, intent, and relationship.

It's helpful to utilize older students to educate peers and younger students about what misogyny and harassment are, the harm done to victims of harassment and assault (and potential risks to those who intervene), how to report violations and seek support, and strategies for challenging perpetrators. Peer educators might fan out in the cafeteria to talk to students, engage students in health classes or advisories, or present at assemblies. Several programs across the country now use students as peer educators to promote healthy romantic and sexual relationships and interactions.

6. Encourage Boys to Think About the Nature of Honor and Courage-and Promote Empathy

Many boys are attempting to demonstrate bravado when they tout their exploits with girls or degrade them. It's vital for school adults to talk to boys about the real nature of courage and honor. There is, of course, no honor or courage in degrading, belittling, or sexualizing others. Yet there can be honor in standing up to your peers when they label or "slut-shame" girls or harass them, or shun boys or girls they find unattractive. There is also dignity in attending to those who might be vulnerable to harassment and assault and intervening to help protect them.

School adults can and should talk to young people from early ages about the importance of listening to and appreciating their peers of different genders, as a matter of decency and humanity. Teachers can use practices that develop empathy across gender, such as choreographing classes in ways that enable boys and girls to collaborate and promote cross-gender friendships. Teachers might also do an exercise in which boys are asked to simply listen while girls explain what it's like to be female in their school or community; and then girls can listen while boys share what it's like to be male. Such discussions need to be thoughtfully facilitated, of course.

7. Encourage and Expect Upstanding

Schools should expect students to not only refrain from harassment, but also protect each other. Learning to be an "upstander" is a vital part of becoming an ethical, courageous person. Yet upstanding can be risky-perpetrators sometimes turn on upstanders. That's why it's important to brainstorm with teens strategies that protect both them and the victim. Here again, educators might engage students in role-plays in various contexts, exploring what teens would typically do versus what they should and could do.

Few Things Are More Important

There is much else schools can do to prevent or reduce misogyny and sexual harassment. It's vital for schools to provide information to parents, for example, about how to talk to their children about these issues. (See Making Caring Common's website for resources we have developed for parents.)

Schools can also increase students' awareness of degrading images of females that are portrayed in song lyrics, television, and other media. Many young people seem oblivious to these images: Thirty-nine percent of respondents to our survey either agreed with or were neutral on the statement "It's rare to see a woman treated in an inappropriately sexualized manner on television." Startling numbers of teens are also watching internet porn that reinforces all sorts of degrading and misogynistic impulses. Resources that schools can use to take on this difficult, fraught topic are available in the resource guide of our report " The Talk."

Reducing sexual harassment and misogyny in schools won't be easy. But given the pervasive and enduring harm these problems can bring, few things are more important. For far too long-whether we are educators, parents, or other community adults-we have dodged these serious problems. We need to expect more from teens. And we need to expect more from ourselves.

Author's note: For a fuller discussion of how to help young people navigate relationships between the genders-including romantic relationships-see Making Caring Common's report " The Talk."

References

Handy, N. (2016, June 9). Cambridge students take stand against sexual harassment, demand re-examination of practices. Wicked Local Cambridge. Retrieved from http://cambridge.wickedlocal.com/news/20160609/cambridge-students-take-stand-against-sexual-harassment-demand-re-examination-of-practices

Hernandez, E. (2016, May 20). Girls walk out of Regis Jesuit High School. The Denver Post. Retrieved from www.denverpost.com/2016/05/20/girls-walk-out-of-regis-jesuit-high-school

Hill, C., & Kearl, H. (2011). Crossing the line: Sexual harassment at school. Washington, DC: American Association of University Women.

Lander, J. (2017, January 2). Tackling teen sexual harassment. The Boston Globe. Retrieved from www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2017/01/02/tackling-teen-sexual-harassment/XueH8daTm6t8kbTqg15b4I/story.html

Endnote

In this article, I define "catcalling" as a loud whistle or a comment of a sexual nature made by a male to a passing female.

Richard Weissbourd is a senior lecturer in education at Harvard Graduate School of Education and director of the Making Caring Common project.

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Let's Take a Stand Against Sexual Harassment in Schools

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October 2018 | Volume 76 | Number 2 The Promise of Social-Emotional Learning Pages 52-57 Richard Weissbourd In spring of 2016, a group of students at a Boston-area high school staged a walkout to protest what they characterized as daily misogyny and sexual harassment at their school and incidents of sexual assault among students.

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These four high school students used their mindfulness practice to battle their experiences of depression. They learned to take pauses to breathe, make friends with the present moment, reflect on and connect to themselves, feel gratitude, cultivate creativity, and discover freedom from their critical inner voice.

"Into Light" was created by Mindful Schools graduate and filmmaker, Julie Bayer Salzman.

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No matter how smart you think you are, the chances are that you sometimes fail to make the most of your memory. A series of surveys have shown most students fail to use proven methods of learning effectively, instead wasting their time on ineffective methods.

One of the problems is that we often receive a lot of conflicting information from parents, teachers, and scientists, so that we are unsure what works and what doesn't.
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Fortunately, a new paper, published in one of the top psychology journals, has examined the biggest misconceptions, with a list of the five most popular study strategies, the potential pitfalls, and the ways that they can use them more effectively.
Strategy 1: Rereading
Learning new vocabulary? The most common strategy is to read the words and their meanings until they stick. Unfortunately, psychologists believe that it is too passive, meaning that most of the information fails to leave an impression.
Memory hack: Space your reading
Passive rereading is probably the least effective study method, but it may sometimes feel inevitable if you feel like you lack a basic understanding of the concepts. You can make better use of those sessions, however, by ensuring that you return to the material at regular intervals. You might read a chapter, move on to something else, and then re-read it after an hour, a day, or a week to help stimulate the memory.

You can also benefit from questioning your understanding before you return to the material, which helps tune your attention on the bits you do and don't know and increases your mental engagement.
Strategy 2: Underlining and highlighting
Like rereading, this study technique is nearly ubiquitous. The idea makes sense: the process of underlining key words and phrases should help you to engage more with the information, and it makes it easier to identify the most important passages later on. But although it can be more effective than passive rereading, underlining and highlighting often fails to work, with most students mindlessly marking up almost every paragraph without much discernment.
Memory hack: Pause to think
Instead, the scientists suggest that you read the text once through cold, and then mark up the relevant passages on the second pass. By forcing you to think more carefully about each point and its relative importance in the overall argument, this encourages the more active processing that is essential for the formation of stronger memories.
Strategy 3: Note-taking
Visit any lecture theatre or library and you will find students judiciously copying the most important facts into their notebooks. Like underlining and highlighting, the problems come when you fail to be judicious about the material you are including. Your overenthusiasm - and propensity to include everything that is mentioned - can easily become a vice.
Memory hack: Be concise
Experiments have shown that the fewer words students use to express an idea in their notes, the more likely they are to remember it afterwards. This is probably because creating summaries and paraphrasing force you to think deeply about the nub of the idea you are trying to express - and that additional effort cements it in your memory. These findings may also explain why it is better to take notes with a pen and paper, rather than using a laptop: writing by hand is slower than typing and forces you to be more concise in what you note down.
Strategy 4: Outlining
Many teachers encourage their students to take a 'bird's eye' view of the course they are studying, presenting an overview of the key points to be learned in a structured, logical manner. Sometimes these outlines are created by the instructor themselves, but they may also encourage the student to do it for themselves.
Memory hack: Search for deep patterns
Students offered a course outline do tend to perform better, new evidence suggests, since it allows them to identify the underlying connections between different topics. These studies suggest that it's often more efficient to begin with a skeletal outline before study, and to then fill in more of the details as you progress.

Much of our learning is independent, of course, without formal instruction - but you can easily make your own bullet-point outlines of a text or lecture. Again, being concise is key: you have to focus on the structure of the argument rather than getting lost in the details, if you are to see those underlying connections and make the most of that deeper learning.
Strategy 5: Flash cards
Self-testing (or "retrieval practice", as psychologists call it) is now considered to be most reliable learning strategy, particularly for specific, detailed facts, with considerable evidence that it can boost memory. Even so, there are still more and less effective ways of doing it.
Memory hack: Beware overconfidence
Most people struggle to gauge the limits of their own thinking, believing that their decisions are smarter than they really are - and judgments of learning are no different. Indeed, one study found that the more confident people felt about their learning of a fact, the less likely they were to recall it later.

We all underestimate just how easily we will forget material in the future. The use of flash cards can therefore backfire if you believe that once an item is successfully recalled, it will stick forever - leading you to 'drop' the card before it is cemented in your memory. Instead, it makes more sense to continue testing long after you think you know the word.

--
David Robson is a science writer based in the UK. He is d_a_robson on Twitter.
If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called "If You Only Read 6 Things This Week". A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Capital, and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

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No matter how smart you think you are, the chances are that you sometimes fail to make the most of your memory. A series of surveys have shown most students fail to use proven methods of learning effectively, instead wasting their time on ineffective methods.

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here's this miracle happening at home right now. And before it's over, I feel like I need to put it on paper - just to make sure I have some documented proof.

So let the record state:

Riley, our six-year-old daughter, wants to be like her parents.

I know, I know - it's not going to last forever.

And I know..... that rebellious phase..... it's coming.

But for right now?

Well, we asked Riley, "Hey, Ri Ri - what do you want to be when you grow up?"

And she didn't miss a beat. "A basketball player cook."

Like I said, the girl is really feeling her parents these days.

Now I won't lie: The last time we asked, it was between "makeup artist" and "horseback rider" - so who really knows with this one. And I'm not going to pretend we have the logistics all figured out, either. Is she going to put out the cookbook first, and then start hooping? Or is she going to hoop first, and then turn to building her restaurant empire?

Either way, though, the skills are there. She's dribbling 100 times in a row now, continuously - and we're working on getting the left hand up to par. (Yes, the jumper is legit.)

And then on the cooking front, Riley's big thing is making everything : from pasta, to cake, to eggs, to..... slime. She has us set up her camera while she's doing her thing in the lab, and pretends like she hosts her own YouTube show. It's crazy. I probably wouldn't recommend eating the slime (too much glue), but her fundamentals - they're already sound: elite-level recipe-building, and a lot of really creative color choices.

Anyway, it's cool. And in all seriousness - to have a daughter who thinks her parents are alright enough role models that she wants to be like them ... it's a blessing.

But at the same time, you know, Riley arriving at that age, that age where she's really starting to come into her own as a person - it's also been a learning experience for me.

Growing up, I was lucky to be raised by my mom, Sonya - an incredible and fiercely principled woman who had the courage and vision to open her own school, the Christian Montessori School of Lake Norman. And for the last seven years, I've been lucky to be married to another incredible and fiercely principled woman, in Ayesha - who is both a successful business owner and the most amazing mother to our three kids. So for my whole life, really, I feel like I've been receiving this education on what it means to be a woman in America.

And one lesson from that education that's really stood out to me is: to always stay listening to women, to always stay believing in women, and - when it comes to anyone's expectations for women - to always stay challenging the idea of what's right.

In other words, I'd like to think that these ideas have been on my mind for a while.

But even still.

Riley and Ryan are growing up so fast. And with Ayesha and I suddenly seeing things through the eyes of these daughters of ours, who we brought into this world, and now are raising to live in this world ... you know, I'd be lying if I didn't admit that the idea of women's equality has become a little more personal for me, lately, and a little more real.

I want our girls to grow up knowing that there are no boundaries that can be placed on their futures, period. I want them to grow up in a world where their gender does not feel like a rulebook for what they should think, or be, or do. And I want them to grow up believing that they can dream big, and strive for careers where they'll be treated fairly.

And of course: paid equally.

And I think it's important that we all come together to figure out how we can make that possible, as soon as possible. Not just as "fathers of daughters," or for those sorts of reasons. And not just on Women's Equality Day. that's when we need to be working to close the pay gap in this country. Because every day is when the pay gap is affecting women. And every day is when the pay gap is sending the wrong message to women about who they are, and how they're valued, and what they can or cannot become.

Last week, I did something I'll never forget: I hosted a basketball camp for girls.

Let's call it the "first annual," actually, because I'm definitely planning on hosting one again. It was a lot of fun - just to share a court with 200 girls who love to hoop, and watch them do their thing.

But I think it was also something more than that. I think it was also the sort of thing that can help to shift people's perspectives. So that when someone sees an NBA player is hosting a camp, now, you know - maybe they won't automatically assume it's for boys. And so eventually we can get to a place where the women's game, it isn't "women's basketball." It's just basketball. Played by women, and celebrated by everyone.

One thing we've always maintained about our camp, is that we want it to be world class. And in 2018? Here's the truth: You're not world class if you're not actively about inclusion.

And like I said, the camp was incredible. I've never seen a more engaged group of kids. At every boys camp that I've ever been to, you've always got some kids running around, acting wild. But this camp, these girls - they were it. They were trying to absorb every single thing. They were running up to me after every drill, like, "Steph, Steph, I got some questions about how you trained as a kid. Can you look at my form?" It was special, man.

And the girls didn't just bring it on the court, they also brought it off the court. We had a Q&A session with several successful women in sports and business, which historically have been fields dominated by men. And our campers blew me away with their questions. Just, like, the level of thoughtfulness and care that was flowing through them, and the maturity and nuance of it all. It really struck me.

One of the girls - she asked Ariel Johnson Lin, a VP at JPMorgan Chase & Co., about how, if she's in a business meeting, and has a great idea..... but the meeting is composed of, say, eight men and then her as the only woman..... would she think twice about how to convey the idea? Would she switch up how she worded things, or her body language, or her tone of voice, based on the gender imbalance of her workplace?

Again, I was just blown away. I mean, we're talking about a 14-year-old kid here, having the knowledge and sophistication to take a simple camp Q&A session to that level. And questions like hers - those really are the questions that young women continue to have to ask about the workplace in 2018. And that's because it's still so deeply ingrained in them, even in 2018, that inequality is just a thing you have to come to expect.

Ariel answered the question beautifully.

There was a long version, but I'll give you the short one, which was: Be yourself. Be good, and try to be great - but always be yourself. You could see all of the girls at the camp nodding in unison, and I have to be honest: that was a really powerful moment for me. It was a satisfying feeling, to know we had put these girls in this position where they could connect with some role models, share their experiences and their ideas, and really just hoop, and be themselves - and feel like the main event.

But while that moment was satisfying ... I'm not even close to satisfied. In fact, I'm feeling more driven than ever - to help out women who are working toward progress, in any way that I can.

Let's work to close the opportunity gap. Let's work to close the pay gap.

I mean, "women deserve equality" - that's not politics, right?

That's not something that people are actually disagreeing on, is it?

Earlier this summer, a few weeks after the season ended, Ayesha and I were blessed with the birth of our third child, Canon - our first son. And one of the things that has been most on my mind, since then, is the idea of what it means now to raise a boy in this world.

I already know, just based on his gender alone, that Canon will probably have advantages in life that his sisters can only dream of. How do you make honest sense of that as a parent? What are the values, in this moment, to instill in a son?

It's a lot to think about.

But in the end ... I think the answer is pretty simple.

I think you tell him the same thing that we told those girls last week at our camp: Be yourself. Be good, and try to be great - but always be yourself.

I think you teach him to always stay listening to women, to always stay believing in women, and - when it comes to anyone's expectations for women - to always stay challenging the idea of what's right.

And I think you let him know that, for his generation, to be a true supporter of women's equality - it's not enough anymore to be learning about it.

You have to be doing it.

It's 2018 - school's out. It's time to go to work.

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here's this miracle happening at home right now. And before it's over, I feel like I need to put it on paper - just to make sure I have some documented proof. So let the record state: Riley, our six-year-old daughter, wants to be like her parents.

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Did the Holocaust really happen? No. The Holocaust did not really happen. Six million Jews did not die. It is a Jewish conspiracy theory spread by vested interests to obscure the truth. The truth is that there is no evidence any people were gassed in any camp. The Holocaust did not happen.

Are you happy with that answer? Happy that if you have children, this is what they're being exposed to? That all across America and France and Hungary and Holland and Britain, when people ask that question, this is what they are clicking on and reading and absorbing? No? Well, then, we really, really need to talk about Google. Right now. Because these are the "facts" of what happened according to the number one source of information to the entire planet. Type this into your Google search bar: "did the hol". And Google suggests you search for this: "Did the Holocaust happen?"

And this is the answer: no. The top result is a link to stormfront.org, a neo-Nazi site and an article entitled: "Top 10 reasons why the Holocaust didn't happen". The third result is the article "The Holocaust Hoax; IT NEVER HAPPENED". The fifth is "50 reasons why the Holocaust didn't happen." The seventh is a YouTube video "Did the Holocaust really happen?" The ninth is "Holocaust Against Jews is a Total Lie - Proof."

This is what Danny Sullivan, the editor of SearchEngineLand, a leading expert on Google search, means when he says "something has gone terribly wrong with Google's algorithm". Stormfront describes itself as "the voice of the new, embattled white minority... a community of racial realists and idealists". It's the kind of site that Gideon Falter, the chair of the Campaign Against Antisemitism, says is being used to radicalise a new generation of extreme, violent, rightwing individuals. It's where Anders Breivik used to hang out online. It's where, on its discussion forum, users gathered to celebrate the murder of Jo Cox.

And, according to Google, it's the most authoritative source on the internet on the "question" of whether or not the Holocaust actually happened. Sceptical, educated people will of course look for other evidence. These are the searches that Google lists at the bottom of the page as suggestions for what to search next: "Holocaust never happened theory" "proof the Holocaust happened" "Holocaust fake proof" "Holocaust never happened movie" "Holocaust didn't happen conspiracy" "did the Holocaust happen during ww2."

A week ago I wrote in the Observer about how rightwing websites have successfully colonised a vast swathe of the internet. About how they have gamed Google's algorithm. About how Jonathan Albright, an associate professor at Elon University in the US, had mapped them to show how they have become a vast and growing ecosystem that is encroaching on the mainstream news and information infrastructure like a cancer. How Google, with all its money and resources, is being owned by hate sites who have hijacked its search results.

One week on, Google is still quietly pretending there's nothing wrong, while surreptitiously going in and fixing the most egregious examples we published last week. It refused to comment on the search results I found - such as the autocomplete suggestion that "jews are evil", with eight of its 10 top results confirming they are - and, instead, hand-tweaked a handful of the results. Or as, we call it in the media, it "edited" them. It did this without acknowledging there was any problem or explaining the basis on which it is altering its results, or why, or what its future editorial policy will be. Its search box is no longer suggesting that Jews are still evil but it's still suggesting "Islam should be destroyed". And, it is spreading and broadcasting the information as fact.

This is hate speech. It's lies. It's racist propaganda. And Google is disseminating it. It is what the data scientist Cathy O'Neil calls a "co-conspirator". And so are we. Because what happens next is entirely down to us. This is our internet. And we need to make a decision: do we believe it's acceptable to spread hate speech, to promulgate lies as the world becomes a darker, murkier place?

Because Google is only beyond the reach of the law if it we allow it to be. It's selling ads against these searches. It's profiting from Holocaust denial. Its algorithm is helping Stormfront reach new recruits - the next generation of Thomas Mairs and Breiviks - all the while adding to its bottom line, its quarterly profits. This week, Chi Onwurah, the shadow secretary of state for culture, media and sport tweeted her concern about the subject but noted "I'm sure @google will argue they aren't responsible for the results".

Only, here's the thing: that's exactly what they are. Responsible. Google writes the code that drives the algorithm that returns the results. How they write this code, what they use to assess authority and credibility, how that enables Stormfront to spread its lies and spew its poison is entirely its responsibility. When the shadow minister whose brief this includes fails to realise this, we have some idea of the scale of the problem.

Our problem too: because do we let these multinational corporations own us and all aspects of our lives? Is that the plan? The Google Transparency Project has documented how the company has become one of the biggest spenders on government lobbyists in the US. It has also shown how in the US, UK and Europe there has been an open door between government and senior positions at Google - the GTP found 251 instances of staff moving between the two in the US and 80 in Europe.

That is how power works. This is how power works too: the last time I wrote a story that Google didn't like, I got a call from Peter Barron, Google's UK head of press, who was at pains to point out the positive and beneficial relationship that Google has with the Guardian Media Group, our owners.

Google's business model is built around the idea that it's a neutral platform. That its magic algorithm waves its magic wand and delivers magic results without the sullying intervention of any human. It desperately does not want to be seen as a media company, as a content provider, as a news and information medium that should be governed by the same rules that apply to other media. But this is exactly what it is. This week's editing of the content around evil Jews has demonstrated exactly that. And our failure - the failure of our politicians and the mainstream press - to reckon with it makes us an accessory to the crime. We are colluding with it in broadcasting hate speech and lies.

The right is on the rise everywhere. And that includes on the internet. It is creating more content that is travelling wider and further. It has changed both the questions being asked - did the Holocaust actually happen? Are Jews evil? Should Islam be destroyed - and answered. It is in the process of remaking the world, rewriting history, rewiring minds, changing the conversation, reframing the questions and answers. It's our world. Our internet. Our history. And we have to wake up to what is happening right now on the laptop on our desk, the phone in our pocket, the tablet in our children's bedrooms. This is our choice: do something. Or accept the truth according to Google. That six million didn't die. That the Holocaust never happened. That we didn't care enough to remember.
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Google is not 'just' a platform. It frames, shapes and distorts how we see the world

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Did the Holocaust really happen? No. The Holocaust did not really happen. Six million Jews did not die. It is a Jewish conspiracy theory spread by vested interests to obscure the truth. The truth is that there is no evidence any people were gassed in any camp. The Holocaust did not happen.

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As usual, there have been a lot of digital safety updates in the news that are important for parents to know (so they can keep their family safe online). It can be difficult to find all of the important security and safety information you need to know as a parent. So to continue our mission of helping parents protect their families online and on social media, we created this bi-weekly newsletter to bring you up to speed on all of the things happening in digital safety.

In this Parent University member newsletter we talk about which social media networks are the worst offenders when it comes to showing children mature content, a shocking new study that revealed suicide-related hospital visits have nearly tripled for adolescents, how Snapchat made it even easier for students to share their location in real-time, the new Instagram updates parents need to know, and more.
We spend countless hours each week researching (and summarizing) the latest digital safety tips parents and educators need to know, join Parent University to get access to our best research and resources.
Watch this episode as a video:

Snapchat just made it easier for kids to share their location

Utilizing the "Snap Map" feature, users will now be able to send and request location data with their friends. To access the feature, users long press on their friend's name and can select to share or request location information. A map with the user's current location will appear in the users' private chat conversation. The feature only appears for mutual friends and users have the ability to disable any location sharing requests. Location sharing data will last for 8 hours after the user opened the app, unless the user cancels sharing before then.

Source: Engadget

New Instagram updates parents need to know

Instagram announced a new feature that allows users to share an Instagram post on their story. Users can share their own posts - or posts from any public accounts they follow - by adding it as a sticker in their story. Stories that share an Instagram post will include the original poster's username and a link back to the original post. Instagram hopes this new feature will help users promote brands and accounts. Read our Instagram Parent App Guide to learn how you can keep your children safe on the app.

While Instagram users already have the capability of muting another user on Instagram stories, they will now have the ability to do the same in their regular feed. This new feature is designed to give users more control over the content that they see. If your student has an Instagram account, read our Instagram Tutorial for Students to learn how they can set up their account to boost their online resume and impress college admissions officers.

Source: The Verge

Do you know about the adult content students are watching on Snapchat?

Parents might not be aware that there are several companies creating content specifically for Snapchat that can be inappropriate for students. While some of the content can be educational, most of it can have a negative impact on students. Learning how to navigate Snapchat and what kids have access to is the best way to keep your children safe. Join Parent University to get access to our Snapchat Parent Tutorials.

Source: Variety & Cool Mom Tech

2 Stories We Heard about the Negative Effects of Social Media

New study reveals social media is linked to teen drinking problems

A new study finds that teens who engage, view, or "like" alcohol related content on social media tend to have issues with alcohol. Teens who engage with content related to alcohol on social media have more negative drinking incidents then teens who don't. Consider using this study as a means to start a healthy dialog with your teens about social media safety and alcohol use.

Source: The NY Post

Student suspended over social media post

A post on social media resulted in a Minnesota student being suspended from school and deputies opening an investigation. After becoming aware of the post, the school spoke with the student's parents and suspended the student. However, the student continued to post inappropriate content on social media after being suspended, which resulted in an investigation. Deputies went to the home of the student and spoke with the student and their parents. The investigation concluded that the social media posts from the student were inappropriate but did not pose any imminent threats to anyone or the school.

Source: International Falls Journal

An Example of How Your Student Can Be Positive on Social Media

A bullied student used social media to empower others

Overcoming being bullied is never easy, but a student in Tennessee was able to turn a horrible bullying incident into a positive message that they share on social media. Compounding offline bullying with cyberbullying can be incredibly difficult for teens and tweens to endure. For this student, the offline bullying incident was shared on Snapchat. In an effort to change the bullying narrative, the teen uses social media to share her story with other student who may be struggling.

Source: ABC Nashville

Safety Threats You Need to Know This Week

Suicide-related hospital visits for teens and tweens have almost tripled

Were' seeing an uptick in discussion around students, suicide, and shootings. A new study in the journal 'Pediatrics' found that kids being admitted or seeking help in the emergency department or hospital for suicidal ideation or attempts have dramatically increased. While the increase of suicide-related hospital visits have increased in every age group, adolescents have seen the biggest change in the past decade. According to the New York Times, in 2016 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that middle school students were as likely to die from suicide as from traffic accidents. These statistics are shocking but some mental health experts warn that suicide contagion can be spread among teens through content like "13 Reasons Why", the Netflix series.

Make sure parents, teachers, and students are aware of suicide risk warning signs. Always take warning signs seriously, and never promise to keep them secret.
Here's some resources you should consider researching this week:
Source: The New York Times

Thousands of parents' passwords were leaked by phone monitoring app

Popular parental monitoring app Teensafe has leaked thousands of accounts with both parent and student data. Teensafe is designed for parents to monitor multiple children and access all sent, received, and deleted texts or iMessages. The company left it's servers unprotected and accessible to anyone without a password. Some of the data leaked includes: parent's email address, their child's Apple ID email address, their child's device name (usually just their name), their child's device unique identifier, and their Apple ID passwords in plain text. When asked about solving the issue, Teensafe said they "will provide additional information" as it becomes available.

Source: ZDNet

Major internet service provider leaks customer data

According to ZDNet, a bug in Comcast's website used to activate Xfinity routers can return sensitive information on the company's customers. When setting up their home internet or cable service, users have to use a website from Comcast. The website can be hacked into revealing the home address, wifi name, and password where the router is located. Even if the password is updated, hacking the site can reveal the new password. When asked about the data breach, a Comcast spokesperson said, "within hours of learning of this issue, we shut it down. We are conducting a thorough investigation and will take all necessary steps to ensure that this doesn't happen again."

Source: ZDNet

The Top Social Media App Stories for Parents This Week

This major social network has added new features to battle internet trolls

Twitter has announced new features which could help fight abusive content posted by internet trolls. An internet troll is a person who uses social media and technology to upset and bully others. The new feature will use behavioral signals to identify harassers on Twitter and then limit the visibility of their tweets. Even if the content of their tweet itself isn't offensive, users who are consistently trolling others will see a decrease in the visibility of all of their tweets. If your student has an account, please read our Twitter Safety Guide for Parents.

Source: Reuters

These social media apps are the worst offenders when it comes to exposing students to sex, violence, and suicide

A recent survey from NSPCC shows that Facebook and YouTube are the worst offenders when it comes to exposing students to sex, violence, and suicide. The survey gathered reviews from over 4,000 parents and students. The survey lists the "riskiest sites" when it comes to mature content. Below is a list of social media networks with high or medium risk, according to the survey:

Source: Business Insider

We train 30,000 students each year how to shine online using social media and we show them how their accounts can be used to create a portfolio of positive accomplishments that impress colleges and employers.

Parents of kids 8-18:

Educators:

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Parent University Member Newsletter (Week 4)

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In this Parent University member newsletter we talk about which social networks are the worst offenders when it comes to showing children mature content, a new study that revealed suicide-related hospital visits have nearly tripled for adolescents, how Snapchat made it easier for students to share their location, and more.

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Why Understanding Student Trauma is More Important Than Teaching 'Grit'

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This young boy's ability to learn wasn't going to be transformed by a change in his mindset. He needed significant changes in his home life. I was reminded of this conversation during a recent presentation by Tyrone C. Howard on how student culture affects learning.

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No son exactamente más conocimientos o manejo de herramientas lo que las empresas esperan que tengan sus actuales o futuros empleados, como muchos podrían pensar. Es decir, la diferencia entre las habilidades que se aprenden y las que las personas necesitan se está acentuando cada vez más. O por lo menos así lo asegura un informe del Foro Económico Mundial. Lo que las empresas están buscando en los empleados -entre otras cosas- son las denominadas habilidades del siglo XXI, o para la vida, o las mal llamadas habilidades blandas.

Según el informe 'Nueva visión para la educación: Fomentar el aprendizaje social y emocional a través de la tecnología', los postulantes a empleos deben tener virtudes que combinen el aprendizaje social y el emocional con los conocimientos básicos o académicos. Transversal al aprendizaje social y el emocional está la inteligencia emocional.

De una u otra forma, en cuanto a habilidades en los empleados, para los empleadores ellos requieren, en orden de importancia: aplicar valores y ética profesional en el desempeño laboral (98,3 por ciento), asumir una cultura de convivencia (98,2), trabajar en equipo para alcanzar metas comunes (97,9) y comunicarse oralmente con claridad (97,7), de acuerdo con una encuesta del Observatorio Laboral del Ministerio de Educación de Colombia.

Beneficios reconocidos

Algunos empleadores ya reconocen los beneficios de las habilidades emocionales en el lugar de trabajo. Por ejemplo, Google, después de examinar encuestas a empleados y revisiones de desempeño, encontró que sus gerentes más efectivos fueron buenos capacitadores, tomaron un interés activo en la vida de sus empleados y fueron hábiles al escuchar y compartir información. Por ejemplo, cuando se trataba de comunicar actualizaciones de la compañía, los gerentes más efectivos fueron más allá de retransmitir información para explicar qué significaba esa información para sus equipos.

Ahí juega la inteligencia emocional. Pero ¿qué es? Se trata de una de las inteligencias múltiples que formuló en 1999 el estadounidense Howard Gardner, psicólogo y pedagogo de la Universidad de Harvard: aquella que se nutre de dos inteligencias: la interpersonal y la intrapersonal.

"La primera está referida a aquellas personas que entienden los sentimientos del otro, que generan empatía y son capaces de ponerse en los zapatos del otro; son líderes y tienen gran facilidad para relacionarse", explica Sandra Patricia Varela, investigadora y profesora de la facultad de Educación de la Universidad de La Sabana.

Y la segunda, añade la experta, está relacionada con la capacidad de una persona de conocerse a sí mismo y autorregular sus reacciones, emociones y vida interior". Es precisamente esta inteligencia la que buscan que tengan los trabajadores hoy, principalmente los millennials, que según encuestas son los que más carecen de la capacidad de controlar sus emociones.

Jennifer Klein, rectora del Gimnasio Los Caobos y autora del libro Guía de la Educación Global, cuenta que ha trabajado en su trayectoria con personas que carecen de inteligencia emocional y que ha sido una labor muy difícil: "Dicen cosas que ofenden a otros sin darse cuenta que lo están haciendo".

"No se ponen en los zapatos de los demás. No tienen empatía -explica-. Además, en los momentos difíciles reaccionan de forma emocional y poco racional. He trabajado con maestros que se enojan con padres o con los niños y no actúan de la mejor forma, se dejan llevar por sus emociones".

La pedagoga Sandra Patricia Varela asegura que todos tenemos las capacidades para desarrollar las mismas inteligencias, quizás unas con mayor facilidad. Pero aclara que no se desarrollan porque no se dan las posibilidades para que estos aprendizajes ocurran.

"Hay que buscar situaciones y exponerse a ellas para el desarrollo de una u otra inteligencia. Solo de esta manera es posible descubrir qué talentos tiene y cuáles debe potenciar más", explica la experta.

Dividendos académicos

Más allá del beneficio para los empleadores, o del perjuicio, según el Foro Económico Mundial, los estudios han demostrado que las habilidades sociales y emocionales pagan dividendos en el rendimiento académico y otras medidas de bienestar. En el 2011, un metanálisis de 213 estudios -que involucró a más de 270,000 estudiantes de colegio- descubrió que la inteligencia podría proveer gran cantidad de beneficios sociales y emocionales para los estudiantes.

Los alumnos que recibieron instrucción en inteligencia emocional obtuvieron puntajes de logros de 11 puntos porcentuales más altos que los que no la tuvieron. La adquisición de habilidades sociales y emocionales contribuyó a un mejor rendimiento académico y mejores actitudes y comportamientos. También redujo la angustia emocional, dice el estudio.

Alexánder Rubio, profesor de la Institución Educativa Rodrigo Lara Bonilla (en la localidad de Ciudad Bolívar de Bogotá), donde ha trabajado procesos pedagógicos para mejorar la convivencia, explica que la inteligencia emocional permite generar ciertas acciones que son indispensables para la vida: el desarrollo de los procesos socioemocionales, la integración con la comunidad, con el ambiente y consigo mismo, el autocontrol, el autodominio, las respuestas asertivas, la capacidad de resolver situaciones de conflicto que se presentan en la cotidianidad.

"Cuando se habla de inteligencia emocional está implícita la alteridad, la otredad, la empatía, el reconocimiento del otro, y a esto se le está apuntando en los países del primer mundo", explica el docente.

La pedagoga Jennifer Klein reafirma la postura de Rubio. Dice que los colegios tienen un rol central en la formación en inteligencia emocional, pero también los padres: "El colegio es a veces en donde uno empieza sus primeras amistades, sus primeras peleas; es un ambiente en donde muchas veces los estudiantes experimentan con el bullying (matoneo) o el maltrato por otros estudiantes que se están buscando a sí mismos en un ambiente social más que nada, y sus identidades se están formando en este ámbito".

Rubio concluye diciendo: "No hay tutoriales para formar seres humanos porque nos formamos desde la base emotiva, desde la sensibilización, desde el cuerpo, desde la educación física, desde el arte, porque este tipo de área nos permite relacionarnos y llevar esas acciones de la inteligencia socioemocional a la práctica constante".

Simón Granja Matías
Twitter: @simongrma

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Inteligencia emocional, la habilidad para el siglo XXI

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No son exactamente más conocimientos o manejo de herramientas lo que las empresas esperan que tengan sus actuales o futuros empleados, como muchos podrían pensar. Es decir, la diferencia entre las habilidades que se aprenden y las que las personas necesitan se está acentuando cada vez más.

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It's not surprising, then, that some adolescents use porn as a how-to guide. In a study that Rothman carried out in 2016 of 72 high schoolers ages 16 and 17, teenagers reported that porn was their primary source for information about sex - more than friends, siblings, schools or parents.

"There's nowhere else to learn about sex," the suburban boy told me. "And porn stars know what they are doing." His words reflect a paradox about sex and pornography in this country. Even as smartphones have made it easier for teenagers to watch porn, sex education in the United States - where abstinence-based sex education remains the norm - is meager. Massachusetts is among 26 states that do not mandate sex ed. And a mere 13 require that the material be medically and scientifically accurate. After some gains by the Obama administration to promote more comprehensive sex ed, which includes pregnancy prevention, discussions of anatomy, birth control, disease prevention, abstinence and healthy relationships, the Trump administration did not include the program in its proposed 2018 budget; it also has requested increased funding for abstinence education. Easy-to-access online porn fills the vacuum, making porn the de facto sex educator for American youth.

One Thursday afternoon, about a dozen teenagers sat in a semicircle of North Face zip-ups, Jordans, combat boots, big hoop earrings and the slumped shoulders of late afternoon. It was the third week of Porn Literacy, and everyone already knew the rules: You don't have to have watched porn to attend; no yucking someone else's yum - no disparaging a student's sexual tastes or sexuality. And avoid sharing personal stories about sex in class. Nicole Daley and Jess Alder, who wrote the curriculum with Emily Rothman and led most of the exercises and discussion, are in their 30s, warm and easygoing. Daley, who until last month was the director of Start Strong, played the slightly more serious favorite-aunt role, while Alder, who runs Start Strong's classes for teenagers, was the goofier, ask-me-anything big sister. Rothman also attended most of the classes, offering information about pornography studies and explaining to them, for example, that there is no scientific evidence that porn is addictive, but that people can become compulsive about it.

In the first class, Daley led an exercise in which the group defined porn terms (B.D.S.M., kink, soft-core, hard-core), so that, as she put it, "everyone is on the same page" and "you can avoid clicking on things you don't want to see." The students also "values voted" - agreeing or disagreeing about whether the legal viewing age of 18 for porn is too high, if working in the porn industry is a good way to make money and if pornography should be illegal. Later, Daley held up images of a 1940s pinup girl, a Japanese geisha and Kim Kardashian, to talk about how cultural values about beauty and bodies change over time. In future classes, they would talk about types of intimacy not depicted in porn and nonsexist pickup lines. Finally, Daley would offer a lesson about sexting and sexting laws and the risks of so-called revenge porn (in which, say, a teenager circulates a naked selfie of an ex without consent). And to the teenagers' surprise, they learned that receiving or sending consensual naked photos, even to your boyfriend or girlfriend, can be against the law if the person in the photo is a minor.

Now, in the third week of class, Daley's goal was to undercut porn's allure for teenagers by exposing the underbelly of the business. "When you understand it's not just two people on the screen but an industry," she told me, "it's not as sexy."

To that end, Daley started class by detailing a midlevel female performer's salary (taken from the 2008 documentary "The Price of Pleasure"): "Blow job: $300," Daley read from a list. "Anal: $1,000. Double penetration: $1,200. Gang bang: $1,300 for three guys. $100 for each additional guy."

"Wow," Drew muttered. "That makes it nasty now."

"That's nothing for being penetrated on camera," another boy said.

Then, as if they had been given a green light to ask about a world that grown-ups rarely acknowledge, they began peppering Daley, Rothman and Alder with questions.

"How much do men get paid?" one girl asked. It is the one of the few professions in which men are paid less, Rothman explained, but they also typically have longer careers. How long do women stay in their jobs? On average, six to 18 months. How do guys get erections if they aren't turned on? Often Viagra, Rothman offered, and sometimes a "fluffer," as an offscreen human stimulator is known.

Daley then asked the teenagers to pretend they were contestants on a reality-TV show, in which they had to decide if they were willing to participate in certain challenges (your parents might be watching) and for how much money. In one scenario, she said, you would kneel on the ground while someone poured a goopy substance over your face. In another, you'd lick a spoon that had touched fecal matter. The kids debated the fecal-matter challenge - most wouldn't to do it for less than $2 million. One wanted to know if the goop smelled. "Can we find out what it is?" asked another.

Then Daley explained that each was in fact a simulation of a porn act. The goopy substance was what's called a "baker's dozen," in which 13 men ejaculate on a woman's face, breasts and mouth.

"What?" a girl named Tiffany protested.

The second scenario - licking the spoon with fecal matter - was from a porn act known as A.T.M., in which a man puts his penis in a woman's anus and then immediately follows by sticking it in her mouth.

"No way," a 15-year-old boy said. "Can't you wash in between?"

Nope, Daley said.

"We don't question it when we see it in porn, right?" Daley went on. "There's no judgment here, but some of you guys are squeamish about it."

"I never knew any of this," Drew said, sounding a bit glum.

Daley went on to detail a 2010 study that coded incidents of aggression in best-selling 2004 and 2005 porn videos. She noted that 88 percent of scenes showed verbal or physical aggression, mostly spanking, slapping and gagging. (A more recent content analysis of more than 6,000 mainstream online heterosexual porn scenes by Bryant Paul and his colleagues defined aggression specifically as any purposeful action appearing to cause physical or psychological harm to another person and found that 33 percent of scenes met that criteria. In each study, women were on the receiving end of the aggression more than 90 percent of the time.)

"Do you think," Daley said, standing in front of the students, "watching porn leads to violence against women? There's no right or wrong here. It's a debate."

Kyrah, a 10th-grade feminist with an athlete's compact body and a tendency to speak her opinions, didn't hesitate. "In porn they glamorize calling women a slut or a whore, and younger kids think this is how it is. Or when they have those weird porn scenes and the woman is saying, 'Stop touching me,' and then she ends up enjoying it!"

Tiffany, her best friend, snapped her fingers in approval.

"Yes and no," one guy interjected. "When a man is choking a woman in porn, people know it is not real, and they aren't supposed to do it, because it's violence." He was the same teenager who told me he would just "do" anal sex without asking a girl, because the women in porn like it.

Pornography didn't create the narrative that male pleasure should be first and foremost. But that idea is certainly reinforced by "a male-dominated porn industry shot through a male lens," as Cindy Gallop puts it. Gallop is the creator of an online platform called MakeLoveNotPorn, where users can submit videos of their sexual encounters - which she describes as "real world," consensual sex with "good values" - and pay to watch videos of others.

For years, Gallop has been a one-woman laboratory witnessing how easy-to-access mainstream porn influences sex. Now in her 50s, she has spent more than a decade dating 20-something men. She finds them through "cougar" dating sites - where older women connect with younger men - and her main criterion is that they are "nice." Even so, she told me, during sex with these significantly younger nice men, she repeatedly encounters porn memes: facials, "jackhammering" intercourse, more frequent requests for anal sex and men who seem less focused on female orgasms than men were when she was younger. Gallop takes it upon herself to "re-educate," as she half-jokingly puts it, men raised on porn. Some people, of course, do enjoy these acts. But speaking of teenagers in particular, she told me she worries that hard-core porn leads many girls to think, for example, that "all boys love coming on girls' faces, and all girls love having their faces come on. And therefore, girls feel they must let boys come on their face and pretend to like it."

Though none of the boys I spoke to at Start Strong told me they had ejaculated on a girl's face, Gallop's words reminded me of conversations I had with some older high-schoolers in various cities. One senior said that ejaculating on a woman's face was in a majority of porn scenes he had watched, and that he had done it with a girlfriend. "I brought it up, or she would say, 'Come on my face.' It was an aspect I liked - and she did, too."

Another noted that the act is "talked about a lot" among guys, but said that "a girl's got to be down with it" before he'd ever consider doing it. "There is something that's appealing for guys. The dominance and intimacy and that whole opportunity for eye contact. Guys are obsessed with their come displayed on a girl."

Many girls at Start Strong were decidedly less enthusiastic. One senior told me a boyfriend asked to ejaculate on her face; she said no. And during a conversation I had with three girls, one senior wondered aloud: "What if you don't want a facial? What are you supposed to do? Friends say a boy cleans it with a napkin. A lot of girls my age like facials." But a few moments later, she reversed course. "I actually don't think they like it. They do it because their partner likes it." Next to her, a sophomore added that when older girls talk among themselves, many say it's gross. "But they say you gotta do what you gotta do." And if you don't, the first girl added, "then someone else will."

These are not new power dynamics between girls and boys. In a 2014 British study about anal sex and teenagers, girls expressed a similar lack of sexual agency and experienced physical pain. In the survey, of 130 heterosexual teenagers age 16 to 18, teenagers often said they believed porn was a motivating factor for why males wanted anal sex. And among the guys who reported trying it, many said friends encouraged them, or they felt competitive with other guys to do it. At the same time, a majority of girls who had tried anal sex said they didn't actually want to; their partners persuaded or coerced them. Some males took a "try it and see" approach, as researchers called it, attempting to put their finger or penis in a girl's anus and hoping she didn't stop them. Sometimes, one teenager reported, you "just keep going till they just get fed up and let you do it anyway." Both boys and girls blamed the girls for pain they felt during anal sex and some told researchers the girls needed to "relax" more or "get used to it." Only one girl said she enjoyed it, and only a few boys did. Teenagers may not know that even while porn makes it seem commonplace, in the 2009 national survey of American sex habits, most men and women who tried anal sex didn't make it a regular part of their sex lives. And in another study, by Indiana University's Debby Herbenick and others in 2015, about 70 percent of women who had anal sex said they experienced pain.

Drew had firsthand experience with what he had seen in porn not translating into actual pleasure. The first time he had sex, he thought he was supposed to exert some physical control over his girlfriend. But the whole thing felt awkward, too rough and not all that fun. And things that looked easy in porn, like sex while taking a shower or mutual oral sex, didn't go so well.

At one point during sex, Drew's girlfriend at the time, who was a year older and more experienced, asked him to put his hand around her neck during sex. He did it, without squeezing, and though it didn't exactly bother him, it felt uncomfortable. Drew never asked if she got the idea from porn, but it made him wonder. Had she also picked up other ways of acting? "Like, how do you really know a girl has had a good time?" he said one afternoon, musing aloud while sitting with some friends before Porn Literacy class. "My girlfriend said she had a good time," he went on. "She was moaning. But that's the thing: Is it fake moaning?"

Even if you know porn isn't realistic, it still sets up expectations, one senior told me. In porn, he said, "the clothes are off, and the girl goes down on the guy, he gets hard and he starts having sex with her. It's all very simple and well lit." Before he had sex, porn had supplied his images of oral sex, including scenes in which a woman is on her knees as a man stands over her. At one point, he thought that's how it might go one day when he had sex. But when he talked with his girlfriend, they realized they didn't want to re-enact that power dynamic.

I spent a couple of hours on a Wednesday afternoon at Start Strong with a senior girl who took the first Porn Literacy class in the summer of 2016. Looking back over the last several years of middle and high school, A., who asked me to identify her by the first initial of her middle name, said she wished she had had someplace - home, school, a community sex-ed program - to learn about sex. Instead, she learned about it from porn. She saw it for the first time by accident, after a group of sixth-grade boys cajoled her to look at tube8.com, which she didn't know was a porn site. She was fascinated. She had never seen a penis before, "not a drawing of one, nothing." A few years later, she searched online for porn again after listening to girls in the high school locker room talk about masturbation. A.'s parents, whom she describes as conservative about sex, hadn't talked to her about female anatomy or sex, and her school didn't offer any sex education before ninth grade; even then, it focused mostly on the dangers - sexually transmitted infections and diseases and pregnancy.

Aside from some private schools and innovative community programs, relatively few sex-ed classes in middle and high school delve in detail into anatomy (female, especially), intimacy, healthy relationships, sexual diversity. Even more rare are discussions of female desire and pleasure. Porn taught A. the basics of masturbation. And porn served as her study guide when she was 16 and was the first among her friends to have sex. She clicked through videos to watch women giving oral sex. She focused on how they moved during sex and listened to how they moaned. She began shaving her vulva ("I've never seen anyone in porn have sex with hair on it").

Porn is "not all bad," said A., who was frank and funny, with a slew of advanced-placement classes on her transcript and a self-assured manner that impresses adults. "I got my sexual ways from porn, and I like the way I am." But what she learned from porn had downsides too. Because she assumed women's pleasure in porn was real, when she first had intercourse and didn't have an orgasm, she figured that was just how it went.

For A., it wasn't enough to know that porn was fake sex. She wanted to understand how real sex worked. Rothman and her team did consult a sex educator while they were writing the Porn Literacy curriculum but decided to include only some basic information about safe sex. It came in the form of a "Porn Jeopardy" game during one class. The teenagers, clustered in teams, chose from four categories: S.T.D./S.T.I.s, Birth Control, Teen Violence/Sexual Assault and Porn on the Brain.

"S.T.I.s/S.T.D.s for $300," one student called out.

"Why is lubrication important for sex?" Alder asked.

"What's lubrication?" Drew asked.

"It's lube," another teenager said, in an attempt to explain.

"Is lubrication only the little tube-y things?" a girl with long black hair asked. "Or can it be natural?"

"I never learned this before," Drew announced to the class after it was mentioned that lubrication decreased friction, increased pleasure and could reduce the risk of tearing and therefore of S.T.I.s and S.T.D.s. Drew's only sliver of sex ed was in sixth grade with the school gym teacher, who sweated as he talked about sex, "and it was all about it being bad and we shouldn't do it."

As if to rectify that, Alder offered a quick anatomy lesson, drawing a vulva on the whiteboard and pointing out the clitoris, the vagina, the urethra. "This is called a vulva," she said. Alder repeated the word slowly and loudly, as if instructing the students in a foreign language. It was both for humor and to normalize a word that some of them may have been hearing for the first time. "This is the clitoris," Alder went on. "This is where women get most pleasure. Most women do not have a G spot. If you want to know how to give a woman pleasure, it's the clitoris."

"Let's move on," Rothman said quietly. Alder had just inched across a line in which anatomy rested on one side and female desire and pleasure on the other. It was a reminder that as controversial as it is to teach kids about pornography, it can be more taboo to teach them how their bodies work sexually. "The class is about critically analyzing sexually explicit media," Rothman told me later, "not how to have sex. We want to stay in our narrow lane and not be seen as promoting anything parents are uncomfortable with." Daley added: "I wish it were different, but we have to be aware of the limitations of where we are as a society."

Porn education is such new territory that no one knows the best practices, what material should be included and where to teach it. (Few people are optimistic that it will be taught anytime soon in public schools.) Several years ago, L. Kris Gowen, a sexuality educator and author of the 2017 book "Sexual Decisions: The Ultimate Teen Guide," wrote extensive guidelines for teaching teenagers to critique "sexually explicit media" (she avoided the more provocative term "porn literacy"). Even though Oregon, where Gowen lives, has one of the most comprehensive sex-ed programs in the country, Gowen said that teachers felt unequipped to talk about porn. And though the guidelines have been circulated at education conferences and made publicly available, Gowen doesn't know of a single educator who has implemented them. In part, she says, people may be waiting for a better sense of what's effective. But also, many schools and teachers are nervous about anything that risks them being "accused of promoting porn."

The most recent sex-education guidelines from the World Health Organization's European office note that educators should include discussions about the influence of pornography on sexuality starting with late elementary school and through high school. The guidelines don't, however, provide specific ideas on how to have those conversations.

In Britain, nonprofit organizations and a teachers' union, along with members of Parliament, have recommended that schools include discussions about the influence of porn on how children view sex and relationships. Magdalena Mattebo, a researcher at Uppsala University in Sweden who studies pornography and adolescents, would like porn literacy mandated in her country. "We are a little lost in how to handle this," Mattebo told me.

More than 300 schools, youth and community groups and government agencies in Australia and New Zealand use components of a porn-education resource called "In the Picture" that includes statistics, studies and exercises primarily for teenagers. It was created by Maree Crabbe, an expert on sexual violence and pornography education, who lives near Melbourne, Australia. As she put it during a United States training program for educators and social workers that I attended in 2016: "We want to be positive about sex, positive about masturbation and critical of pornography." One key component of the program is often neglected in porn literacy: providing training to help parents understand and talk about these issues.

Last year, a feminist porn producer, Erika Lust, in consultation with sex educators, created a porn-education website for parents. The Porn Conversation links to research and articles and provides practical tips for parents, including talking to kids about the ways mainstream porn doesn't represent typical bodies or mutually satisfying sex and avoiding accusatory questions about why your kid is watching porn and who showed it to them. "We can't just say, 'I don't like mainstream porn because it's chauvinistic,' " says Lust, whose films feature female-centered pleasure. "We have given our children technology, so we need to teach them how to handle it." But she takes it a step further by suggesting that parents of middle- and high-schoolers talk to their teenagers about "healthy porn," which she says includes showing female desire and pleasure and being made under fair working conditions. I asked Lust if she would steer her daughters in that direction when they are older (they are 7 and 10). "I would recommend good sites to my daughters at age 15, when I think they are mature enough. We are so curious to find out about sex. People have doubts and insecurities about themselves sexually. 'Is it O.K. that I like that, or this?' I think porn can be a good thing to have as an outlet. I'm not scared by explicit sex per se. I'm afraid of the bad values."

Tristan Taormino, another feminist porn filmmaker and author, speaks frequently on college campuses and produces explicit sex-ed videos for adults. "The party line is we don't want teenagers watching our videos," she says, noting they are rated XXX. "But do I wish teenagers had access to some of the elements of it?" In addition to seeing consent, she said, "they would see people talking to each other, and they'd see a lot of warm-up. We show lube, we show sex toys."

That may be more than most parents, even of older teenagers, can bear. But even if parents decided to help their teenagers find these sites, not only is it illegal to show any kind of porn - good or bad - to anyone under 18, but, really, do teenagers want their parents to do so? And which ones would parents recommend for teenagers? "Unlike organic food, there's no coding system for ethical or feminist porn," Crabbe notes. "They might use condoms and dental dams and still convey the same gender and aggression dynamics." Also, "good porn" isn't typically free or nearly as accessible as the millions of videos streaming on mainstream sites.

Al Vernacchio, a nationally known sexuality educator who teaches progressive sex ed at a private Quaker school outside Philadelphia, believes the better solution is to make porn literacy part of the larger umbrella of comprehensive sex education. Vernacchio, who is the author of the 2014 book "For Goodness Sex: Changing the Way We Talk to Teens About Sexuality, Values, and Health," is one of those rare teenage-sex educators who talks directly to his high school students about sexual pleasure and mutuality, along with the ingredients for healthy relationships. The problem with porn "is not just that it often shows misogynistic, unhealthy representations of relationships," Vernacchio says. "You can't learn relationship skills from porn, and if you are looking for pleasure and connection, porn can't teach you how to have those."

Crabbe notes one effective way to get young men to take fewer lessons from porn: "Tell them if you want to be a lazy, selfish lover, look at porn. If you want to be a lover where your partner says, 'That was great,' you won't learn it from porn." And parents should want their teenagers to be generous lovers, Cindy Gallop argues. "Our parents bring us up to have good manners, a work ethic. But nobody brings us up to behave well in bed."

To prepare his students to be comfortable and respectful in sexual situations, Vernacchio shows photos, not just drawings, of genitalia to his high-schoolers. "Most people are having sex with real people, not porn stars, and real bodies are highly variable. I would much rather my students have that moment of asking questions or confusion or even laughter in my classroom rather than when they see their partner's naked body for the first time." He, along with Debby Herbenick, who is also the author of the 2012 book "Sex Made Easy: Your Awkward Questions Answered for Better, Smarter Amazing Sex," advocate that adolescents should understand that most females don't have orgasms by penetration alone, and that clitoral stimulation often requires oral sex, fingers and sex toys. As she notes: "It's part of human life, and you teach it in smart, sensitive ways."

As the students from the first Porn Literacy classes moved through their lives in the year after their courses ended, some things from the discussions stayed with them. In surveys from the first three sets of classes, one-third of the students still said they would agree to do things from porn if their partner asked them to. Several also wanted to try things they saw in porn. They were, after all, normal, sexually curious, experimenting teenagers. But only a tiny number of students agreed in the postclass survey that "most people like to be slapped, spanked or have their hair pulled during sex," compared with 27 percent at the start of class. And while at the beginning, 45 percent said that porn was a good way for young people to learn about sex, now only 18 percent agreed. By the end of the class, no one said pornography was realistic; just over one-quarter had believed that at the outset. The survey didn't reveal the catalyst for the changes. Was it the curriculum itself? Was it something about Daley and Alder's teaching style? It's possible the students created the changes themselves, teaching one another through their in-class debates and discussions.

A., the young woman who said she had never seen an image of a penis until she watched porn, resisted the idea that porn was uniformly bad for teenagers. "At least kids are watching porn and not going out and getting pregnant," she said. But recently, she told me that she'd given up watching it altogether. She disliked looking at women's expressions now, believing that they probably weren't experiencing pleasure and might be in pain. When Drew watched porn, he found himself wondering if women were having sex against their will. As another student said with a sigh: "Nicole and Jess ruined porn for us."

In the months after the class, A. had created a new mission for herself: She was going to always have orgasms during sex. "And I did it!" she told me. It helped that she had been in a relationship with a guy who was open and asked what she liked. But even if Porn Literacy didn't go into as many details about sex as she would have liked, "in this indirect way, the class shows what you deserve and don't deserve," she said. "In porn, the guy cares only about himself. I used to think more about 'Am I doing something right or wrong?' " Porn may neglect women's orgasms, but A. wasn't going to anymore.

Drew, who had once used porn as his main sex educator, was now thinking about sex differently. "Some things need to come to us naturally, not by watching it and seeing what turns you on," he told me. The discussions about anatomy and fake displays of pleasure made him realize that girls didn't always respond as they did in porn and that they didn't all want the same things. And guys didn't, either. Maybe that porn clip in which the nice, tender guy didn't excite the girl was wrong. What Drew needed was a girl who was open and honest, as he was, and with whom he could start to figure out how to have good sex. It would take some time and most likely involve some fumbling. But Drew was O.K. with that. He was just starting out.

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What Teenagers Are Learning From Online Porn

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It's not surprising, then, that some adolescents use porn as a how-to guide. In a study that Rothman carried out in 2016 of 72 high schoolers ages 16 and 17, teenagers reported that porn was their primary source for information about sex - more than friends, siblings, schools or parents.

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15 signs you have emotional intelligence - World Economic Forum

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15 signs you have emotional intelligence - World Economic Forum

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Dr Travis Bradberry looks at the qualities shared by people with emotional intelligence, based on data from more than a million people.