Here’s what you need to know:
What is International Women’s Day?
It is a worldwide event that recognizes women’s achievements – from the political to the social – while also calling for gender equality. Find out more about the background of International Women’s Day by visiting here (it has been observed since the early 1900s)!
Focusing on your mental health is made easier by having self-care at the tips of your fingers on your phone. There are many apps out there for both iPhone iOS and Android devices. The benefits of some of these apps makes it easy to prioritize mental health. When experiencing anxiety or depression, it can be difficult to ask for help right away. These apps can help you get a jump start on managing your wellness. If you are seeing a professional to address mental health concerns, these apps can also come in handy between sessions. Some of these apps help you track your mood/symptoms—something that can be shown to the professional during sessions. There are a wide array of apps out there to help with your mental health.
Once there was a young woman who posted a joke on Twitter, and she thought that only her 170 followers would be able to see it. She clicked “Tweet” and climbed on a plane for an 11-hour flight from New York City to Cape Town, South Africa.
And while she was sleeping, her world blew up.
Continue reading Does Your Teen Know Who Can See Their Posts?
When it comes to Social Media, what does the practice of privacy mean to you and your child?
How do you feel when you see personal information about someone on Facebook or another social media website? Is anything truly private once it’s on the internet?
Have you or your child ever taken time to unplug? To step away from the screen? Would you consider a day without screens? It may be hard to image with smartphones and social media being around us all the time. However, it often feels great to put all your devices away and take a break.
Has your child ever had to sit by herself in the lunchroom? Seventeen-year-old Californian Natalie Hampton has—for two whole years—and she’s invented an app to make sure no one else ever has to go through that.
When Hampton—an outgoing girl who had always had lots of friends—moved a new school in seventh grade, she had high hopes of making new pals, but that’s not what happened. Instead, she was completely ostracized by the other students.
The worst part was lunch: she would walk into the crowded cafeteria and see that no one was willing to eat with her.
This lasted for two years.
To make matters worse, none of the adults at the school supported her. The school counselor even interrogated her on a weekly basis, trying to get her to admit what she had done to make the students behave this way.
The school’s refusal to support her made the bullying even worse. Finally, when she was ready for high school, she decided to change schools and start all over again.
The SOVA Project is happy to feature this blog post written by one in our team of fantastic SOVA Ambassadors—these are young people who help create meaningful blog posts for us to share.
The internet is not going anywhere—there is no doubt that it’s an essential part of our lives. The online world can make our lives more convenient—it gives us the means to communicate efficiently, purchase anything we want, and access our favorite forms of entertainment with a click of a button.
However, like most tools, the internet can help or hurt us, depending on how we use it.
When I was using social media compulsively, it had many more hurtful qualities than helpful ones. Apps such as Snapchat and Instagram were especially hurtful to me and people I knew when we used them without limits. When using them that way, it was hard to resist the feeling that other people’s opinions are extremely important. This attitude toward social media has caused many young adults to live with Instagram constantly in the back of their minds, with every other thought being what they should post next. That’s obsessional use. Continue reading Why She Quit Social Media
You know those moments when you’re hanging out with your family and all of a sudden you look around and everyone is on their phones, not talking or looking at each other? It can be amusing, but also a good reminder to put down our phones and be present. And while we all need to check ourselves from time to time, the reality is we depend on our phones a lot.
In the world of balancing our schedule, health, well-being, work, family, commitments, errands, intentions and more there are definitely some apps out there that serve as reminders and help keep us organized and on top of it all. Whether its scheduling, keeping up on our health or a useful tool for work, there’s no doubt apps can serve as a reminder and help us live a healthier life.
However, if not careful, we can become overly attached to our phone (and the apps we use). Read more about nomophobia here.
What apps do you and your child(ren) rely on the most? If you were doing an app cleanse, which ones would you get rid of from your phone? Leave a comment below!
Studies have found that teens today have the same level of anxiety as psychiatric patients did in the 1950s, and the difficulties of managing this anxiety can diminish healthy self-esteem, leading in turn to depression. We hear so much about how we need to support our teens in gaining a high level of self-esteem.
But what does “self-esteem” mean, anyway?
One clue to understanding any idea is to look at how its words evolved. We often think that holding someone in “high esteem” is to love them, so we often think of having “self-esteem” as loving ourselves. But let’s look at the older meanings, too.
“Esteem” was first used as an English word that meant “worth.” It came into English from very old French and Latin words that meant “to appraise” and “to estimate”—can you hear how “esteem” and “estimate” sound similar?
So self-esteem can mean how we “appraise” ourselves or “estimate” our “worth.” It’s like our selves—our bodies, minds, spirits—are like a house full of valuables, and we are the appraisers, estimating how much our house and all its contents are worth.
Here are two helpful new understandings we can draw from just looking at the words:
Self: We get to be the appraisers. Nobody else but we ourselves. If our teen gives the power to appraise her estates to somebody else, then she gives away her own power to “estimate” her “worth.”
Appraisal: Estimating our worth depends on having realistic attitudes. If our teen looks at her “riches” and sees only what’s missing—what she thinks should be there and isn’t—then she doesn’t do an accurate job of appraising her worth. But if she can look at her riches and appreciate what she does have, then she has a better chance of building on that accurate appraisal.
Hear how the words “appraise” and “appreciate” sound the same?—they come from the same ancient Latin roots, too.
Habits that can “depreciate” teens’ sense of themselves:
Continue reading A Parents’ Guide To Fostering Teens’ Self Esteem
Sometimes you may feel as though your adolescent lives on their phone/tablet/computer. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, on and on! Everyone wants their attention!
You give likes, you get likes, your phone buzzes, little red numbers come up on the apps letting you know about every interaction, every moment someone may notice you.
Are you giving yourself time to just be you? For them to just be them?
