Cyber world / Bullying

Dear Danni, My daughter has Instagram and is obsessed with posting photos of herself. She even takes selfies in the car as I drive her to school. How do I…

Kindness isn’t the cure for complex issues like bullying. If we’re serious about stamping out bullying, we need to stop thinking in trite slogans.

Worried that your little girl is 10, going on 15? You’re not alone. When I first started working in schools with young women to give them the skills they need…

Mental health issues are taking a terrible toll on our teens. It’s time we also acknowledged the damaging ripple effect may be having on their peers too.

How committed are we really to acknowledge just how complex this issue is, and to implement multifaceted programs to tackle ongoing aggression?

The internet isn’t just making us dumb, it’s making us angry. And it is women who are among the fastest adopters for venting their rage online.

If you have a teen, it’s highly likely that at some stage they have been sent a nude image.

Whether the trolls realise it or not, their comments reveal far more about them than they ever do about those they are hoping to intimidate or discredit.

Further to last week’s post on an alarming new type of lewd cyber scavenger hunt, I thought I’d share this Opinion piece by author, columnist, journalist, semi-retired academic and social…

Want to help your children succeed? Then focus on their mistakes. As adults, the single biggest mistake we make is our carefully staged, micromanaged, Instagram-filtered focus on perfection. We’ve created…

It’s the deceptively unhelpful piece of advice that every well-intentioned adult has at one point issued to a child: “You should be friends with everybody!” Admit it — who among…

I’m a proud feminist. And I’m the CEO of Australia’s largest provider of in-school workshops for teen girls that help develop self-worth and resilience. And I promote self-defence classes to…

Dear Friends Who Take Selfies…

What is the one thing teen boys say they wish adults better understood about their lives? Forget raging hormones, academic angst and peer pressure. When my team and I run…

I’ve had the opportunity to contribute to, and write, some really interesting pieces for various media outlets this week. I want to share the highlights with you here. The always-wise…

I was pleased to have had the opportunity to provide a context for why young girls might chose to send their images to online Instagram pages that invite others to…

It’s been wonderful to be back at Channel 7 this week on both The Daily Edition (discussing cyber bullying and the pressures placed on schools to address this), and The…

I often find myself frustrated by much of the dialogue that surrounds teen girls as it can in fact be very damaging. Sadly, those that use these assumptions and stereotypes…

Despite the popular rhetoric about social media leading to the demise of real-world friendships (you’ve heard the criticisms, right? “Teens are now too busy texting to talk”, “Young people care…

This advertisement for Skype is just gorgeous. In the current culture that mocks teen girl friendships and focuses on the negative (think Mean Girls, Ja’mie) this shows just how genuine…

Because there has been so much (often furious and ultimately, therefore, alienating and unhelpful ) discussion on Mia Freedman’s recent post on girls and personal safety , I hesitated to…

This week I am sharing a guest post by my colleague and friend Nina Funnell which first appeared in The Age. In this Nina attempts to make sense of alarming…

“The best films of any kind, narrative or documentary, provoke questions.” Edward Norton This week I want to preempt the release of two extraordinary films with the hope that schools…

This week I am proud to have been given permission to publish an extract from one of the speeches given at yesterday’s Reclaim The Night rally in Sydney; this was…