Jim Liebelt's Youth Culture Watch

Teen Blogging Declines While Popularity of Social Media Sites Increases

As social-media sites like Facebook grow in popularity among teenagers and young adults, good ol' blogging has declined sharply over the past three years for this set, a new report shows.

In 2006, 28 percent of teens ages 12 to 17 and young adults ages 18 to 29 were bloggers, according to survey results released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center. By the fall of 2009, however, these numbers dropped to 14 percent of teens and 15 percent of young adults. During the same period, the percentage of online adults over 30 who are blogging rose from 7 percent in 2006 to 11 percent in 2009.

The survey attributed the decline in blogging among younger Internet users to changes in social network use. About three quarters (73 percent) of online teens and an equal number (72 percent) of young adults use social-networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace.

Source: CNET News
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10446816-93.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

Masculinity in a Spray Can

Interesting article recently in the New York Times about the appeal and marketing of male body sprays (such as Axe or Swagger by Old Spice) to teen guys. An increasing number of tween boys are now jumping on board... adding to the fog of fumes that tend to follow young guys around these days.

ONE bathroom in Stefanie Mullen’s home in a suburb of San Diego is stocked with enough products to line an aisle in a drugstore:

Body wash. Face wash. Exfoliator. Exfoliating wash. Body hydrator. Body spray. Deodorant. Shaving cream. Shampoos and conditioner. Hair gel, of course.

All told, 18 different containers.

They belong to her sons Noah Assaraf, 13, and Keenan Assaraf, 14. They have been dousing themselves for years.

“Every day they walk out the door in a cloud of spray-on macho,” Mrs. Mullen said.

When boys pile into her car, that’s her cue to roll down her window, no matter the weather. “The smell drives me nuts.”

So boys are turning to hypermasculine guideposts like Instinct from Axe, Swagger by Old Spice and Magnetic Attraction Enhancing Body Wash by Dial with results that are poignant, comic, confused — and stinky.

Source: New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/fashion/31smell.html?pagewanted=1

Teen Girl-on-Girl Fighting Goes Online

If you thought only men engage in fist fights, you'd be wrong.

CBS News correspondent Whit Johnson reported there aren't any statistics yet, but experts say there's a growing problem with teenage girls letting disputes with one another turn violent.

Increasingly, Johnson reported, girl fights are being recorded and posted on the Internet, which can make the problem even worse.

A video popped up on YouTube more than a week ago that showed two teenage girls in a violent fist fight -- with two adults allegedly watching -- and another minor videotaping the entire thing. The fight took place in Baton Rouge, La.

Days later, in Lowell, Mass., local authorities discovered similar videos online.

Gerry Leone, the district attorney of Middlesex, Mass., told CBS News, "We found three different videos posted to YouTube, and it was female-on-female violence, where young females were fighting in a very violent way, and being exhorted to do so by friends who were both boys and girls."

Leone says local educators report about 80 percent of school fights are now girl against girl, a trend he says is fueled, in part, by the Internet.

Leone said, "They see friends getting a lot of attention from the posting of these violent attacks, and being young and impressionable kids, they figure that's one way of getting attention themselves." 

A recent search for "girl fight" on YouTube turned up 267,000 videos.

Experts say the fights can also lead to cyberbullying, as tech-savvy teens look for more ways to torment one another.

Source: CBS News
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/02/02/earlyshow/main6165570.shtml

Youths' Use of Social Networking Reflects Their Face-to-Face Interactions

Simply stated, new research suggests that socially well-adapted young people with positive relationships are more likely to use social networking websites (like Facebook) to further enhance the relationships they already have. On the flip side, young people with behavior problems and difficulty making friends are more likely to use social networking in a negative, or aggressive way, or steer clear of social networking altogether.

Though parents often have concerns about letting their teens use social media Web sites like Facebook and MySpace, a new study by University of Virginia psychologists suggests that well-adapted youth with positive friendships will use these sites to further enhance the positive relationships they already have.

However, they warn, teens who have behavioral problems and difficulty making friends, or who are depressed, may be more inclined to use social media in negative and sometimes aggressive ways, or not to use such sites at all.

The study appears in the January issue of the journal Developmental Psychology.

"We're finding that the interactions young adults are having on their Facebook and MySpace pages are more similar to than different from the interactions they have in their face-to-face relationships," said U.Va. psychology professor Amori Yee Mikami, the study's lead author. "So parents of well-adjusted teens may have little to worry about regarding the way their children behave when using social media. It's likely to be similar positive behavior."

However, Mikami warns, teens with behavioral problems or who have difficulty maintaining positive friendships may be more likely to use social media sites in negative ways, just as they may behave negatively in their face-to-face relationships. Negative use of the sites would include using excessive profanity, making hostile remarks or aggressive gestures, or posting nude photographs of themselves or others. They also have fewer supportive relationships with their Facebook and MySpace friends. But this group also is less inclined to use social media at all.

Source: Science Daily
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100125173450.htm

Canadian Study Finds Correlation Between Teen Drug, Alcohol Use and Increased Sexual Activity

A new study from the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada (IMFC) revealed that teenagers who use drugs, alcohol and smoke were more likely to report engaging in sexual activity. Also, the study found that increased time with a boyfriend or girlfriend was connected with a greater likelihood of being sexually active. Regarding teens' emotional health, a correlation was found between attempting suicide and being sexually active in girls.

Source: Institute of Marriage and Family Canada
http://www.imfcanada.org/article_files/Rated_PG_Part_II.pdf

Kids and Media Use

In its third phase (1st-1999, 2nd-2004), the Kaiser Family Foundation examines the extent and nature of media usage by young people in the "Generation M^2" study. In a sense, it tells us what we already know: that media is a powerful influence in the lives of our kids. Yet, this study sheds light on explosive growth of media use (largely due to advances in technologies that deliver it) by today's young people.

Significant findings:

• Over the past five years, there has been a huge increase in media use among young people.
    - Today's teens spend 7 hours, 38 minutes per day consuming media (an increase of 1 hour, 17 minutes per day from 2004. This amounts to a full-time job! (Even more when you take into account that the reported time consuming media per day is based upon 7 days a week - not the standard 5 day work week.)
    - When multitasking is accounted for (consuming multiple sources of media at one time), today's youth consume 10 hours, 45 minutes of media content per day! (An increase of about 2 hours, 15 minutes per day from 2004.)

• An explosion in mobile and online media has fueled the increase in media use among young people.
    - The story of media in young people’s lives today is primarily a story of technology facilitating increased consumption. The mobile and online media revolutions have arrived in the lives—and the pockets—of American youth.
    - Mobile media:
        • Cellphone ownership among kids increased from about 39% in 2004 to about 66% in 2009.
        • iPod/MP3 device ownership among kids increased from 18% in 2004 to 76% in 2009.
    - Television on new media platforms:
        • Kids have turned increasingly to watching television programming on mobile devices and online via computer.
    - Online media:
        • As new online media forms have increased (think YouTube, Facebook) kids use of these sources has increased.

• Youth who spend more time with media report lower grades and lower levels of personal contentment.
    - Nearly half (47%) of all heavy media users say they usually get fair or poor grades (mostly C’s or lower), compared to 23% of light media users. Heavy media users are also more likely to say they get into trouble a lot, are often sad or unhappy, and are often bored.

• Children whose parents make an effort to limit media use—through the media environment they create in the home and the rules they set—spend less time with media than their peers.

• Two groups of young people stand out for their high levels of media consumption: those in the tween and early teen years (11- to 14-year-olds), and Blacks and Hispanics.
    - The jump in media use that occurs when young people hit the 11- to 14-year-old age group is tremendous—an increase of more than three hours a day in time spent with media (total media use), and an increase of four hours a day in total media exposure.
    - Differences in media use in relation to race and ethnicity are even more pronounced, with Hispanic and Black youths averaging about 13 hours of media exposure daily (13:00 for Hispanics and 12:59 for Blacks), compared to just over 81⁄2 hours (8:36) among Whites.

Source: Kaiser Family Foundation
http://www.kff.org/entmedia/upload/8010.pdf

Young Criminals Anticipate Early Death

As Atlanta officials aim to tackle the city's safety problems this year, some of their toughest criminals to stop maybe young offenders whose desires to commit crimes are being fueled by an anticipation of dying early.

Georgia State University Criminal Justice experts Timothy Brezina, Volkan Topalli and economist Erdal Tekin, have released a unique study that indicates that although young criminals are aware of the risks of violent injury, death or punishment, the possibility of a shorter life span encourages them to focus more on the "here and now."

"It turns out that if you boil it all down the more you think you are going to die young the more likely it is that you are going to engage in criminality and violence," Topalli said. "This is the opposite of what most people think, because most people think that if you think you're going to die soon you become depressed and you wouldn't commit crimes."

Source: Science Daily
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100113104255.htm

Teenage Girls as Aggressive as Boys

Girls are starting puberty earlier and as a result are more likely to become aggressive teenagers, Queensland researchers have found.

The study found that at 14, girls were also just as likely as boys to be involved in fights, threats and stealing – reinforcing the perception that young women are behaving more like their male friends.

University of Queensland sociologist Jake Najman, lead author of the research, said children were experiencing puberty at earlier ages because of increasing rates of obesity.

He said while early puberty for girls was related to an increased risk of aggression in adolescence, the same could not be said for boys.

"The most important finding we have is that when we look at the overall level of aggressive and/or delinquent behaviour by boys and girls at 14 years of age, the girls were just as aggressive as the boys, they were just as likely to be delinquent," Professor Najman said.

"What we're seeing, I think for the first time, is that many of the more common aggressive or delinquent types of behaviours that exist in society are now being exhibited by females in much the same way they were exhibited by males."

Professor Najman said more research was needed to find why some young females were starting to behave like males.

"The argument that it's males doing it because they're driven by their testosterone fails because the same thing is happening in females," he said.

Source: Couriermail.com.au
http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,,26578316-3102,00.html?utm_source=YS+Update&utm_campaign=a980810c93-YSU_1_12_10&utm_medium=email&mc_cid=a980810c93&mc_eid=c59c563fac

UK Text Messaging Teens Use Only 800 Words a Day

A cautionary tale from across the pond...

A generation of teenagers who communicate via the Internet and by text messages are risking unemployment because their daily vocabulary consists of just 800 words, the UK's new children's communication tsar has warned.

Although, according to recent surveys, they know an average of 40,000 words, they tend to favour a "teenspeak" used in text messages, on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace and in internet chat rooms like MSN.

One poll, commissioned by Tesco, revealed that while children had the vocabulary to be articulate, the top 20 words they used included  “yeah”, “no” and “but” - accounted for about a third of all the words they used.

According to Jean Gross, England's first Communication Champion for Children who started in the post this month, the lack of range will impact negatively on their chances of getting a job.

“Teenagers are spending more time communicating through electronic media and text messaging, which is short and brief," she told The Sunday Times. "We need to help today’s teenagers understand the difference between their textspeak and the formal language they need to succeed in life – 800 words will not get you a job.”

Source: Telegraph.co.uk
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/6960745/Teenagers-only-use-800-different-words-a-day.html

Most High School Students Are Sleep Deprived

There seems to be a general consensus among experts that adequate sleep for teens is important for their physical and emotional well-being...and that most don't get the sleep they need. I'm aware that helping teens get the sleep they need is much easier said than done. But, given the importance of adequate sleep, I urge parents to make this a high priority.

Only about 8 percent of high school students get enough sleep on an average school night, a large new study finds. The others are living with borderline-to-serious sleep deficits that could lead to daytime drowsiness, depression, headaches and poor performance at school.

The study, which appears online in the Journal of Adolescent Health, evaluated responses from 12,000 students in grades 9 through 12 who participated in the 2007 national Youth Risk Behavior Survey.

The authors found that 10 percent of adolescents sleep only five hours and 23 percent sleep only six hours on an average school night. More females than males have sleep deficits as do more African-Americans and whites compared to Hispanics. Nearly 20 percent more 12th-grade students have sleep deficits than do those in ninth grade.

The findings of this study were consistent with those reported from the National Sleep Foundation’s 2006 Sleep in America Poll, the authors say, adding that that although no formally accepted sleep guidelines exist, the foundation defines nine hours a night as optimal for adolescents, eight hours as borderline and anything under eight hours as not enough.

Source: Health Behavior News Service
http://www.cfah.org/hbns/archives/getDocument.cfm?documentID=22165

Read the study from the Journal of Adolescent Health:
Prevalence of Insufficient, Borderline, and Optimal Hours of Sleep Among High School Students – United States, 2007
http://www.cfah.org/hbns/archives/viewSupportDoc.cfm?supportingDocID=873