4 Troubled Teens Blog

Gwenn Schurgin O’Keefe, a pediatrician and mother of two, knows that her children have been bullied -- and that they're not alone. Conservative figures estimate that 25 percent of kids are physically bullied at some point, and as many as 42 percent endure cyberbullying -- being harassed via the Internet or cell phones.

In an article for Gatehouse News Service, Dr. O'Keefe urged parents and other caregivers to make sure that they are paying attention to children who are -- or are at risk of -- being bullied:

What we fail to realize as parents it that kids don't categorize situations as we do. Situations we view as "not bad" or "mild" are still incredibly painful. In fact, in the case of bullying, it all hurts, and it's extremely challenging to categorize it.

We can look back after the fact in some cases, such as the tragic suicide death of Phoebe Phoenix of South Hadley High School in South Hadley, Mass., and recognize how intense that was with nothing being done.

However, all bullying is intense and does escalate. That means we have to pay attention to each and every report of bullying and stop it before it gets to the point of no return for the victim and before they feel so helpless that he or she reaches for some extreme cry for help ... Those extreme cries for help mean that the system and adults within that system have let that child down and failed to protect that child.

In 2008, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended that children under two years old should not watch any television. Now a new study finds that television watching may increase aggression in children under three years old.

• Dr. Jennifer Manganello and her colleagues conducted telephone surveys with parents of more than 3,100 children ages 1 to 3 years old.
• Sixty-five percent of the three-year-olds were watching more than two hours of TV per day, and in most homes, the television set was on more than seven hours a day.
• Dr. Manganello, of the University of Albany School of Public Health, found that "for every hour a child watched TV, his or her aggression went up 0.16 on a scale of zero to 30," after she screened out other factors such as living in an unsafe neighborhood or being spanked.

This study appeared in the journal Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

Researcher Steven Lehrer of Queen's University and Jason Fletcher of Yale have found a connection between mental health and educational success. In particular, Dr. Lehrer said, they found a direct correlation between poor mental health and the length of time a student stays in school.

An article on the website News-Medical.net provided the following details about the Lehrer-Fletcher study:

"Our study shows that poor mental health in children and teenagers has a large impact on the length of time they will stay in school," says Dr. Lehrer. He notes a large number of school-based programs have recently been introduced to prevent childhood obesity through lifestyle changes, but suggests the net should be cast more widely. ...

The findings provide strong evidence that inattentive symptoms of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in childhood and depression in adolescents are linked to the number of years of completed schooling.

Dr. Lehrer says this points to potentially large benefits from childhood and adolescent health interventions that have not yet been identified. "We focus on the link between health and education because unraveling the mechanisms linking the two will have important implications for policy design."

Teens that have been abused by dating partners are more likely to develop risky behaviors like eating disorders and suicidal thoughts. A team of researchers from the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis compared the behaviors of boys and girls who had experienced dating violence with those who hadn't.

"Both boys and girls who had experienced dating violence were more likely to display three or more of 10 behavioral and psychological health problems including binge eating, cigarette smoking, alcohol or marijuana use, depressive symptoms and low self-esteem, the researchers found. The relationship was particularly strong for girls."

Dr. Diann Ackard suggested that parents ask questions about teens' relationships; particularly how they feel when they're with certain people – which can help determine whether the teen is at risk of being abused.

Depressed teens who take anti-depressants as they undergo "talk therapy" are more likely to recover than those who take drugs or therapy alone. Talk therapy also protects them from having suicidal thoughts.

• A federally funded study involved 327 teenagers over a six-month period who were divided into three groups.
• The first group took fluoxetine (Prozac) by itself
• The second had only talk therapy
• The third group had a combination of the two.

Those in the combination group had the best outcomes. The ones who took fluoxetine alone had twice the number of suicidal thought compared to the other two groups.

The study was published in the Archives of General Psychiatry.

Young people define virginity and abstinence from drugs and alcohol in more liberal terms than adults, according to a new study in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

• In a survey by the Prevention Search Center and the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, researchers interviewed 1100 teenagers of representative age, gender, ethnicity and sexual experience.
• About one in four believe that a person who engages in anal or vaginal intercourse remains a virgin.
• A majority believe that abstinence is related to how long you avoid certain behaviors such as sex, drug use or drinking.

The authors concluded that adolescents probably underestimate the dangers of contracting sexually transmitted diseases from oral sex and other behaviors and could benefit from better sex education programs.

Children who bully other children may actually suffer from social anxiety, but it presents as hostility and not shyness, according to new studies from George Mason University and the Netherlands.

• Professors Todd Kashdan and Patrick McKnight of George Mason found that one in five people suffering from social anxiety reported elevated levels of aggression.
• The Dutch researchers from the University of Groningen questioned 481 children ages 9 to 12 years old about how much they liked their classmates, and which ones were bullies or victims of bullies.
• The researchers found that bullies wanted the approval of their same-sex classmates, and that they divided children of the same sex into potential targets or sources of affection. They are actually using bullying as a means to gain friendships.

"Bullies are very strategic in their behaviors," said Dutch researcher Rene Veenstra. "They are looking for attention and affection from their peer group."

"For people with social anxiety," the George Mason researchers wrote, "it may seem like a reasonable strategy to attack and reject other people before those people get a chance to do the same to them."

Gambling addictions run in families, perhaps for genetic reasons, according to a new study from the University of Missouri.

• Dr. Wendy Slutske and her colleagues studied 4700 twins from the Australian Twin Registry . In terms of gambling addictions. Men were almost three times more likely to be addicted to gambling
• One percent of women and 3 percent of men had the problem.
• Dr. Slutske found that if one identical twin had a gambling addiction, the other twin was more likely to have one too. This was not as true for fraternal twins, and implies a genetic component to gambling addictions.

"Like alcoholism, problem gambling is a complex disorder," Dr. Slutske said. "The answer will be in a collection of genes, maybe 10 or 100, we don't know how many, but each gene will increase the risk slightly for developing those problems."

The study appears in the Archives of General Psychiatry.