The following is excerpted from an online article posted by StudyFinds.
The typical family spends just six hours together a week, thanks in part to long working hours and time spent diving down the digital device rabbit hole.
According to a survey of 2,000 British parents with children at home, most agree that work shifts hinder family quality time (56 percent). Other factors include homework (29 percent), household chores (27 percent), TV time (21 percent), social media use (20 percent), and after-school activities (19 percent).
When families are at home together, 37 percent admit they don’t set aside specific time to spend with one another. The survey finds half of the respondents think there are too many distractions in the home — particularly devices with screens — which impact quality time.
There’s plenty of research that shows how eating meals together as a family has positive effects on everyone. To that end, a quarter of parents would like to eat more family meals together to encourage conversation, as 42 percent say they struggle to initiate chats with their children. The most popular topics around the table when they do dine together are school (50 percent), TV shows (48 percent), and friendships (46 percent).
Source: StudyFinds
https://studyfinds.org/average-family-spends-6-hours-together/
The following is excerpted from an online article posted by The Hill.
Teen overdose deaths have doubled in three years, an alarming trend amid a historic decline in drug and alcohol use among high school students.
The main reason is fentanyl. Teens consume the powerful opioid unwittingly, packaged in counterfeit pills tailored to resemble less potent prescription medications. Drug traffickers lace pills with fentanyl to boost the black-market high. Dangerously addictive, fentanyl can be lethal, especially to children experimenting with drugs.
Deaths from drug and alcohol rose from 788 in 2018 to 1755 in 2021 among children ages 15 to 19, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, tabulated by The Hill.
“Fentanyl, it’s just a different beast,” said Dr. Hoover Adger Jr., professor of pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “And it’s so deadly. You have a milligram of fentanyl being equivalent to 50 milligrams of heroin, being equivalent to 100 milligrams of morphine. And right now, fentanyl is creeping into everything.”
Many sources point to fentanyl as the leading cause of teen overdose death. Between 2010 and 2021, the number of adolescent deaths from black-market fentanyl and related synthetics rose more than twenty-fold, from 38 to 884, according to a 2022 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Source: The Hill
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/3917058-teen-overdose-deaths-have-doubled-in-three-years-blame-fentanyl/
The following is excerpted from an online article posted by HealthDay.
Four out of five U.S. parents questioned in a large poll believe their preteen and teenage kids are clear on the risks that electronic cigarettes pose, and only a few think their child actually vapes.
Still, if their child did vape, would parents know? Nearly half of more than 1,300 parents polled said they would.
The findings, experts say, point to a potential disconnect between what parents think is going on and the real deal when it comes to vaping among American youth.
"These findings point to a few ways parents might be off," said poll co-director Sarah Clark.
For one thing, Clark pointed to 2022 data compiled by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that found that 14% of high school students and 3% of middle schoolers had vaped in the prior month.
It's not so easy to tell if your child is among them, cautioned Clark, a research scientist with the Child Health Evaluation and Research Center at the University of Michigan.
She noted, for example, that many parents in her team's poll "appear to think vaping would leave a detectable odor, the way traditional cigarettes do. This is not the case."
Many of the parents also believe "they will find vaping devices or supplies," Clark added. "However, disposable vapes are popular with youth, and likely are thrown away before parents have a chance to find them." Also, a number of them are disguised as pens, phone cases or watches.
"And many parents think their child would tell them if they were vaping, despite a long history of kids trying to hide this type of thing," she said.
The vaping poll is the latest release from the C.S. Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health. Conducted in February, it surveyed parents who have at least one child between 11 and 18 years old.
The Mott Poll Report was released on March 20, 2023.
