Weight is the Least of It By Arnell Hinkle

When it comes to youth wellness, we’ve been having the wrong conversation. In a culture increasingly plagued by obesity, we’ve been obsessed with thinness. Granted, healthy eating and exercise are part of the message. But the stated goal is most often weight reduction, and we place responsibility squarely on the individual. Nowhere is this more clear than with adolescents, who may be the most vulnerable to the flood of messages from print, TV and the Internet, to say nothing of peer pressure.more

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The Youth Crime Ripple By John Kelly
Amid shouts about a new wave, researchers see “mixed picture.”

Surge. Spike. A gathering storm. All of the above have been used in media coverage to describe trends in the most recent youth crime statistics – much to the chagrin of prominent juvenile justice researchers who convened last month to discuss the chatter about youth crime waves around the nation. Overall, arrests of juveniles dropped 2 percent from 2004 to 2005 more

Reading Disabilities Put Students at Risk for Suicidal Thoughts and Behavior and Dropping Out of School Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center

Youth who have difficulty reading are three times as likely to consider or attempt suicide, and six times as likely to drop out of school as students of average reading ability, according to this study by Wake Forest researchers. The study followed a group of nearly 200 public high school students for a average of 3.3 years. more