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A young representative of a largely ‘invisible’ group of children made his presence felt at a children’s rights seminar in Wellington today.
“A total of 90,000 – 10 percent – children in New Zealand have disabilities – but they still seem to be largely invisible to policy makers,” says IHC Director of Advocacy Trish Grant.
“Of these children, 25 percent of them live in benefit-dependent households; and 523 children with a disability are under the care of Child Youth and Family.” [Read more...]
It may come as a disappointment to hear this, but your friends are probably more popular than you are. New research has found that this “friendship paradox” may help predict the spread of infectious disease.
The friendship paradox states that if you take a random group of people and ask each of them to name one friend, the named people will rank higher in the social web than the ones who named them. On average, people name friends who are well connected and are unlikely to name a recluse.
But the popular people pay a price. Just as they get the gossip and the trends first, they also pick up the flu first, on average two weeks sooner than most others, research in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS ONE has found. [Read more...]
Being an adolescent now is very different from being one just one or two generations ago and we will not understand the teenage years if we project our own experiences on to them.
That makes it hard to be a parent, it makes it hard to be a teenager and it is making for some very difficult challenges for our society. It means we need to fundamentally rethink how we structure our social organisations to give every child the best chance of navigating their way through the teenage years successfully.
Sadly about 20% of New Zealand children come to significant grief during those years in ways that will affect their future lives, and we really have only the beginning of an understanding why. One of the problems is that we have treated this problem as series of separate issues: health, education, justice, social welfare…, rather to taking an integrated approach to understanding two questions. [Read more...]