When should a child begin to train, and why the old fear was wrong
Most parents think lifting weights is dangerous for children. Twenty years of paediatric consensus disagree, and the reason has more to do with the nervous system than with muscle.
Issue 3
Joy, not trauma: what young people say shaped them most
Most of what shapes a young life turns out to be joyful and ordinary. A major new study shows what teenagers themselves treasure, and why the way they answer can tell you how they are really doing.
4 min read
Researchers asked more than a thousand young people, in their own words, to name the most important event in their lives. The large majority chose something positive and ordinary. And the way a young person answers turns out to reveal how they are doing.
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Every few years, researchers in Zurich opened their survey to the same group of young people with a single open question. Think back over the last few years, they asked. What was, for you personally, the most important event in your life? There was no checklist, no menu of traumas and triumphs to tick. Just a blank space and an invitation to answer in their own words.
A new study in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry has now analysed thousands of those answers, and the headline finding cuts against decades of research on life events. When young people choose for themselves what mattered, the overwhelming majority name something good.
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