Being a teenager in 2018 — I don’t know how it’s done. Imagine having the same list of pressures that you had as a high school kid — school, extracurriculars, chores, a social life often filled with angst — and then adding on the constant pull of social media, alerting you to all the things you aren't doing. (“Did you see that Gigi is building houses in Africa this summer and that Jonah has an internship at Snapchat?”)

When parents tell their teenagers to do something, it makes them want to, well, not do it. You know this if you have a teen, or if you have ever been a teen. Mums and dads can keep pushing, nagging, threatening to shut down Fortnite forever, but that only leads to short-term compliance at best.

You knew it would happen, but you never thought it would happen this fast: Your child has become a teen. And now, suddenly, everything about you is annoying or embarrassing - the shirt you're wearing, the way you walk, the questions you ask, the gifts you buy, the pace at which you spread cream cheese on your bagel. The kid can't stand being around you.

High school and university students are suffering from unprecedented levels of anxiety, and anyone raising teenagers these days knows they're coping with huge amounts of stress. This goes double for girls, who have what Rachel Simmons calls "role overload" in her book Enough as She Is: How to Help Girls Move Beyond Impossible Standards of Success to Live Healthy, Happy and Fulfilling Lives. Girls have to be smart and beautiful and athletic and ... they have to look as though playing all these roles takes no effort at all.

How we feel about our bodies - and how we treat them - is influenced by many different factors, but one of the biggest is how we were raised. As a longtime fat activist, I have heard tons of stories about well-meaning parents who'd talk about food choices in terms of weight loss rather than nutrition, or exercise as a moral imperative rather than a fun way to spend time. And their children grew up to develop harmful attitudes and behaviours because of it.

When I was a child there weren't many options for entertainment after school or on weekends: I could walk to a friend's house. I could watch TV on our 13 fuzzy channels. Or I could read. And so I read, and read, and read -- hours and even whole days would pass with no interruptions. I didn't have any choice but to concentrate.

What happens if your picky-eating child doesn't grow out of it? What if you're begging a 15-year-old to just taste a green vegetable? After all, by the time they're adolescents, kids have spending money, autonomy, and access to plenty of junk food. So what is a parent supposed to do when the strategies they used when the kid was six simply don't work anymore?

Some call it the "good kids' high." Children and teens are playing the so-called "choking game" - an activity in which they strangle themselves or friends for an instant shot of euphoria - believing it's cheaper, quicker, easier and more legal than buying booze or pot. The game, which goes by many different names, is not new, but in an age of stupid teen challenges on social media, hospitals are warning parents about it once again.

You may have heard of mums and dads giving their teenagers alcohol as a parenting tactic - rationales include 1) it's safer to buy it, serve it and monitor it in a controlled environment than to have them sneak off with their friends to scull goon in some sketchy parking lot, and 2) it normalises alcohol so they won't see it as something taboo and therefore something they must ingest in mass amounts as quickly as possible.

Getting kids out the door in the morning can go one of two ways: They wake up early and then dawdle, forcing a last-minute scramble, or they wake up late, forcing a last-minute scramble. I know very few people who get to school or day care on time and with serenity - maybe those folks who have a late start time and a short commute? But after a particularly spectacular late-fest in our household last week (late waking, breakfast eaten one crumb at a time, generic dawdling, forgotten backpacks), I decided to look around for some time-saving tips. Here are seven.

If you think your kids aren't getting any kind of sex education, you're wrong: They're getting plenty of it - from pornography. Doesn't that sound horrifying?

When I was a teenager smartphones weren't a thing, and neither was sexting. You aren't exactly going to take some tasteful nudes with a film camera and drop the roll off at your local pharmacy to get developed so you can pass them to your significant other between classes.

There are a lot of numbers you have to keep in mind when you're raising a kid: Their height and weight. How many millilitres of milk they're drinking, at first, and then how many fruits and veggies they're eating, how much outdoor play they're getting, and of course, how many minutes a day they spend glued to a device.

Anxiety in adolescents is on the rise, reports the New York Times: It is now the most common reason university students request counselling services, and numerous surveys indicate that kids in high school and university are feeling overburdened and overwhelmed. Hospital admissions for suicide attempts in the US have doubled in the last decade, and Times describes in-patient facilities for severely anxious teens.

Consent isn't all that complicated. And yet according to a study from the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, there's still lots of confusion over what "counts" as sexual assault. Case in point: Harvey Weinstein.

Adolescence is a rough time. Teens are acutely aware of relationships and social status, but they don't yet have the psychological and emotional fortitude to let social struggles roll off their backs. They also don't have the life experience to know that setbacks or failures are temporary and can be overcome.

If you've been alive in the last, say, 10 years, you've been subject to the spate of articles claiming that smartphones are destroying a generation. Today's young people, the argument goes, are more isolated, have shorter attention spans, and...

There's a reason teens are nodding off in class, and it's not just that last lecture on polynomials. They're sleepy. And a reason why they're sleepy is that school starts too damn early.

Few adolescent experiences are as liberating as being granted a smartphone The bond I felt with my first phone (a Nokia 6610), bordered on covalent and that was sans access to today's veritable buffet of games and social networks -- not to mention the internet at large.