Are Bullies the Popular Kids?
Movies often portray teen bullies as hulking jocks or pretty cheerleaders—”popular” kids, even though being mean doesn’t have anything to do with being popular. Now, researchers from the University of California-Davis are finding there’s some truth behind that stereotype: As youth become more popular, they’re more likely to become more aggressive, too. The multi-year study followed students at 19 middle schools and high schools in North Carolina, mapping their friendships and patterns of interactions and asking, among other things, who picked on them and who they, in turn, picked on. They discovered that kids climbing up the social ladder tended to bully more. The more concerned they were with their own popularity, the more likely they’d be to bully or belittle students around them. Once students reached the pinnacle of popularity (landing in the top 2 percent of the school’s social network) or had fallen to the very bottom, bullying tended to stop. “By and large, status increases aggression until you get to the very top,” says UC Davis professor Robert Faris. “When kids become more popular, later on they become more aggressive.” (Time, L.A. Times)

Unintended Consequences
Want to cut down on the number of teen pregnancies? A story from England offers some advice on what not to do. For several years, some regions in England have been handing out free morning-after pills to women and girls who asked for them, hoping to cut down the number of the country’s unwanted pregnancies—particularly when it comes to teens. The plan backfired, according to a recent study from Nottingham University. “We find that offering the morning-after pill free of charge didn’t have the intended effect of cutting teenage pregnancies,” says professor David Paton, “but did have the unfortunate side effect of increasing sexually transmitted infections.” Indeed, teen birth rates have gone pretty much unchanged in areas in which the morning-after pills were given out, but STDs in those same regions have gone up 12 percent. In other words, the pills—intended to help teens be more responsible in their sexual activity—instead appear to be making them less so. “International research consistently has failed to find any evidence that emergency birth control schemes achieve a reduction in teenage conception and abortion rates,” says Normal Wells, director of England’s Family Education Trust. “Now we have evidence showing that not only are such schemes failing to do any good, but they may in fact be doing harm.” (The Telegraph)

Making Lemonade out of ADHD
We’ve heard a lot about Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. As a youth leader, you likely know someone—or lots of someones—being treated for ADHD right now. While children with ADHD often underperform at school and can be difficult to manage in youth groups, researchers now say there’s a distinct upside to the condition. Children who have it tend to be more creative. For the purposes of the study, researchers divvied the way we think into “divergent” and “convergent” thinking. When you think convergently, you essentially narrow down options until you come up with the best possible answer—the sort of thinking we employ when we’re taking a standardized test. When we think divergently, we’re thinking “outside the box” and pulling solutions from unexpected sources: This sort of thinking won’t likely up your GPA, but it might give you an advantage when it comes to writing a poem or performing on stage or even starting your own business. Students with ADHD tended to lag behind their less-distracted peers when it came to convergent thinking, but scored significantly better when thinking divergently. This creativity was especially obvious in areas where a lack of inhibition was considered a good thing such as performing on stage. (The Daily Beast)

Quote:
“I’m not perfect…I made a mistake…I’m disappointed in myself for disappointing my fans.”—Miley Cyrus, talking about an incident last year in which she smoked the psychedelic herb salvia from a bong. Someone took a picture of Cyrus smoking and posted it on the Internet. It was just the latest controversy Cyrus has found herself at the center of in her young career. When a journalist told Cyrus that she’s not doing anything that many teens haven’t done before her, Cyrus said, “But they’re not Miley Cyrus. They’re not role models. So for me it was a bad decision, because of my fans and because of what I stand for.” (MTV News)