A new study in the Journal of Adolescent Health reports that teenagers who experience cyberbullying are more likely to develop negative responses such as depression and addictive behaviors.

The study's lead author, Dr. Manuel Gamez-Guadix of the University of Deusto in Spain, said that it is important to understand how cyberbullying impacts adolescent health.  While many adolescents both become cyberbullying victims and also bully others themselves, those that experience cyberbullying attacks for six months or longer are more likely to experience problems such as depression or substance abuse.

Crucial information about Snapchat and leaked photos from our friends at Phones Review.   

What a week it has been for Snapchat leaked photos and users wanting to learn how to take a screenshot within the Snapchat app, which is a real-time chatting app on both Android and iPhone. The other reason this news has hit the headlines for most majorly news outlets is thanks to the kind of sexting photos appearing on services like Snapchat Leaked.

Snapchat leaked photos and websites – two websites hitting the headlines this week include Facebook and a website called Snapchat Leaked. While some of the Android and iPhone owners using Snapchat might have thought every photo they took would be safe, it seems that a Facebook page and website called Snapchat Leaked has been posting these pictures after taking screenshots that users first thought was impossible.

The Snapchat Leaked Facebook page was removed within the past 24 hours, although Google still has a cache of that Facebook page, and the website Snapchat Leaked seems to have gone as well with some dodgy looking redirects now in place.

Most adolescents and teens can’t imagine a world without Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites. As a parent, you may feel a responsibility to monitor your child’s social media use, and that makes sense.

However, it’s important to make a distinction between necessary monitoring, which you’re doing for your child’s safety, and simply impinging on their social life and interactions with their friends. Facebook for kids is a form of interaction – one that most children want limited to their peers as much as possible.

Here are 10 things that parents do on social media that might be embarrasing to their children: 

This is a post from our friend's over at SafeSoundFamily. They interviewed 17 Internet and mobile safety experts about how to keep children safe online, and Tim was one of them! Read the full post for some great information from the leading experts in digital safety.

Leading the way, the federal government created Stopbullying.gov. Essentially, this is a one-stop shop of tools and resources where parents and educators can search for information that they can use at home, at school, and within their own communities. This fantastic resource provides information on how to recognize bullying, how to respond when it is discovered, and how to prevent it from reoccurring in the future. 

While resources such as this have been extremely helpful in providing communities with support and information, some states have decided to take their anti-bullying and anti-cyberbullying efforts even further. This past year, the State of Delaware began considering legislation that would make it mandatory for schools in the state to report bullying and cyberbullying.

A few years ago there was an extremely disturbing reality TV show called “To Catch A Predator.” The show was all about luring and then capturing men, who thought that they were meeting underage children for the purpose of sex. The show was taken off the air in 2008, but sent a chilling message to parents.  The sexual predator has evolved and is no longer wandering around playgrounds with a bag of candy.  They have become highly sophisticated internet experts, hanging-out online and infiltrating the sites where your children go.  But is the online predator a threat?

Statistics

• A recent survey that was carried out about internet predators, and asked over 1000 children aged between 10 and 17 concluded that:

• A figure of one in thirty three children had been asked to meet someone secretly.

• Just under a quarter of all child targets were aged 10 to 13.

Cyberbullying has emerged as a new and pressing problem for schools and parents alike. The internet allows young people to participate in a world utterly removed from adult supervision: a world where bullying thrives and intimidation and harassment go unnoticed and unpunished by authority figures. 

Cyberbullying can take many forms – all of which can be potentially devastating. Cybullies may use threats of physical violence to frighten a child but, more often, they will use intimidation to cow and torture a child. They may either threaten to or actually post derogatory information about a child on popular social networking sites, like Facebook or Twitter, and they may use mobile devices to keep in constant contact with their target.

Cyberbullying, regardless of the form it takes, can be exceptionally harmful. Children and young adults are very susceptible to the emotional damage bullying and cyberbullying can cause, and, as Sameer Hinduja, Ph.D. and Justin W. Patchin, Ph.D. argue in their paper “Cyberbullying and Suicide,” cyberbullying can make young adults significantly more likely to consider suicide. Hinduja and Patchin find that this particular kind of adolescent peer aggression makes its victims twice as likely to attempt suicide compared with those who have not experienced it.

In today's day and age, bullying is not only done in person, but via the Internet as well. Physical altercations are just as harmful to a child as verbal ones, and a greater deal of harm can be done online, where there is a large network available for these bullying teens to put down their victims. They aren't just picking on them at school in front of a few others, but they are writing horrible things to them or about them on the Internet, spreading like wildfire, doing damage to the bullied child's reputation and psyche.

FACEBOOK SAFETY ALERT

Shared via Yahoo! News: The latest controversy over who can use your Instagram photos is far from an isolated event.

Facebook's photosharing site Instagram backtracked Tuesday on its new user privacy policy that would have allowed the site to sell users' photos to advertising agencies.

After a huge outcry from Instagram users on both Facebook and Twitter, co-founder Kevin Systrom wrote on the company's blog:

Not only does your child have an incredibly active social life, but now a huge part of their social life happens online, away from the prying eyes of parents.  It's probably unknown to you how many hours your child spends hiding under her covers after the lights are supposed to be out, texting away, or browsing through her friends' status updates.  And now, as if Facebook and Twitter didn't give you enough to worry about, there is Instagram and Snapchat; yet one more reason why social network monitoring needs to be a priority for every parent.

43% of kids say they've been bullied online and kids say that 93% of the cruel behavior they see online is on Facebook. Your child's first line of defense should be unfriending bullies or blocking them – but which is most appropriate, and what's the difference between the two? 

In a world where cyberbullying is commonplace behavior and online rudeness is par for the course, here are 3 simple arguments for your teen to avoid being negative online and be more positive in his posts and texts.

1. Negativity Makes You A Target

The media loves the phrase 'bullycide,' and the kids like Phoebe Prince who take their lives in the wake of cyberbullying are never far from the thoughts of parents. But are we doing our kids a disservice by stressing the link between cyberbullying and suicide. 

When I picked up my friend's 10-year-old daughter Gabby for art class last spring, I asked her how her day had gone. “Good,” she said. “A guy came to our school and told us about his son, who killed himself because he was bullied.”

Like most things teens might do to fill their time, online gaming has its pros and cons. Gaming improves hand-eye coordination, encourages problem solving, and can foster teamwork and social skills (in multi-player games.) On the other hand, too much of a good thing can be, well, bad and can affect teen kids safety. Several studies have followed the effects of gaming in teens, including the latest released by the American Psychiatric Association revealing a correlation between too little sleep and Internet gaming.