Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret?

Mindfulness involves focusing on the present and attending to the ‘here and now’ of our lives. It is having a non-judgmental view and experiencing life ‘moment by moment’. It does not mean that we avoid thinking about the future, rather we attend to the present, and be consciously aware of our thoughts, emotions and surroundings

A thought experiment: Imagine your best friend just said something hurtful to you. How do you feel?

My generation, X, is not known for naming things.  Literally, our name says it all – X.  Insert any word here to identify us.  We are not eXtraordinary or eXtra-special.  Our reality bites.

The COVID-19 pandemic reshaped the world in unexpected ways, impacting daily life and prompting a reevaluation of societal functions. For young people, it brought both significant challenges and new opportunities, especially in activism and civic engagement. A scoping review published in the Journal of Research on Adolescence in December 2024 explores how the pandemic influenced youth involvement in their communities. Here are the key findings from that review.

Sheriffa Mahama¹, Karina Weichold², Nora Fehmer², Eunice N. Mvungu ³ & Misaki N. Natsuaki^4
1University of Ghana, Legon, Ghana
²Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, Germany
³Kenyatta University, Kenya
⁴University of California, Riverside, USA

Authors:  Murry, V. M., Stanton, C. A., & Gonçalves, C.

Teaching college students about adolescence can be a wild ride. Many college students are not that far removed from adolescence themselves which allows for a depth and breadth of conversation that can be fun and fascinating while also making me feel quite old! There can be drawbacks to such relatability between the subject topic and the students when discussions devolve into sharing stories of “well when I was a teenager…” While fun in moderation, these derailments do not further the scientific goals of a psychology classroom. To combat this, I tried to fill my Adolescent Development seminar-style course with structured activities to help my students make connections between their own lives and the literature on adolescent behavior.

Throughout the U.S. educational pipeline, immigrant students who are undocumented (i.e., immigrants who do not have citizenship, permanent-resident status, refugee status, or any of the temporary statuses provided by the U.S. government for long-term residence and work; Yoshikawa et al., 2016) are subject to institutional and interpersonal oppression (e.g., prohibited from speaking Spanish, treated as scapegoats, experience verbal abuse; Ayón & Philbin, 2017). These forms of interpersonal and systemic oppression limit the developmental opportunities for undocumented immigrant children and adolescents. Despite these adversities, immigrant students who are undocumented engage in everyday forms of resistance, which include covert actions that undermine power and enables them to persist in the educational system. Mentors and other adults may help undocumented students navigate the educational system and resist oppression. For example, prior research shows that mentors and other adults are integral in the college application process of undocumented students (Gonzalez, 2012; Gámez et al., 2017). We examined two research questions: