Antes del momento de la “convocatoria de Gorgan” en el cuarto acto del episodio, a Kirk no le habían dicho el nombre de Gorgan, ni podría haberlo aprendido. Más tarde, cuando Kirk finalmente se enfrenta a Georgan, le pregunta el nombre de la aparición. Uno de los niños, Tommy (Craig Huxley), informa a Kirk por primera vez. “Es Georgan”, dice Tommy. “Él es nuestro amigo y es capaz de todo”.
El uso que hace Kirk del nombre “Georgane” aparece en el guión original y en la versión final transmitida del episodio. Fue un error que se coló en la producción. Orion Press asume que el error fue el resultado de un error de edición durante la fase de escritura del guión.
La resolución de problemas en “Star Trek”, por supuesto, es un deporte extracurricular vigoroso que los Trekkies practican a menudo, y a menudo de manera lúdica. de hecho, Autor Phil Farrand Montado Varios guiones finales para errores de “Star Trek”. En “La guía del quisquilloso para la próxima generación de viajes” (1993), “La guía del quisquilloso para los viajes clásicos” (1994), “La guía del quisquilloso para la próxima generación de viajes, volumen II” en 1995, y “La guía del quisquilloso a Deep Space Nine” Trekkers “en 1996.
Frand señala muchos otros errores obvios en “Y él guiará a los niños” más allá del error de Jorgan. Primero, Kirk parece haber abandonado a dos de los guardias de seguridad del planeta cuando el Enterprise partió con los niños. Ups. En otra escena, los niños ven imágenes de archivo de sus padres y el dispositivo de grabación se puede ver en las imágenes de archivo. Ups. Más tarde, Kirk y Spock entran en un turboascensor, sin recibir instrucciones de voz, pero llegan a su destino.
Children of the Sun burst onto the indie scene like a muzzle flash on a dark night. Publisher Devolver Digital dropped the game’s first trailer on February 1, showcasing frenzied sniper shots and a radioactive art style. A Steam demo highlighting its initial seven stages went live that same day and became a breakout hit during February’s Steam Next Fest. Two months later it landed in full and to broad acclaim. This explosive reveal and rapid release timeline mirrors the game itself — chaotic but contained, swift and direct, sharp and bright.
Though it feels like Children of the Sun popped into existence over the span of two months, it took solo developer René Rother more than 20 years to get here.
René Rother
As a kid in Berlin in the early 2000s, Rother was fascinated by the booming mod community. He spent his time messing around with free Counter-Strike mapping tools and Quake III mods from the demo discs tucked into his PC magazines. Rother daydreamed about having a job in game development, but it never felt like an attainable goal.
“It just didn’t seem possible to make games,” he told Engadget. “It’s like it was this huge black box.”
Rother couldn’t see an easy entry point until the 2010s, when mesh libraries and tools like GameMaker and Unity became more accessible. He discovered a fondness for creating 3D interactive art. But aside from some free online Javascript courses, he didn’t know how to program anything, so his output was limited.
“I dabbled into it a little bit, but then got kicked out. Again,” Rother said. “It was just like the whole entrance barrier was so big.”
René Rother
Rother pursued graphic design at university and he found the first two years fulfilling, with a focus on classical art training. By the end of his schooling, though, the lessons covered practical applications like working with clients, and Rother’s vision of a graphic design career smashed into reality.
“There was an eye-opening moment where I felt like, this is not for me,” Rother said.
In between classes, Rother was still making games for himself and for jams like Ludum Dare, steadily building up his skillset and cementing his reputation in these spaces as a master of mood.
“Atmospheric kind of pieces, walking simulators,” Rother said, recalling his early projects. “Atmosphere was very interesting to me to explore. But I never thought that it was actually something that could turn into a game. I never thought that it would become something that can be sold in a way that it’s actually a product.”
René Rother
By the late 2010s Rother decided he was officially over graphic design and ready to try a job in game development. He applied to a bunch of studios and, in the meantime, picked up odd jobs at a supermarket and as a stagehand, setting up electronics. He eventually secured a gig as a 3D artist at a small studio in Berlin. Meanwhile, his pile of game jam projects and unfinished prototypes continued to grow.
“In that timeframe, Children of the Sun happened,” Rother said.
In Children of the Sun, players are The Girl, a woman who escaped the cult that raised her and is now enacting sniper-based revenge on all of its cells, one bullet at a time. In each round, players line up their shot and then control a single bullet as it ricochets through individual cult members. The challenge lies in finding the most speedy, efficient and stylish path of death, earning a spot at the top of the leaderboards.
“It was just a random prototype I started working on,” Rother said. “And one Saturday morning I was thinking, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing with my life.’” With an atmospheric prototype and a head full of ennui, Rother emailed Devolver Digital that same day about potentially publishing Children of the Sun.
“The response was basically, ‘The pitch was shit but the game looks cool,’” Rother said. “And then it became a thing.”
René Rother
Visually, Children of the Sun is dazzling. It has a sketchy 3D art style that’s covered in bruise tones, with dark treelines, glowing yellow enemies and layers of texture. Every scene looks like The Girl just took a hit of adrenaline and her senses are on high alert, lending a hectic sense of hyper-vigilance to the entire experience. It’s a game built on instinct.
“I didn’t make any mood boards,” Rother said. “I didn’t prepare [for] it. It was just like, oh, let’s make it this color. Ah, let’s make it this color…. This is something to very easily get lost in. I spent a lot of time just adjusting the color of grass so it works well with the otherwise purplish tones and these kinds of things. I spent way too much time on the colors.”
Children of the Sun went through multiple visual iterations where Rother played with contrast, depth, fog density and traditional FPS color palettes, before landing on the game’s dreamlike and neon-drenched final form. The residue of this trial and error is still visible beneath Children of the Sun’s frames, and that’s exactly how Rother likes it.
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The visual evolution of Children of the Sun
Screenshots of the game in development
“I see it as a big compliment, actually,” he said. “In paintings, when we talk about visual art, I really like when you can see the brushstrokes. I like when you can still see the lines of the pencil before the painting got made. I like the roughness. I wanted everything to be rough. I didn’t want it to be polished.”
Rother picked up the game’s soundtrack collaborator, experimental ambient composer Aidan Baker, the same way he hooked up with Devolver. Rother was a fan of Baker and his band Nadja, and he wanted a similar droning, slowcore vibe as a backdrop for Children of the Sun. On a whim, Rother sent Baker a casual message asking if he’d like to make music for a video game.
“He was like, ‘Well I’ve never done it, so I don’t know,’” Rother remembered. “So we met one evening and then afterwards he was like, ‘Yeah, let’s just do it.’ Instead of just emulating something that I like in the game, I somehow managed to get straight to the source of it. And that was a really nice experience.”
For Rother, Children of the Sun has been a lesson in trusting his gut. He hasn’t found the proper word in English or German to describe the atmosphere he created in the game, but it’s something close to melancholy, spiked with an intense coiled energy and bright, psychedelic clarity. He just knows that it feels right — visuals, music, mechanics and all.
“That’s kind of how I live my life,” Rother said. “Not that I’m, like, super spontaneous or just flip-flopping around with opinions or these kinds of things. It’s more about doing things that feel right to me without necessarily knowing why.”
When he booted up that Quake III demo disc and started making 3D vignettes for game jams, Rother didn’t realize he was building the path that would eventually lead him to a major publishing deal, a collaboration with a musician he admires, a big Steam release and a game about cult sniping called Children of the Sun. When Rother takes a moment to survey his current lot in life, he feels lucky, he said.
René Rother
“I feel like in the last three years, somehow, lots of things fell into my lap,” Rother said. “Although I still had to do something for it. I needed to be prepared for this moment, that required work.… But in the time where I prepared myself, I was not aware that I was preparing myself. So that’s how the feeling of luck gets amplified a bit more.”
“Luck” is one way to describe it, but “artistic instinct” might be just as fitting. Children of the Sun is available now on Steam for $15.
In today’s digital-first environment children are being routinely exposed to harmful, age-restricted and even illegal content online. The continued proliferation of smart devices and easy, anywhere access to user-generated content (UGC) through social media and chat platforms is only exacerbating the issue.
At the tap of a button, individuals can now be exposed to more adult, extreme and illegal content than ever before. And in the UK it has been revealed that children themselves are now the biggest perpetrators of sexual abuse against children (52%).
The UK’s National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) has directly correlated this trend with the ease of access young people have to the internet via smartphones. While the IWF has revealed that the development of new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) will only exacerbate the creation, distribution and ease of access to illegal content such as Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) further.
Safer Internet Day brings together thousands of young people, parents and organizations each year to raise awareness of how children can stay safe online. It provides an opportunity to bring the conversation and enforcement of safer practices to the mainstream, helping to protect children from inappropriate or illegal content and visiting the dark web.
This year it must also become a springboard for businesses to enhance their online age assurance and content moderation to ensure they are doing their utmost to protect the young and vulnerable.
Michal Karnibad
Ease of Access in an online world
While the internet’s easy accessibility has brought numerous benefits, the truth is that as a result of its rapid, and often unregulated development, children now have unprecedented access to age restricted and illegal online content.
This is naturally a leading concern for parents, with research from Ofcom revealing that 75% worry about their children seeing inappropriate content when online. 73% specified this as adult or sexual content.
Not only is the viewing of this content a horrific occurrence in itself, but it also leads to a detrimental impact on children’s longer-term wellbeing and mental health, as well as warping young people’s views on sex and appropriate behavior.
Many popular social media sites permit users to create accounts from just 13 years of age, despite the fact that age-restricted and illegal content can be accessed and shared. This, paired with the camera and video capabilities of modern smart devices, makes it all too easy for users to produce, upload and view inappropriate content quickly.
The digital world therefore needs to catch up with the offline world, where viewing an individual’s documentation and physical appearance is the norm, making it far easier and practical for authorities to restrict them from accessing age-restricted products and content.
Age assurance and content moderation
To overcome these challenges, organizations must rapidly deploy and enhance their age assurance and content moderation infrastructure. The advent of technologies such as AI has made it far easier and practical than ever before to identify and stamp out illegal content online at scale, accurately and at a low cost.
With regulatory guidance on online safety measures still forthcoming, organizations have historically had little business incentive to implement these technologies. But the wellbeing of our young people is at stake. Rather than pointing fingers now is the time to implement pragmatic solutions to solve the issue of how we best protect children online. Businesses should be engaging and partnering with subject matter experts in this area, including the regulators and safety tech providers. This way we can build an ecosystem of effective solutions that when implemented truly provide protection to young people when they go online.
With a plethora of age assurance solutions such as email address age estimation now out there, businesses have the tools at their disposal to verify the age of customers with minimal friction. At the same time, content moderation tools now enable the analysis of uploaded or live-streamed content in real-time, before it is published, providing instant solutions that flag or remove illegal material.
Furthermore the implementation of proactive solutions such as uploader and participant verification facilitate consent and reduce the risk of revenge porn, intimate image abuse, exploitation, slavery and sex trafficking.
Safety and privacy
Despite these available tools, work still needs to be done to protect children online and remove illegal content from sites. This challenge is often exacerbated by the ongoing safety and privacy debate, where technology companies and social media firms state the importance of encryption in keeping user data safe. The problem with encryption, however, is that it can be abused by bad actors to distribute and circulate age-restricted or illegal content online.
This is a debate which will only grow in prominence over the next few months, especially now that the UK’s Online Safety Act has come into law. Fortunately, as new privacy preserving authentication tools emerge, such as email address, organizations will be able to mitigate this concern. This is something which was specifically called out in recent guidance from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the body that regulates both privacy (GDPR in the UK) and online content.
It’s only logical therefore that while the regulators push out these new robust laws, and social media and technology firms adapt to the changes, businesses become responsible for their own actions. This means taking the lead on implementing age assurance and content moderation tools that drive meaningful change across their industries. Safer Internet Day provides the perfect opportunity to start doing this.
This article was produced as part of TechRadarPro’s Expert Insights channel where we feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today. The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/news/submit-your-story-to-techradar-pro
Children of the Sun is a bullet-bending puzzle game set in a trippy world of cults and revenge, and it’s due to hit PC via Steam on April 9. In Children of the Sun, players line up a single sniper shot and then control the bullet as it ricochets among the cultists in their sights. The goal is to take everyone out with the most speed, elegance and creativity, curving the bullet around the environment and through objects as the targets attempt to flee in slow motion. It’s a repeatable, satisfying set of mechanics.
It’s not all senseless violence, either. The sniper is called The Girl, and she’s a former cult member who grew up as a victim of its brainwashing. She’s now on a mission to dismantle the cult, member by member and bullet by bullet, before finally taking out The Leader. So yes, there is violence in the game, but it’s not completely senseless.
The environments in Children of the Sun have a high-contrast, demonic glow about them, and the enemies appear as thermally lit skeletons as The Girl spies on them, lining up each shot. The visuals alone lend the game an unpredictable, adrenaline-fueled edge.
Children of the Sun comes from René Rother, a developer who’s big in the world of game jams. Rother has a history of building minimalistic games with loud messages about violence and death — or, sometimes, chewing gum. Children of the Sun is published by Devolver Digital.
Devolver Digital
The demo for Children of the Sun landed on Steam in early February and offered a seven-course taste of the game’s core loop. It was a breakout hit of Steam Next Fest; its demo clocked more than 60,000 players that week.
“It’s been a few pretty fun weeks after the first announcement of the game and the release of the demo,” Rother said on Steam. “There were lots of really nice words and great feedback coming from you. I appreciate everyone who gave the Demo a moment of their time…. So now that release date is public, I guess I finally need to actually finish the game. Ha!”
Four children have remained free of detectable HIV for more than one year after their antiretroviral therapy (ART) was paused to see if they could achieve HIV remission, according to a presentation today at the 2024 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) in Denver. The children, who acquired HIV before birth, were enrolled in a clinical trial funded by the National Institutes of Health in which an ART regimen was started within 48 hours of birth and then closely monitored for drug safety and HIV viral suppression. The outcomes reported today follow planned ART interruptions once the children met predefined virological and immunological criteria.
“These findings are clear evidence that very early treatment enables unique features of the neonatal immune system to limit HIV reservoir development, which increases the prospect of HIV remission,” said NIAID Director Jeanne Marrazzo, M.D., M.P.H. “The promising signals from this study are a beacon for future HIV remission science and underscore the indispensable roles of the global network of clinicians and study staff who implement pediatric HIV research with the utmost care.”
Advances in ART have significantly reduced perinatal HIV transmission, when a child acquires HIV while in the uterus, during birth, or through consumption of milk from a lactating person. If transmission does occur, children must take lifelong ART to control replication of the virus and protect their immune systems from life-threatening complications. Typically, interruption in treatment will lead to rapid resumption of HIV replication and detectable virus in the blood within weeks. However, in 2013, a case report described an infant born with HIV in Mississippi who initiated treatment at 30 hours of life, was taken off their ART at 18 months of age and remained in remission with no evidence of detectable HIV for 27 months.
Building on the observation that very early ART initiation may limit HIV’s ability to establish reservoirs of dormant virus in infants researchers began an early-stage proof-of-concept study of very early ART in infants conducted in Brazil, Haiti, Kenya, Malawi, South Africa, Tanzania, Thailand, Uganda, the United States, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Previous publications from the clinical study showed that ART initiated within hours of birth was safe and effective at achieving and maintaining HIV suppression. A small subset of children achieved sustained HIV suppression and met other predefined study criteria for interrupting ART. These criteria include a durable absence of HIV replication from 48 weeks of ART initiation onward, no detectable antibodies near the time of ART interruption, and having a CD4+ T-cell count (the main immune cell target of HIV) similar to those of a child without HIV. Children who met these criteria, were older than 2 years and had stopped consuming human milk were eligible to interrupt ART.
Data presented at CROI summarized the experience of six children, all aged 5 years, who were eligible for ART interruption with close health and safety monitoring. Four of the six children experienced HIV remission, defined as the absence of replicating virus for at least 48 weeks off ART. One of them experienced remission for 80 weeks, but then their HIV rebounded to detectable levels. Three others have been and remain in remission for 48, 52 and 64 weeks, respectively. However, two children did not experience remission, and their HIV became detectable within three and eight weeks after ART interruption, respectively. The two children whose HIV returned at eight and 80 weeks experienced mild acute retroviral syndrome (ARS) with symptoms including headache, fever, rash, swollen lymph nodes, tonsillitis, diarrhea, nausea and vomiting. One child had markedly low white blood cells, which are a type of immune cell. Both the ARS and white blood deficiency resolved either prior to or soon after restarting ART. The three children who experienced viral rebound resumed HIV suppression within six, eight and 20 weeks of restarting ART.
“This is the first study to rigorously replicate and expand upon the outcomes observed in the Mississippi case report,” said lead study virologist Deborah Persaud, M.D., professor of pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and director of the Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, Baltimore. “These results are groundbreaking for HIV remission and cure research, and they also point to the necessity of immediate neonatal testing and treatment initiation in health care settings for all infants potentially exposed to HIV in utero.”
The latest findings show that very early ART initiation has varying but favorable outcomes on control of HIV. While ARS was generally mild and resolved in both cases, the authors cautioned that close monitoring for this potential event is needed in ongoing and future HIV remission research involving ART interruption. The children participating in this study took ART regimens with medicines that have been part of standard first-line therapy for decades. Further research is planned or underway to understand how these observations could differ in children receiving newer, more potent generations of antiretroviral drugs, and to identify biomarkers to predict the likelihood of HIV remission or rebound following ART interruption. Additional studies are also needed to understand the mechanisms by which neonatal immunity and very early ART initiation limited the formation of HIV reservoirs and contributed to the remission observed in this study.
“ART shifted the HIV care paradigm, but treatment is a long road, especially for children as lifetime HIV survivors” said Adeodata Kekitiinwa, MBChB, MMed, emeritus clinical associate professor in the Department of Pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine, study investigator of record and clinical research site leader in Kampala, Uganda. “This trial takes us a step closer to realizing another paradigm shift in which our approach to ART could be so effective that it might be used for a season of life, rather than its entirety.”
This ongoing research is being conducted by the International Maternal Pediatric Adolescent AIDS Clinical Trials (IMPAACT) Network, which is funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, with co-funding from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).
The research was led by study co-chairs Ellen Chadwick, M.D., professor of pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, and Yvonne Bryson, M.D., professor of pediatrics at the David Geffen School of Medicine and Mattel Children’s Hospital at UCLA, and director of the Los Angeles Brazil AIDS Consortium. Dr. Kekitiinwa, Boniface Njau, M.S., study coordinator at Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre in Tanzania and Teacler Nematadzira, MBChB, site investigator at the University of Zimbabwe-University of California San Francisco Collaborative Research Program continue to lead the study teams overseeing care of children who experienced HIV remission. Jennifer Jao, M.D., M.P.H., professor of pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine has since assumed a study co-chair role with Dr. Chadwick. The full IMPAACT P1115 study team consists of hundreds of staff across 30 NIAID- and NICHD-supported sites in the 11 study countries.
Adults who had amblyopia (‘lazy eye’) in childhood are more likely to experience hypertension, obesity, and metabolic syndrome in adulthood, as well as an increased risk of heart attack, finds a new study led by UCL researchers.
In publishing the study in eClinicalMedicine, the authors stress that while they have identified a correlation, their research does not show a causal relationship between amblyopia and ill health in adulthood.
The researchers analysed data from more than 126,000 participants aged 40 to 69 years old from the UK Biobank cohort, who had undergone ocular examination.
Participants had been asked during recruitment whether they were treated for amblyopia in childhood and whether they still had the condition in adulthood. They were also asked if they had a medical diagnosis of diabetes, high blood pressure, or cardio/cerebrovascular disease (ie. angina, heart attack, stroke).
Meanwhile, their BMI (body mass index), blood glucose, and cholesterol levels were also measured and mortality was tracked.
The researchers confirmed that from 3,238 participants who reported having a ‘lazy eye’ as a child, 82.2% had persistent reduced vision in one eye as an adult.
The findings showed that participants with amblyopia as a child had 29% higher odds of developing diabetes, 25% higher odds of having hypertension and 16% higher odds of having obesity. They were also at increased risk of heart attack — even when other risk factors for these conditions (e.g. other disease, ethnicity and social class) were taken into account.
This increased risk of health problems was found not only among those whose vision problems persisted, but also to some extent in participants who had had amblyopia as a child and 20/20 vision as an adult, although the correlation was not as strong.
Corresponding author, Professor Jugnoo Rahi (UCL Great Ormond Street Institute for Child Health, UCL Institute of Ophthalmology and Great Ormond Street Hospital), said: “Amblyopia is an eye condition affecting up to four in 100 children. In the UK, all children are supposed to have vision screening before the age of five, to ensure a prompt diagnosis and relevant ophthalmic treatment.
“It is rare to have a ‘marker’ in childhood that is associated with increased risk of serious disease in adult life, and also one that is measured and known for every child — because of population screening.
“The large numbers of affected children and their families, may want to think of our findings as an extra incentive for trying to achieve healthy lifestyles from childhood.”
Amblyopia is when the vision in one eye does not develop properly and can be triggered by a squint or being long-sighted.
It is a neurodevelopmental condition that develops when there’s a breakdown in how the brain and the eye work together and the brain can’t process properly the visual signal from the affected eye. As it usually causes reduced vision in one eye only, many children don’t notice anything wrong with their sight and are only diagnosed through the vision test done at four to five years of age.
A recent report from the Academy of Medical Sciences* involving some researchers from the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute for Child Health, called on policymakers to address the declining physical and mental health of children under five in the UK and prioritise child health.
The team hope that their new research will help reinforce this message and highlight how child health lays the foundations for adult health.
First author, Dr Siegfried Wagner (UCL Institute of Ophthalmology and Moorfields Eye Hospital), said: “Vision and the eyes are sentinels for overall health — whether heart disease or metabolic disfunction, they are intimately linked with other organ systems. This is one of the reasons why we screen for good vision in both eyes.
“We emphasise that our research does not show a causal relationship between amblyopia and ill health in adulthood. Our research means that the ‘average’ adult who had amblyopia as a child is more likely to develop these disorders than the ‘average’ adult who did not have amblyopia. The findings don’t mean that every child with amblyopia will inevitably develop cardiometabolic disorders in adult life.”
The research was carried out in collaboration with the University of the Aegean, University of Leicester, King’s College London, the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) at Moorfields Eye Hospital and UCL Institute of Ophthalmology and the NIHR BRC at UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health and Great Ormond Street Hospital.
The work was funded by the Medical Research Council, the NIHR and the Ulverscroft Foundation.
Families, neighborhoods, and real-life bonds can help fight against social media’s “false perfection.” With the possible exception of facial plastic surgery and skincare, the world of medicine is not about trying to be perfect, but about dealing with flaws and keeping illness and death at bay for as long as possible, not about following a higher standard.
We doctors know too much about the human body to worship it. Our therapists call this worshipping of oneself “narcissism,” and they try to help their patients accept themselves as they are.
In this way, social media and apps on the internet are often our enemies. It’s weird to think that individuals on dating sites are obsessed with rich people with beautiful bodies and looks. Relationships that are based on faith and a good sense of fun are at risk.
On social media, many young women talk badly about marriage to avoid the pitfalls of having a child and a partner. Putting off marriage and starting a family to focus on a job is one thing, but making fun of the “institution” is another.
And the way social media makes people disagree goes all the way into politics and hate. In 2017, at a high school in California, an Instagram account was full of racist, sexist, and inappropriately mocking jokes. This caused a lot of tension in the town and led to multiple cases. Sadly, this is far from the only time this has happened. It was and still is too easy to attack, pick on, and ignore people who can’t hear or see you. The COVID pandemic made the problem much worse because people were stuck in their caves with only their cellphones and social media became their only way to talk to other people.
It wasn’t good for them, and the rate of worry showed that. Teenage girls were especially at risk. According to CDC data, almost two-thirds of teens felt very lonely and unhappy in 2021, and one-third of them actually thought about killing themselves as the number of teens who went to the emergency room for mental health problems went up.
It would be too easy to just blindly ask for more government oversight and rules, but this would probably lead to more stubborn refusal and not solve the problem at all. I agree with Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, who I have talked to several times and who says that beating loneliness and reconnecting with people is a good alternative to social media. I also like what Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia is doing with his Right Help Right Now program. This program is trying to fight the growing feeling of isolation and the mental health problem that is getting worse because of the outbreak. In an interview I did with him last week for Fox News, he told me that social media’s presence in every part of so many Americans’ lives only makes them feel more alone.
Youngkin also said, “Children belong to their families, not to the government. So, it’s very important to make sure that parents are always given power and the right to make choices with their child. We need to save this age, which is in danger of dying out. And at the center of it all is the part parents play in the lives of their children.”
Families, communities, and in-person bonds where kids, teens, and young people learn to accept and love each other “warts and all” are the best ways to fight the fake perfection of the internet and social media, which is luring and hurting our most valuable prize.
People can possess all kinds of different personality traits, and this helps to make us unique. Every person has their mix but did you know that some personality traits can make you ideal for fostering children in Portsmouth? If this is a calling you’ve been giving thought to as of late, especially since there is a big need for foster carers in Portsmouth, you may be wondering if you’ve got what it takes.
Here we’ll take a look at six personality traits that are ideal for foster carers to possess and can make them all the more effective and supportive in the role.
Compassion, Kindness and Understanding Benefit All
Compassion, kindness, and understanding are traits everyone can benefit from. Being able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and understand where they are coming from will take you far as a foster carer. These traits will also help a foster child to feel safe and secure.
Patience Can Take You Far in Life
Here’s another personality trait that can take you far in life, as patience can often seem like it’s in short supply. Caring for children requires patience every day, as you are acting as a role model and showing them the best way to deal with life experiences.
A Joy for Life Is a Wonderful Trait to Have
If you’re the type that has joy for life, then you’re likely the type that sees the positive in every situation. Again, what a great example to be setting for children, showing them to always appreciate the good surrounding them, even if you have to look a little harder to find it. A joy for life will also keep you open to new adventures, activities and experiences.
The Ability to Adapt and Be Flexible
Caring for children means you need to be flexible at all times, as each day is something new and you need to be able to go with the flow. Sticking to rigid expectations just isn’t possible when you add kids to the mix.
A Sense of Humour Keeps Life Fun and Light
Let’s face it, there’s no better way to deal with life than with a smile and a sense of humour. A sense of humour can make you a more approachable person, make you more relatable and help your foster child to open up to you and feel relaxed. It is often said that the best medicine is laughter, so why not aim to include it each day?
A Sense of Stability
Another important personality trait is a sense of stability in your life. Children thrive when they have a routine or schedule that they can stick to and count on, and this requires stability. A sense of stability is also something that fostering agencies in Portsmouth will be looking for when you apply to become a foster carer.
If you’re scanning through this list of personality traits and ticking off each one, then it could be worth looking into fostering.
