We’re seeing serious robberies committed by kids who really aren’t fully mature in the way they think but they’re carrying guns which makes them very dangerous …

[King County, WA Prosecutor Dan] Satterberg is focusing on research that shows juvenile brains are not yet fully developed. He cites studies that show adolescents must rely heavily on emotional centers of the brain when making decisions.[Source: KCPQ-TV (Seattle)]

Satterberg suggests that penalties for teens who use guns to commit violent crimes should be harsher, in the hopes that stiffer penalties would make kids think twice. Satterberg has lobbied for such changes to Washington state laws, but been told the change would cost too much money.

“Keep teens out of online chatrooms. Interestingly, older teens are more at risk of being sexually exploited because their Internet use is often unsupervised, and the teens are more likely to talk about personal and sexual matters than a younger minor. Younger kids can face danger from online predators because the teens have a more trusting, unassuming nature; troubled teens looking for an understanding adult or emotionally vulnerable teen girls also are at risk.” [Source: The Clinton Herald]

Many parenting experts suggest that families have a centrally located computer – somewhere out in the open, where online chats can be observed. In addition, consider limiting, or eliminating, Internet access on your child’s phone. Set up rules regarding Internet use, and explain them fully to your kids. Explain why you’re doing it, and also what the consequences will be for broken rules.

Professor Carmen Van der Zwaluw studied 430 children ages 11 to 14 years old, and found that entering puberty was related to sleep problems and later bedtimes, which in turn correlate with experiments with alcohol.

The study appeared in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.

Child health specialists from England and Ireland contributed to the report. They pointed out that the government already removes children from homes where parents fail to get treatment for chronic diseases such as asthma and epilepsy. They also point out that two thirds of obese adults report being sexually or physically abused as children.

“Childhood obesity can be seen as a failure to adequately care for your children by failing to provide a healthy diet and sufficient activity, whether through direct neglect or more subtly through an inability to deny children the pleasures of energy dense, fast food and television viewing,” according to the report.

Professors Patrick and Charlotte Markey studied 118 teenagers in terms of their personality factors and video game habits. If the teenager had three certain personality traits, playing violent video games was likely to make him more violent and aggressive. The three traits were high neuroticism, low agreeableness, and low conscientiousness.

“All of the incidences of violence, particularly school violence, linked to video games are all alarming; what should have surprised us more is that there are no more violent video game-driven violent episodes, given the number of youths regularly engaged in violent video game play,” the authors wrote in a report published in the journal Review of General Psychology.

They wrote that school shooters are usually described by others as “angry, mean, depressed, psychotic, unruly, anxious, aggressive, and hateful before the shootings.”