More than 30 percent of teenagers keep their worries to themselves instead of sharing them with family members and friends, according to a survey co-conducted by the Child Welfare League Foundation (CWLF), which has set up a toll-free help hotline for teenagers, which will be ready to take calls beginning next month.
Past surveys done by the Missing Children Data Resource Center, co-established by the Child Welfare League Foundation and the Ministry of the Interior’s Child Welfare Bureau, have shown that family conflicts and feelings that they are not understood are among the major reasons some teens run away from home, the foundation said.
“Missing teenagers are different from missing younger children. There are warning signs before teens go missing, such as a sudden increase in telephone calls received, and the likelihood of running away again after being found is high,” said Lin Wu-hsiung (林武雄), the office chairman of the center. “These teenagers feel that they don’t have anyone to confide in.”
The foundation surveyed children aged 13 to 15 and found that teens worry most about their school performance, with 57.2 percent of respondents indicating that schoolwork is their biggest concern.
Regarding peer relationships, 71.7 percent of the respondents said they worried about fighting with friends, nearly 40 percent said they felt stressed when friends made dirty jokes and 30 percent felt uncomfortable about the epithets they have been given by their peers.
“What is worth adding is that boys are more stressed by dirty jokes in the peer group than girls are, while the girls are more stressed than boys by a fight with friends or being excluded,” foundation president Joyce Feng (馮燕) said.
Sixty-seven percent of the surveyed teens said they felt stressed when their parents compared them to other children, and 36 percent claimed parental favoritism as a source of worry.
Questions about their appearance, personality and health were also posed, and the results show that about 20 percent of the teenagers surveyed dislike how they look, 21 percent dislike their own personality and 20.4 percent do not consider themselves healthy.
Thirty-three percent of respondents said they would rather keep their problems to themselves than tell anyone, the survey shows.
“The percentage of boys unwilling to share their worries stands at 39.15 percent, much higher than that of girls [at 29.3 percent],” Feng said.
“We encourage all troubled teens to call the helpline, which has many people willing to listen,” Lin said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching