¼ teaspoon almond extract (optional)

Today, Radwan speaks about the harms of social media to teens and has joined a lawsuit against Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta Platforms Inc. that seeks to hold the tech giant accountable for the harms its platforms have caused to children and teens. Her daughter has recovered and is attending college.While parents are definitely part of the equation, most of the the teens and experts interviewed by The Associated Press pointed to schools as the key place where all children can learn about “digital citizenship,” the umbrella term that includes news media literacy, cyberbullying, social media balance and now even artificial intelligence literacy.

“We have sex education. We don’t have things about like online safety,” said Bao Le, a 18-year-old freshman at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. “And a lot of kids are dying of suicide, you know, text sextortion. So I think it’s really important the school also teaches this.”But while some schools offer digital literacy or online safety programs, these are still few and far between. Teachers already face pressure to teach the regular curriculum while also dealing with staffing shortages and funding issues. Not only that, but kids are often encouraged to be on social media if they want to participate in extracurricular activities and other school programs., but just as with parental bans, kids often find a way. For instance, at schools that collect the gadgets from kids in the morning, students say they get around it by turning in fake phones. To get around parental bans, they set up social media accounts on friends’ phones, computers or buy burner phones to keep using after they have turned in their official phone.

“Hope is not a strategy. And pretending that (social media) doesn’t exist is also not a strategy, because we have to deal with real life,” said Merve Lapus, vice president of education outreach at the nonprofit Common Sense Media, whose digital citizenship curriculum is used in more than 90,000 schools in the U.S. “Our kids are being exposed to it in some shape or form. They’re hearing about it with their friends. The pressure to feel connected has not changed. I mean, these are all pressures we felt as kids.”To really connect with kids, he said, it’s best to get deeper into the pressures they face when it comes to social media, and validate that those are real pressures.

“I think that’s one of the challenges right now, is that it becomes the center of attention only when it’s problematic,” Lapus said. “And so we frame these tools as only problematic tools very easily, very quickly, and our kids will say, you just don’t get it, I can’t talk to you about these things because you don’t understand.”

Over the past decade or so, nonprofits and advocacy groups — many run by young people who emerged from their own struggles with social media — have popped up to offer help.in 2022, it triggered a Missouri law to take effect banning most abortions. But abortion-rights activists gathered initiative petition signatures to reverse that.

Last November, Missouri voters narrowly approved a constitutional amendment guaranteeing a right to abortion until fetal viability, generally considered. The amendment also allows later abortions to protect the life or health of pregnant women and creates a “fundamental right to reproductive freedom” that includes birth control, prenatal and postpartum care and “respectful birthing conditions.”

A limited number of surgical abortions have since occurred in Missouri, butwhile Planned Parenthood wrangles with the state over abortion regulations.