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[wp-yahoo-style-1042-yahoopa-blog]

Dr. Pimple Popper on the 3 questions you should always ask your dermatologist

Today marks the start of skin cancer awareness month, an important time to spotlight a disease which one in five Americans will develop by the age of 70. This year, the focus is on UV rays. According to the American Cancer Society, UV rays — present both in sunlight and tanning beds — not only damage the skin itself (e.g. wrinkles), they actually damage skin cells’ DNA.

To help prevent this exposure, the American Academy of Dermatology has created an educational video titled Do You Use Protection? In it, they offer some best practices for avoiding UV rays, including seeking shade during peak sun hours, wearing protective clothing and using broad-spectrum 30+ SPF sunscreen.

While those are helpful tips for when you’re not at a doctor’s office, Sandra Lee, M.D., board-certified dermatologist famously known as “Dr. Pimple Popper” has some tips for when you are. Here are the three questions she says you should always ask your dermatologist.

1) Where did you get your training?

“We take many years of training to complete and really understand dermatology. I did four years of medical school after college I did four years of residency,” Lee tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “I finished when I was 34 years old. I think especially on social media there’s a lot of misrepresentation out there. So I really think it’s important if someone is taking care of your skin and trying to diagnose skin cancer... it’s really important for you to know what sort of training they have.”

2) What is your speciality?

“I’m a surgeon and I’m also a cosmetic dermatologist but there are many different kinds,” Lee says. “I think it’s important to know what kind of doctor you’re seeing… [that way] you’re then going to be able to find a dermatologist who is going to be able to take really good care of you.”

3) When should I come back?

“Ask your dermatologist when you should come back. Follow up visits are really important especially if you’re having maintenance, full-body exams,” Lee advises. “It really depends on your family history, your skin type. Some people might come back every three months; some people might come back every one or two years. But it’s important to establish a relationship.”

For more information about Skin Cancer Awareness month go to the American Academy of Dermatology.

Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:

Woman's tanning bed habit led to a hole in her face: 'It's not worth dying'

Dr. Pimple Popper shares her secrets to getting perfect skin

Men now have a higher rate of skin cancer deaths than women — here's why

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[bethevenyc]

New Zealand's prime minister is pregnant. What will leading a country with a newborn look like?

New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, has only been in office since October. And now, along with still getting used to her new position of power, she’ll have another job to learn from scratch: motherhood.

On Friday, Ardern, 37, announced that she is pregnant, expecting her first child in June, and that her husband, Clarke Gayford, planned to take a leave from his job as the host of a TV show about fishing to be a stay-at-home dad.

She made her announcement at a news conference, saying that she was “not the first woman to multitask,” nor the first “to work and have a baby,” but adding that she’d suffered from “pretty bad” morning sickness in her first trimester, and that she wasn’t sure “how the government cars would feel about having a baby seat in them.”

This is not the first time a woman leading a nation has given birth in office, though it is a very rare occurrence indeed — the most recent time being in 1990, when the late Benazir Bhutto, former prime minister of Pakistan, gave birth to her daughter Bakhtawar. Here, a look back at all the times a woman gave birth while leading a country.

Jacinda Ardern, Prime Minister of New Zealand

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and her partner Clarke Gayford are expecting their first child in June 2018, an announcement they made on Friday. Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters will take on Prime Ministerial duties for six weeks after the baby is born. (Photo: Getty Images)

Source: Yahoo Lifestyle

Jacinda Ardern, center, after her party’s October victory. She is the third woman to lead her country. (Photo: Getty Images)

Source: Yahoo Lifestyle

Benazir Bhutto, Prime Minister of Pakistan

Former Prime Minister of Pakistan Benazir Bhutto, who served from 1988 to 1990, and again from 1993 to 1996 (and was assasinated in 2007) is the only other leader in modern history to give birth while in office. (Photo: Getty Images)

Source: Yahoo Lifestyle

When Bhutto, who was the first-ever female leader of a Muslim nation, gave birth to her daughter Bakhtawar (shown here) in 1990, she had been in office just a little over a year. Her first child was born just a couple of months before she took office in 1988, and her third child was also an infant when she took office for the second time. (AP Photo)

Source: Yahoo Lifestyle

Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom

The current Queen of the United Kingdom had two of her four children — Prince Andrew and Prince Edward — during her reign. She is seen here on the grounds of Balmoral Castle with Prince Charles, Princess Anne, and Prince Philip, who holds baby Prince Andrew on his lap. (Photo: Getty Images)

Source: Yahoo Lifestyle

Princess Elizabeth, future Queen Elizabeth II, is shown gazing at her month-old son Prince Charles. (Photo: Getty Images)

Source: Yahoo Lifestyle

Queen Victoria

Queen Victoria (1819-1901) had nine children during her reign, which began in 1837. Her first child, also Victoria, was born in 1840, and her youngest, Beatrice (pictured here with her mother) was born 17 years later in 1857. (Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Source: Yahoo Lifestyle

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert shown with some of their children in 1846, in a painting by F. Winterhalter. (Photo: Culture Club/Getty Images)

Source: Yahoo Lifestyle

[rachel-bertsche]

Why some schools are suspending kids for joining gun control walkouts

Students across the country participated in school walkouts this week to demand action on gun violence, and two more widespread walkouts are planned for the next two months — on March 14, to mark one month since the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, and on April 20, the 19th anniversary of the Columbine shooting. (A major Washington, D.C., demonstration, the March for Our Lives, is set for March 24.)

The protests are drawing attention not just for their impassioned plea, but for the ways in which various school districts are reacting to the organized action.

Students expressing anger over gun violence in the form of protests are being met with disciplinary action at some schools. (Photo: Getty Images)

Consequences for students participating in walkouts have been drastically different across the country. At Needville High School in Texas, students were threatened with a three-day suspension if they participated in the walkouts, according to a note posted on the school’s Facebook page by Needville Independent School District superintendent Curtis Rhodes.

“The Needville ISD is very sensitive to violence in schools, including the recent incident in Florida,” the note said. “There is a ‘movement’ attempting to stage walkouts/disruptions of the school through social media and/or media outlets. Please be advised that the Needville ISD will not allow a student demonstration during school hours for any type of protest or awareness!! Should students choose to do so, they will be suspected from school for 3 days and face all the consequences that come along with an out of school suspension.”

The school’s Facebook page has since been taken down, but the note, which went viral after it was posted on Tuesday, was captured in screengrabs. “Life is all about choices and every choice has a consequence whether it be positive or negative. We will discipline no matter if it is one, fifty, or five hundred students involved,” Rhodes wrote, adding that even those who had notes from parents would not be spared from discipline, and asking the community to understand that “we are here for an education and not a political protest.”

Photo: Getty Images

Other school districts made similar threats. According to the Los Angeles Times, Steven Walts, superintendent of Prince William County (Va.) Public Schools, wrote an email to parents and students noting that there would be “disciplinary consequences” for “students who cause disruptions or leave school without authorization.”

On the other end of the spectrum, Jerry Kalina, principal of Papillion-La Vista High School in Omaha, Neb., joined his students for a 17-minute walkout on Wednesday, one minute for each of the Parkland victims. “I thought if kids are going to walk out, I want it to be controlled, and I want it to be a respectful situation in which our kids focus on the victims and their families,” Kalina tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “So I got on the intercom and we took a moment of silence for the victims, and I told the students that if they plan to walk out, that was their choice and they wouldn’t get in trouble.”

When the bell rang to end the class period at 11:55, Kalina says, about 250 kids joined him outside in 18-degree weather. “I roamed around the crowd — kids were worried, they had looks on their faces I hadn’t seen before,” he says. “I wanted to let them know that we are here for them, and to show some compassion and love. I didn’t want to be a dictator; I wanted students to know that hopefully this is the start of something that will create change.”

In St. Charles, Ill., administrators took a similar approach. “Once we were made aware of the walkout, the high school principal sent a message to staff saying that if a student tells you they are walking out, please allow them to do so,” Carol Smith, St. Charles School District 303 spokesperson, tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “We made sure there was supervision. Students met under the flagpole. They had conversations about what this meant, and when the 17 minutes were up they went back to school.”

Smith says that at St. Charles North High School, about 27 students participated in the walkout, and at St. Charles East, there were between 150 and 200. That discrepancy, Smith says, is likely because two St. Charles East students were killed as a result of gun violence just last year. “It’s been very, very difficult, so these students understood what they were doing,” she says. “As one of our students said, ‘We may not be able to vote yet, but we’re a movement. We’re starting to show people that we care and that we can make a difference.’ As a school district, how can we say no to that? How can we discourage them from doing something they are passionate about and they feel can make a difference [about] on a national level?”

Plenty of schools seem to still be hashing out how they will handle the upcoming walkouts. On Tuesday, Todd Gray, the superintendent of the Waukesha School District in Wisconsin, sent an email suggesting that those who participated in a walkout would face disciplinary action, according to the Journal Sentinel. By Wednesday, Gray had amended his message, explaining that students would be allowed to participate if given permission by a parent.

Legally, schools can discipline students who ditch class for any reason, according to a blog post by Vera Eidelman, a William J. Brennan fellow with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “But what the school can’t do is discipline students more harshly because they are walking out to express a political view or because school administrators don’t support the views behind the protest,” she writes. “In other words, any disciplinary action for walking out cannot be a response to the content of the protest.”

Much of the backlash against Rhodes, the Texas superintendent who threatened suspension, seemed to be the result of the content of his message. “It’s a quintessential First Amendment violation, and most Americans have an instinct about that,” Georgetown Law professor Heidi Li Feldman told the Washington Post. “What’s really weird about this is that they announced they will suspend people over the content of their off-campus protest. Content-based restrictions on speech are anathema to the First Amendment. So this looks like a total problem.”

Back in Omaha, meanwhile, Kalina says he believes that any good school administrator should react to specific situations rather than apply a blanket rule as moments like these come up.

“You have to use the common sense approach; you have to be compassionate. I could sense even as our day started on Wednesday that things were different; they’ve been different since this happened. Kids seem on edge,” he says, noting that 17 minutes of the school day wouldn’t be especially disruptive to a school that goes through seven five-minute class changes a day. “Young people need to be heard; we have to trust them and give them boundaries and a controlled setting and let them know that we’re here for them. I didn’t want to talk suspension and punishment — that’s not what my students needed to hear. They needed to hear the opposite — that they will be taken seriously, and they will be safe.”

Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle: 

Gun control rally in Tallahassee; Parkland students meet with lawmakers 

Teens hold a ‘lie-in’ at White House calling for gun control

Are school lockdown drills helping?

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[rachel-bertsche]

Viral support for bullying victims like Keaton Jones won't fix the bigger problem

When a video of Keaton Jones, a bullied boy crying to his mother about the torment he faced at his Tennessee middle school, went viral late last week, celebrities rallied in support. Actor Chris Evans, Tennessee Titans tight end Delanie Walker, and singer Katy Perry were just a few of the famous names who sent messages of support to Keaton in the days after his mother posted the video to social media. And it wasn’t the first story of childhood bullying to make headlines recently — just a few weeks earlier, 10-year-old Ashawnty Davis committed suicide after she confronted and fought with her bully and the video wound up online, her parents say. (That tragic response may have influenced yet another child’s suicide, this one of 8-year-old Imani McCray, say prosecutors.)

Photo: Getty Images

As with so many viral episodes these days, Keaton’s story took on a life of its own. As quickly as the outpouring of support arrived, so too did the backlash — photos spotted online of his mother and other family members posing near Confederate flags sparked an uproar, causing some of Keaton’s online supporters to turn on him. His mother, Kimberly Jones, spoke out, telling CBS News that these were “the only two photos on my entire planet that I am anywhere near a Confederate flag.” She went on to say that “I spent most of my life being bullied and judged because I wasn’t racist.”

Keaton Jones (Photo: Heather Jones via Facebook)

But the swirl around Keaton’s story, as is often the case when one viral episode dominates headlines, has shifted the conversation away from the one we really need to be having: Why is bullying still happening and to such a severe degree? And how can we make it better?

“Individual stories are important for galvanizing interest in and concern about the issue of bullying, which affects millions of kids every year. But when we get too caught up in the individual circumstances it is possible to lose sight of the forest for the trees,” says Robert Faris, associate professor of sociology at University of California, Davis, whose research focuses on teen bullying. “It’s good for people who are in the position to make important school decisions to have faces to put to these stories — they are motivating in a way that statistics never will be. But I try to take a broader view and understand why not just one kid experiences this, but why does it keep happening in very similar ways to millions of kids? What are the commonalities across schools and across kids of various backgrounds?”

The facts about bullying are grim: Between 25 and 33 percent of U.S. students say they have been bullied, and most of that bullying occurs in middle school, according to StopBullying.gov. Approximately 30 percent of young people admit in surveys to bullying others, and 70.6 percent of young people say they have seen bullying in school.

Ashawnty Davis (Photo: GoFundMe)

Faris says there are two different patterns of aggressive behavior, or bullying. The first, he says, is the typical scenario of one kid being defined as “different” and becoming an outcast. “What it means to be different is very subjective. A kid can get this label for whatever reason: weight, acne, poverty,” Faris says. “We see this process of ostracism — the vulnerable kid being left out and isolated and picked on — across cultures.”

The second type of bullying, Faris says, might be more dangerous. That’s when kids — often the most influential kids in the school — use aggressive behavior strategically, as a means of climbing the social ladder. “Often, that kind of bullying is subtle,” he says. “Kids don’t even think of it as bullying. They use terms like ‘talking shit.’ This often occurs within friendship groups or between friends, which makes the negative effects double, because they come with the feelings of being betrayed.”

But while there is a wealth of information about the prevalence of bullying in schools, there is less clear-cut information about how to prevent or stop it. “Many prevention programs have been tested in schools with modest results,” according to StopBullying.gov. “Others have failed to make a difference.”

Faris puts it more bluntly. “Most bully prevention programs don’t work. They rarely have lasting impact,” he says.

“There is all sorts of inflated rhetoric about bully-proofing your school, or stomping out bullying,” Faris adds, but he says the only way schools can come close to achieving that is to address and counteract popularity dynamics. “The fact that aggressive behavior can be rewarded with more prestige and more friends is really difficult for adults to counteract.”

According to Faris’s research, the most promising way to combat bullying is to help kids develop high-quality friendships. “One of the biggest surprises for me in the decade of research I’ve been doing is that the majority of adolescents have what I would define as poor-quality friendships,” he says, pointing out that few kids maintain friendships for more than a four-and-a-half-year period. Ask kids to name their five to 10 best friends, Faris adds, and less than half of those nominations will be reciprocated.

So why would improving these friendships help address the bullying problem? “Stable friendships provide support and anchors,” Faris says. “The logic of social climbing means you will have to let go of old friends. Kids who are locked into these friendships are less willing to make the sacrifices necessary to climb the social ladder.”

And strong friendships won’t just prevent you from becoming a bully, they can save you from getting bullied too, since the more strong connections you have, the less likely you will be deemed a singular “other.”

“A lot of research suggests that having at least one friend is strongly protective,” Faris says. “And when victimization does happen to these kids, they are likely to be less affected by it because they have a support system.”

Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle: 

5-year-old survivor of Texas church massacre just wants Christmas cards for the holidays

Sandy Hook mom and dad speak out in rare interview: ‘You don’t heal from grief’

Can rescue animals change the way we grieve?

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