Recently I had the privilege of sitting and talking with a group of adolescents who weren’t my own children or my friends’ children. These were teens who I knew well enough to where they felt comfortable with me, but not so well that I was privy to their ongoing emotional patterns or personal stressors.

Editor’s note: This first part of this review was published in the July 24 edition of The Smoky Mountain News The evidence is clear that social media is not healthy for girls under the age of sixteen.

When this column is published, I’ll be emerging from five days in the wilderness of Southwest Virginia. A group from First United Methodist Church of Waynesville will be participating in the Wilderness Trail experience from June 21-26.

To hear local skateboarding impresario Jared Lee tell it, there wasn’t much to do in Haywood County for young skaters growing up during the sport’s early boom in the 1980s. 

Question: I need some inexpensive snack ideas for my teens that they can make on their own...

Students in rural America already face many of the challenges experienced by their urban cousins — albeit with fewer resources to overcome them — but a group of Swain County teenagers want to change that by asking commissioners for a youth center.