The Australian invention empowering sick children through tough times

It might not seem like much, being able to choose what you wear. But for children being treated for life threatening conditions and illnesses, it’s more agency than they’re used to.

Regularly prodded with needles, drips and assessed by monitors, as well as being scanned, x-rayed and more, they often have little control over what’s happening – or being done to – their own bodies during hospital stays. It’s often a frightening, bewildering experience.

And it’s not just the sick children who feel powerless.

When tradie Jason Sotiris’s daughter was diagnosed with a life threatening illness as a young child, he was at a loss to help give her the strength and support she needed to endure.

Creating a hospital friendly range of clothing, known as Supertees, was the result. Designed to be MRI and PET scan friendly, the hospital grade garments provide medical staff with easy side and shoulder access to the patient while still looking like a standard t-shirt.

Starting from scratch and with no experience in the clothing industry, Sotiris trialled a number of designs and fastening options before settling on the end product.

But key to their success is the Marvel superhero characters that are printed on them.

Sotiris said the garments are designed to help put young kids in the best frame of mind as possible as they face the toughest times of their lives.

“These children have to face these things and there’s not a lot of choice for them,” he said. “We want them to be able to choose whatever makes them feel stronger.”

Available free to families of kids facing the toughest health battles, the Supertees are in high demand.

“What you wear matters, what you wear can represent you in a certain way and hospital gowns are a symbol of being unwell,” Sotiris said. “It’s something given to those who are unwell.

“We wanted to create something that someone would wear and make them stand out in a special way. How good would it be that something is so cool and fun that it makes healthy kids just a little bit jealous, because it’s usually the other way round.”

The Supertee is aimed at children from birth through to early teens. It looks like a standard t-shirt but is MRI and PET scan friendly, with side and shoulder fasteners for easy access.

But the benefits of the Supertee go way beyond having a desirable superhero costume.

Sotiris pointed to a joint study by researchers at University of Pennsylvania, University of Minnesota, University of Michigan in the US called The Batman Effect: Improving Perseverance in Young Children.

The study found that when four and six year olds ‘impersonated’ an ‘exemplar other’ like a superhero character, they showed much higher levels of perseverance when faced with challenging tasks. The findings of the study supported what Sotiris already suspected.

“So it’s not the child going through the MRI, it’s Wonder Woman,” he said. “How would she act in this situation? We’re trying to use the power of imaginative play.”

While Disney, who has the rights to the Marvel characters’ artwork, has waived licensing fees for the Supertees, the charity is not receiving further monetary support.

Sotiris is seeking high wealth individuals and corporate partners to help him achieve his aim of supplying Supertees to 10,000 seriously ill children around Australia.

“I don’t want parents to have to pay for them – they are going through enough,” he said. “Parents are often working less and navigating that with their employer, or they may have left their job to care for their sick child. It would be great to offer them something to make things a little bit easier.”

He is in talks with other community-minded groups such as the NRL and the NSW Police (to create a Tactical Cancer Fighting Unit Supertee) to extend the range and give more kids the mental boost they need.

Just as it is for any parent who has watched their child go through this experience, it’s still a very personal quest for Sotiris. His daughter, now 11 years old, finished treatment some time ago and her last scan earlier this year was clear. Giving back to other parents and children has helped him process his own difficult memories of that time.

“In 2018 I held my daughter’s hand in one hand and a Supertee in the other and I went back to the hospital,” he said. “I started replacing the memories I had of her treatment with these wonderful memories of helping these kids with the Supertee.”

You can support the Supertee initiative here.

They call themselves TikTok refugees—and the app they are fleeing to is a lot more Chinese than the video-sharing app whose U.S. fate now hangs in the balance.

After Supreme Court justices Friday seemed inclined to let stand a law that would shut down TikTok in the U.S., the Chinese social-media platform Xiaohongshu , translated in English as Little Red Book, has received a flood of American TikTok users. They are looking for a sanctuary or a way to protest the potentially imminent TikTok ban—never mind that they don’t speak Chinese.

Charlotte Silverstein, a 32-year-old publicist in Los Angeles, downloaded Xiaohongshu on Sunday night after seeing videos on TikTok about migrating to the app, which Americans dubbed “RedNote.” She described the move as a “last act of defiance” in her frustration about the potential TikTok ban.

“Everyone has been super welcoming and sweet,” said Silverstein, who has made three posts so far. “I love the sense of community that I’m seeing already.”

By Monday, TikTok refugees had pushed Xiaohongshu to the top of the free-app chart on Apple ’s App Store.

“I’m really nervous to be on this app, but I also find it to be really exciting and thrilling that we’re all doing this,” one new Xiaohongshu user said in a video clip on Sunday. “I’m sad that TikTok might actually go, but if this is where we’re gonna be hanging out, welcome to my page!” Within a day, the video had more than 3,000 comments and 6,000 likes. And the user had amassed 24,000 followers.

Neither Xiaohongshu nor TikTok responded to requests for comment.

The flow of refugees, while serving as a symbolic dissent against TikTok’s possible shutdown, doesn’t mean Xiaohongshu can easily serve as a replacement for Americans. TikTok says it has 170 million users in the U.S., and it has drawn many creators who take advantage of the app’s features to advertise and sell their products.

Most of the content on Xiaohongshu is in Chinese and the app doesn’t have a simple way to auto-translate the posts into English.

At a time of a strained U.S.-China relationship, some new Chinese-American friendships are budding on an app that until now has had few international users.

“I like that two countries are coming together,” said Sarah Grathwohl, a 32-year-old marketing manager in Seattle, who made a Xiaohongshu account on Sunday night. “We’re bonding over this experience.”

Granthwohl doesn’t speak Chinese, so she has been using Google Translate for help. She said she isn’t concerned about data privacy and would rather try a new Chinese app than shift her screentime to Instagram Reels.

Another opportunity for bonding was a photo of English practice questions from a Chinese textbook, with the caption, “American please.” American Xiaohongshu users helped answer the questions in the comments, receiving a “thank u Honey,” from the person who posted the questions.

By Monday evening, there have been more than 72,000 posts with the hashtag #tiktokrefugee on Xiaohongshu, racking up some 34 million views.

In an English-language post titled “Welcome TikTok refugees,” posted by a Shanghai-based Xiaohongshu user, an American user responded in Chinese with a cat photo and the words, “Thank you for your warm welcome. Everyone is so cute. My cat says thanks, too.” The user added, “I hope this is the correct translation.”

Some Chinese users are also using the livestreaming function to invite TikTok migrants to chat. One chat room hosted by a Chinese English tutor had more than 179,900 visits with several Americans exchanging cultural views with Chinese users.

ByteDance-owned TikTok isn’t available in China but has a Chinese sister app, Douyin. American users can’t download Douyin, though; unlike Xiaohongshu, it is only accessible from Chinese app stores.

On Xiaohongshu, Chinese users have been sharing tutorials and tips in English for American users on how to use the app. Meanwhile, on TikTok, video clips have also multiplied over the past two days teaching users the correct pronunciation of Xiaohongshu—shau-hong-SHOO—and its culture.

Xiaohongshu may be new to most Americans, but in China, it is one of the most-used social-media apps. Backed by investors like Chinese tech giants Tencent Holdings and Alibaba Group , Xiaohongshu is perhaps best described as a Chinese mix of Instagram and Reddit and its users increasingly treat it as a search engine for practical information.

Despite its Little Red Book name, Xiaohongshu has little in common with the compilation of Mao Zedong ’s political writings and speeches. In fact, the app aspires to be a guidebook about anything but politics.

Conceived as a shopping guide for affluent urbanites in 2013, Xiaohongshu has morphed into a one-stop shop for lifestyle and shopping recommendations. Every day, its more than 300 million users, who skew toward educated young women, create, share and search for posts about anything from makeup tutorials to career-development lessons, game strategies or camping skills.

Over the years, Xiaohongshu users have developed a punchy writing style, with posts accompanied by images and videos for an Instagram feel.

Chinese social-media platforms are required to watch political content closely. Xiaohongshu’s focus on lifestyle content, eschewing anything that might seem political, makes it less of a regulatory target than a site like Weibo , which in 2021 was fined at least $2.2 million by China’s cyberspace watchdog for disseminating “illegal information.”

“I don’t expect to read news or discussion of serious issues on Xiaohongshu,” said Lin Ying, a 26-year-old game designer in Beijing.

The American frenzy over a Chinese app is the reverse of a migration in recent years by Chinese social-media users seeking refuge from censorship on Western platforms , such as X, formerly known as Twitter, or, more recently, BlueSky.

Just like TikTok users who turn to the app for fun, Xiaohongshu users also seek entertainment through livestreams and short video clips as well as photos and text-posts on the platform.

Xiaohongshu had roughly 1.3 million U.S. mobile users in December, according to market-intelligence firm Sensor Tower, which estimates that U.S. downloads of the app in the week ending Sunday almost tripled compared with the week before.

Sensor Tower data indicates that Xiaohongshu became the top-ranked social-networking and overall free app on Apple’s App Store and the 8th top-ranked social app on the Google Play Store on Monday, “a feat it has never achieved before,” said Abe Yousef, senior insights analyst at Sensor Tower.

Run by Shanghai-based Xingin Information Technology, Xiaohongshu makes money primarily from advertising, according to a Xiaohongshu spokeswoman. The company was valued at $17 billion after its latest round of private-equity investment in the summer, according to research firm PitchBook Data.

Not everyone is singing kumbaya. Some Chinese Xiaohongshu users are worried about the language barrier. And some American TikTok users are concerned about data safety on the Chinese app.

But many are hoping to build bridges between the two countries.

“Y’all might think Americans are hateful because of how our politicians are, but I promise you not all of us are like that,” one American woman said on a Sunday video she posted on Xiaohongshu with Chinese subtitles.

She went on to show how to make cheese quesadillas using a waffle maker.

The video collected more than 11,000 likes and 3,000 comments within 24 hours. “It’s so kind of you to use Chinese subtitles,” read one popular comment posted by a user from Sichuan province.

Another Guangdong-based user commented with a bilingual “friendly reminder”: “On Chinese social-media platforms please do not mention sensitive topics such as politics, religion and drugs!!!”

The Australian invention empowering sick children through tough times

This specially designed medical garment draws on the ‘Batman effect’ to give young patients the strength to persevere

Chinese users of Xiaohongshu, or Little Red Book, welcome Americans fleeing a feared TikTok ban