Until recently, health care professionals and educators would look at an unruly or seemingly unteachable child as the problem, said Dr. Heather C. Forkey.
“We would’ve asked the question, ‘what’s wrong with them?’” said Dr. Forkey, chief of the Division of Child Protection at UMass Memorial Medical Center. “It turns out, we were asking the wrong question.”
The right question, which she said has a lead to a “revolution” in pediatric care and education, is not what’s wrong with those kids, but what happened to them that made them that way. Many of them, researchers have discovered over the past two decades, suffered trauma that not only negatively affected their emotional well-being, but also worsened their mental health, their physical health – and even altered their DNA.
Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, a national leader in the emergent study and response to that trauma – known as “adverse childhood experiences,” or ACEs for short – explored its wide-ranging impacts at a presentation at Worcester Technical High School on Tuesday night attended by hundreds of health care professionals and educators. The event was presented by the Health Foundation of Central Massachusetts, which together with the city school system has attempted to tackle the ACEs problem in Worcester over the past couple years with new intervention programming in the schools.
[For more on this story by Scott O’Connell, go to http://www.telegram.com/news/2...ed-in-worcester-talk]
Comments (0)