January 2018

[Editor's note: Dr. Harise Stein at Stanford University edits a web site -- abuseresearch.info -- that focuses on the health effects of abuse, and includes research articles on ACEs. Every month, she will post the summaries of the abstracts and links to research articles that address only ACEs. Thank you, Harise!! -- Jane Stevens] Lynch BA, Agunwamba A, Wilson PM, et. al. Adverse family experiences and obesity in children and adolescents in the United States. Prev Med. 2016 Sep;90:148-54.

In a space that used to be an abandoned state hospital, Lora Lesak has created an early childhood classroom filled with natural light and comfortable chairs — a room designed to feel like a home. As director of Developmental Health Services for Allentown’s Community Services for Children, she says that’s exactly what children who’ve experienced trauma need. “We have gotten children that have needed to remain in the hospital for two weeks to be weaned of substances — whether it’s cocaine,...

Morgan Langley leans toward a large computer screen. He isn’t sure if the video clip is still there, posted to a random YouTube channel named after a ’90s punk-ska act, but after a few moments, he finds it. Out of a black screen flashes a white Ford Mustang with blacked-out windows and chrome rims. Langley, who is an executive producer of one of America’s longest-running reality shows, “Cops,” narrates. “This kid here is actually selling a thousand pills of ecstasy to an undercover cop,” he...

In its annual count of the city’s homeless population, New York in 2015 listed how many people fit into 10 different groups: nearly 4,000 chronically homeless, more than 8,000 severely mentally ill, 1,500 veterans, and so on. But when the list got to victims of domestic violence, the annual federally mandated count showed one striking number: zero. Far from the reality on the ground — nearly a third of homeless families with children have experienced domestic violence, according to the...

Editor’s note: Last July, Martha Park wrote about the Dumas Hotel , a revered building in Roanoke, Virginia, with an uncertain future. The hotel appeared in the The Negro Motorist Green Book from 1936 to 1967 and survived the city’s sweeping urban renewal efforts from the same period. Today, downtown is thriving . But on the other side of the train tracks, residents in historically black Gainsboro—where the Dumas Hotel still stands—aren’t so sure they’ll benefit from the boom. Below, Park...

The best way to curb anti-Muslim rhetoric the next time you witness it? Simply point out the other person's hypocrisy. But do it with some tact. A new study led by Emile Bruneau , a researcher and the director of the Peace and Conflict Neuroscience Lab at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, suggests that the best way to lower anti-Muslim feelings is to show individuals the hypocrisy of their stance. Bruneau became interested in figuring out the most effective...

Would a law enforcement officer hand a private citizen a gun and ask them to uphold the law without the completion of an officer’s standards and training course? The answer is a resounding no, because that would put people's lives in jeopardy. Law enforcement is a serious profession with strict discipline and education. While each state and jurisdiction has different training requirements, officers receive extensive training before patrolling the streets and enforcing the law. Deciding to...

For a good chunk of the 20th century, residential segregation by race was a fact of life in America. Today, that’s still the case in many cities around the country. While residential segregation has, on average, declined, in many parts of the United States it remains stubbornly high . Researchers who study segregation typically focus on a few possible explanations for the persistence of segregation in America—the economic barriers faced by minorities, for example, or housing market...

In my last post , I wrote about why I started teaching my kids to meditate. In this post, I’ll share how I taught them, and what I did when they lost interest. I want to start out by saying that I don’t think formal meditation is the best way to teach mindfulness to young children. Kids often do better with concrete, fun activities, especially when they can move their bodies. (I’ve shared over 100 different ways to teach mindfulness to children in my book, Ready, Set, Breathe: Practicing...

I feel very fortunate that I discovered social work because it was just by chance that I did. I moved to Texas from Chicago when I was 22. Until that point I had attended two different universities where I had several different majors. In Texas I started a new college but was still unsure of a major — I knew I wanted to do something that made a difference, but I didn’t know what that would be. Then one evening I saw a news story about a social worker working for Child Protective Services...

Ask anyone about caregiving, and you’ll likely hear a story about personal sacrifice. Heather Boldon, a single mother from Minnesota, gave up her full-time job to care for her mother. She took a more than 50 percent pay cut, spent down her 401k, and lost her health insurance. When she was injured, she couldn’t visit a doctor to see whether she needed surgery. In New York, Delores McCrae, a home care worker, was evicted from her home and lived in a women’s homeless shelter where she was...

On her third day alone in the house, 7-year-old Linda Fritts slept in her safe place in the closet. She arranged the shelves and fashioned a nest for herself atop a chest of drawers. “I would take stuffed animals in there and my books in there,” she says now. She read by flashlight, Nancy Drew or The Boxcar Children, the series about four inexplicably happy orphans who live by themselves in an abandoned freight car. “I was jealous,” Linda says. “They had each other.” [For more on this story...