October 2017

Yesterday, a friend asked me if she could borrow my car to run a long-distance errand because my little car gets better mileage than her big one. I wanted to say no; switching cars on an already busy day felt like a hassle to me. But I didn’t say no. Instead, I hemmed and hawed and hesitated, hoping she’d get the hint. It can be really hard to say no. Despite my best attempts not to care what other people think of me , I still find myself wanting to be liked. I don’t want people to think I’m...

Alison is only 14 but she knows what she wants to be when she grows up: A surgeon. It’s not easy to study, however, when you’re so exhausted and hungry you can barely get through 9 th -grade biology. An immigrant from Colombia, Alison is one of more than 200,000 K-12 students in California considered homeless because they lack stable housing. And like most of those students, she lives with her family in a home shared with other families — in her case, two other families. “I go to school...

Even identical twins who are born with the same genome show variations in their health span during the aging process. In addition to our genetic information, many environmental and lifestyle-related factors can influence the aging rate of cells and tissues. One of the most accurate predictors of the rate of biological aging is the"epigenetic clock" formed by chemical tags (methyl groups) that are added to the DNA molecules. When the ticking of this clock is too fast, the risks of chronic...

In the summer of 2007, a woman was brought by ambulance to the emergency department of the Medical Center Haaglanden, a hospital that serves an inner city area of The Hague in the Netherlands. The woman was drunk and had a severe head injury. Her eight-year-old son was with her. Hester Diderich, an emergency nurse, and other hospital staff members looked after the boy while they attended to his mother. “We were very nice to him,” Diderich remembers. After treating the woman’s injuries, they...

Pierce County partners center their work on what The Building Community Resilience Collaborative calls the “pair of ACEs”: Adverse Childhood Experiences and Adverse Community Environments.

With your support, our first printing of Mind Matters sold out in a month (100 copies). We have sold 800 participant journals. They went all over the country from the East coast to the West coast. Both rural and urban communities. All the groups that we expected to use this program purchased them!! Foster kids, alternative high schools, middle schools, detention centers, violence prevention programs, health educators, family service agencies, group homes, etc. I spent two days in San Antonio...

Erica Woodland, in Truthout, on a necessary conversation.

Great site with some lovely books for children 'Some Secrets Should Never Be Kept' https://www.facebook.com/SomeSecretsShouldNeverBeKept/

It is not news that people abused as children are more exposed to clinical depression, anxiety, and a higher risk of death from suicide. But now, researchers have begun to reveal what happens in the brain following this kind of trauma. According to data provided by the Children's Bureau of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, there was a 3.8 percent increase in reported child abuse cases in the country between 2011 and 2015. This amounts to 683,000 cases of child abuse...

Desiree Felix didn’t make her way to UCLA with the help of helicopter parents who hired tutors, hounded teachers or edited her application essays. Her father is a handyman with a sixth-grade education. Her mother finished high school and helps manage apartments. At Kennedy High School in Granada Hills, Felix had to figure out most of the nuts and bolts of preparing for and applying to colleges on her own. She didn’t know anything about Advanced Placement classes until her sophomore year, and...

While probably not in your diary, the second of October 2017 is the fifth anniversary of the Scottish Government’s National Parenting Strategy. Other initiatives and events took precedence during this extraordinary period in Scotland’s history. But, when launched, the Strategywas not a trivial, ‘off the cuff’ public policy. After an extensive consultation process, the Scottish Government proposed dozens of actions under the rubric ‘Our commitment to Scotland’s parents’. A year later, NHS...

In the wake of the tragedy of Las Vegas, I need to pray. I need to pray and I want to hold hands with others and pray with them. But I don't. All too often, I neglect forms of spiritual healing for fear of offending someone of another belief system. The more I study trauma and its adverse affects on our individual and collective well being, the more I understand how we have abandoned indigenous practices, sacred healing practices — practices that once re-edified human connection through the...