May 2017

In 2015, a 26-year-old teacher in the Cops ‘n Kids Youth Center died suddenly in a motorcycle accident, and Robbin Sotelo Redd reached for the phone. Redd, executive director of Cops ‘n Kids, a non-profit managed by the Tarpon Springs Housing Authority (TSHA), called Dr. Robert Moore, a psychologist, former steering committee member and ongoing training provider for Peace4Tarpon . Over the next two weeks, Moore spent hours with Cops ‘n Kids’ staff, parents and children. “He was there for me,...

The case is a half-century old this week, a landmark decision that merged jurisprudence, common sense and fortunate timing to reshape juvenile justice and give children many of the same due process rights long held by adults charged with crimes. The U.S. Supreme Court ruling issued on May 15, 1967, In re Gault ,found for the first time that juvenile court cases are adversarial criminal proceedings. That gave youthful offenders the right to a defense lawyer, formal rules of criminal procedure...

A S A NEONATAL INTENSIVE CARE NURSE, Lauren Bloomstein had been taking care of other people’s babies for years. Finally, at 33, she was expecting one of her own. The prospect of becoming a mother made her giddy, her husband Larry recalled recently — “the happiest and most alive I’d ever seen her.” When Lauren was 13, her own mother had died of a massive heart attack. Lauren had lived with her older brother for a while, then with a neighbor in Hazlet, New Jersey, who was like a surrogate mom,...

The story of Cleveland, as with many other Rust Belt cities, is a story of falling from grace. How is “grace” measured? Population rankings, mostly. Cleveland was America’s 5th biggest city in 1920, beneath only New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Detroit. By 1950 it was 7th. By 1980, 20th. Then down to 45th by 2010. And so on. So, Cleveland shrinks . Shrinking cities are not what successful cities “look” like. They look funny. Cleveland has a “man boobs” problem. Let me explain. In 2006...

I met Jane in 2013 at a women’s prison in Washington state. She was 6, and while other girls her age may have been camping in the woods with their Girl Scout troops, Jane was camping overnight at the prison where her mother was incarcerated. On the day we met, Jane was participating in Girls Scouts Beyond Bars, a program begun in Baltimore in 1992 as a pilot project between the Girl Scouts and the Institute of Justice. The idea was for girls to have formal visits with their incarcerated...

Democratic and Republican officials alike took up the banner of criminal-justice reform over the past five years, hoping to reduce the nation’s unprecedented prison population and scale back the harshest punishments of the tough-on-crime era. Now Attorney General Jeff Sessions has taken a major step toward rolling back their efforts. In a memo released Friday, Sessions instructed federal prosecutors nationwide to seek the strongest possible charges and sentences against defendants they...

I believe I can speak for millions of mothers in America, Republican and Democrat alike, when I say that the 13 men in the Senate drafting its version of the contentious health care bill to repeal and replace Obamacare can skip the whole breakfast in bed thing for Mother's Day. That's not what we need from them. What current and future American mothers need right now is much more attention to their health -- especially an increase in our survival rates in childbirth. Mother's Day is an...

A new study has found that kids with chronic physical illness are more likely to have depression and anxiety in adulthood. For their study, researchers at the University of Sussex and University College London reviewed data from a large number of medical studies, looking for associations between eight chronic physical illnesses in childhood, such as arthritis, asthma, and cancer, and emotional problems experienced later in life. [For more of this story, written by Janice Wood, go to ...

Rich Besser was a fourth-year medical student when he found himself performing his first (and last!) solo emergency Cesarean section at a hospital tucked within a rural Himalayan village in Manali, India. He had come to Lady Willingdon Hospital eager to learn about health problems facing people within the developing world, and worked under a gifted local surgeon, Dr. George “Laji” Varghese . Providing care for the underserved population there was no small feat. For instance, the power would...

The outpouring of responses to my blog about my Mom’s addiction (https://traumainformedlancaster.wordpress.com/2017/05/14/what-my-moms-addiction-taught-me-about-shame-resilience-and-grace/) has made me realize how many families are in this same struggle. As I’ve told some of the people who contacted me to thank me for sharing it: it’s been a long road to this place and I’m still learning and faltering and crying and getting back up every day. But, if my sharing the struggle this vulnerably...

Just beautiful. Check out the images and art! Mamas Day is a celebration of all mamas, everywhere! We know that mamahood is not one size fits all. But most popular images of mothers exclude mamas based on their sexual orientation, race, income, immigration status and more. And Mother’s Day, one of the biggest commercial holidays in the United States, often reinforces traditional ideas of family and motherhood that there's only one way to be a family. That's why we created "Mamas Day" in 2011...

There are many ways in which this artificial "Hallmark" holiday can be hard. There is a perception that everyone is celebrating, that everyone has a mother and that the mother we have (or had) was the image of perfection -- our mentor, our source of guidance, our rock, our stability. For many of us, that is or was not the mother we had. And, many of us tried to be better and different mothers ourselves -- sometimes with enormous success and sometimes with less positive outcomes. We had...