September 2018

“ The best time to influence the character of a child is 100 years before they are born .” W.R. Inge. On October 11 th and 12 th the Inter Agency Committee for Children and Families (IAC), in partnership with Family Centre, will host a conference to raise awareness of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), and how to strengthen systems that help children and families who face adversity and trauma. This partnership is the IAC’s next step in its long history of advocating for and building...

To my colleagues on ACEs Connection - It's been a harrowing two years for our nation, and I'm sure each of you has tried all you can to deal with what we're experiencing in this country (and beyond). My husband and I have been saying for some time that we need to move beyond marches and petitions to actions where we express our refusal to go along symbolically and with our bodies. As we watch a woman who - hesitatingly, with caution and fear - brought forward the story of the sexual assault...

A state grant that funds Nashville public schools' trauma-informed practices will end this year, threatening to stall work that has shown to reduce the need for discipline in the classroom. Trauma-informed schools work to focus on the reducing the impacts of Adverse Childhood Experiences, which can hurt brain development of children and cause behavioral issues. With the grant ending, a group advocating for the practices in schools is asking Metro Nashville Public Schools to put local funds...

When Hurricane Florence made landfall in coastal North Carolina on Friday morning, some 20,000 residents had evacuated from their home and were taking refuge in 157 shelters, according to Governor Roy Cooper. “We’ve spent the last week telling people to evacuate. Now we’re working very hard to save lives,” Cooper said Friday in an interview with NPR . In the days since, some of those evacuees have returned to their home, but the total number of people in the state still in shelters was...

One of the most important and sometimes underappreciated challenges facing the child welfare system in the 21st century is addressing the unique needs of families formed through adoption or guardianship. Between 2000 and 2015 there has been an influx of children in adoptive homes. The growth in adoptive and guardianship homes has led to a heightened awareness of the complex needs families can encounter at any point after permanence has been achieved. Many of the direct challenges stem from...

Now that the school year is in full swing, many young people are feeling the weight of academic demands. But how much strain students experience may depend less on their workloads and more on how they think about the very nature of stress. Stress doesn’t deserve its bad rap. Psychologists agree that while chronic or traumatic stress can be toxic, garden-variety stress — such as the kind that comes with taking a big test — is typically a normal and healthy part of life. In a 2013 article in...

A couple years ago, Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) gave a powerful speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Scott talked about how he had been repeatedly pulled over by police officers who seemed to be suspicious of a black man driving a nice car. He added that a black senior-level staffer had experienced the same thing and had even downgraded his car in the hope of avoiding the problem. Given that Scott otherwise has pretty conservative politics, there was little objection or protest from the...

Have you ever wanted to speak up about an issue or situation at work, but were afraid to? Or wanted to share something about yourself, but worried people might judge you? Or pretended to understand something professionally that you really didn’t? If you’re anything like me and most of the people I know, you could easily answer yes to some of these questions. However, to truly succeed in today’s business world, we must be willing to bring our whole selvesto the work that we do. This means...

In the first study of its kind, researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have found significantly lower birth weights in male infants -- an average decrease of 38 grams, or approximately 1.3 ounces -- born to women who had been exposed to trauma at some point in their lives and who secreted higher levels of cortisol, a hormone related to stress, in late pregnancy. The study will be published online on Tuesday, September 18, at 12:01 am EDT in The Journal of Pediatrics.

Throughout the United States, life expectancy varies, with people in some states living far longer on average than people in others. In a newly released project, researchers from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics partnered with the National Association for Public Health Statistics and Information Systems and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to determine just how different life expectancy can be in one nation. The groups created the U.S.

Today, over 90% of Oklahoma City Public School students qualify for free lunch and the numbers of students living in deep poverty is rising. These students are overwhelmed by trauma and lack resources that traditional classroom constructs are often unable to meet. With High Structure – High Love™ training, schools can create character-rich classrooms that teach both the cognitive and non-cognitive skills that allow all students to thrive. This two-hour training will explain the educational...

Every day, nearly 200 people across the country die from drug overdoses. Opioids have been the primary driver of this calamity: first as prescription painkillers, then heroin and, more recently, illicitly manufactured fentanyl. The death toll has risen steadily over the past two decades . The Drug Enforcement Administration, the agency that most directly oversees access to opioids, deserves much of the blame for these deaths. Because of its incompetence, the opioid crisis has gone from bad...