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The Trump administration is refusing to defend key parts of the Affordable Care Act, essentially arguing that federal courts should find the health law’s protection for people with preexisting conditions unconstitutional. The federal lawsuit hinges on the ACA’s individual mandate, or the requirement to get health coverage or pay a penalty. The mandate has long been a sticking point for conservatives, who argue that the government should not be telling individuals what coverage they must...

Soon after taking office, Ben Carson, the housing and urban development secretary, tried to derail a voucher program that helps disadvantaged families rent homes in healthy, high-opportunity communities with better jobs, schools and transportation, as a way of breaking the cycle of intergenerational poverty. In December, the Federal District Court in Washington wisely blocked that move . Now, Republican and Democratic Congress members are standing up for the principle of economic...

Juvenile Law Center (JLC), with the support of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, has built an excellent new resource for the field in its National Extended Foster Care Review , a website that breaks down each state’s foster care guarantees after the age of 18. Fittingly, the site was launched on the 10th anniversary of Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act, a law signed by President George W. Bush in 2008. Fostering Connections, among other things, amended the Title IV-E...

“I can’t believe they lost!” I blurted out to confused looks from my five cellies while reading a recent edition of The New Yorker. Thinking my outburst was likely baseball-related, one of the guys asked me, “Did your Pirates drop another one, Throop?” “No,” I replied. “Norfolk lost to Harvard.” [For more on this story by Daniel S. Throop, go to https://www.themarshallproject.org/2018/06/07/the-inside-story-of-a-legendary-prison-debate-team ]

A Honduran father separated from his wife and child suffered a breakdown at a Texas jail and killed himself in a padded cell last month, according to Border Patrol agents and an incident report filed by sheriff’s deputies. The death of Marco Antonio Muñoz, 39, has not been publicly disclosed by the Department of Homeland Security, and it did not appear in any local news accounts. But according to a copy of a sheriff’s department report obtained by The Washington Post, Muñoz was found on the...

A federal judge in a fifth lawsuit has ruled that the Trump administration illegally terminated the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program , restoring grants to all 81 programs nationwide that had their funding abruptly axed last year. U.S. District Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s decision on a class action suit, issued last week, ordered the administration to handle all the applications “as if the agency had not undertaken to shorten these grantees’ federal awards.” Reveal from The Center...

Introduction Nurses may struggle to understand how adverse experiences in childhood (ACEs) can negatively affect physical and mental health in adulthood, and may not know how to approach patients who may have had ACEs. This article explains ACEs and their impact, and looks at a trauma-informed care model as a framework for prevention, early intervention and recovery. Adverse childhood experiences The term ‘adverse childhood experience’ was coined in the US in the 1990s by Felitti et al...

Nobody welcomes feelings of sadness or dejection, but feeling down is sometimes part of life. Sadness is a normal, healthy emotion, and a natural response to loss or disappointment. Depression is a mental health issue, and a treatable illness. While it may not seem to matter what you call it when you or a loved one is hurting, it is important to understand how these conditions are different. When untreated, depression can raise the risk that more harmful behaviors will become established.

Teaching our kids how to ride the waves of difficult times is one of the best life skills we can empower our kids with. Suicide is never the solution.

Two years ago, Sesame Workshop, the educational arm of Sesame Street, launched Sesame Street in Communities to offer support, guidance, and tools to those working with our most vulnerable population, our children. In the “About Us” description on their website Sesame Street in Communities they share their intention: “ Every day, you make a difference by helping kids and families grow smarter, stronger, and kinder. Organizations like yours unite communities, foster families’ and kids’...

Trauma is so pervasive in our society that it takes a rather comprehensive survey just to delineate the types of traumatic events children are experiencing. The survey asks a person what form of adversity he or she experienced as a child. It’s a checklist of potentially traumatic events, both large and less large. In our book Anna, Age Eight we leave the language of academics behind to describe most of these experiences as terrible, horrible, no-good and very bad. Through a search online,...

I doubt you would get an argument from anyone working at the Centers for Disease Control if you described the US as a country experiencing an epidemic of childhood trauma. How do we begin to address an epidemic? We can start with a hypothesis. In our book Anna, Age Eight: The data-driven prevention of childhood trauma and maltreatment , we hypothesized that if children and parents have access to family-friendly resources—behavioral health care, medical and dental care, stable housing, food...