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Michael Nash’s 30-year career as a jurist has mostly been focused on trying to make life better for Los Angeles County’s children. He is widely credited by lawyers, child advocates and other judges as having measurably improved the juvenile courts in Los Angeles, where he spent two decades serving alternately as the presiding judge of the Los Angeles Juvenile Court and supervising judge of the Juvenile Dependency Court — the latter oversees the fate of Los Angeles foster...

Every morning, the familiar routine plays out in hundreds of thousands of classrooms: A teacher looks out over the desks, taking note of who's in their seats and who isn't. On any given day, maybe there are one or two empty chairs. One here, one there. And that all goes into the school's daily attendance rate. But here's what that morning ritual doesn't show: That empty desk? It might be the same one that was empty last week or two weeks ago. The desk of a student who has racked up five, 10,...

Did you know that 90 percent of people who receive services from behavioral health organizations have experienced trauma? People with mental illnesses and addictions whose trauma goes unaddressed have greater mental health problems and increased risk of heart disease, suicide, and substance abuse. The National Council for Behavioral Health is currently accepting applications for the 2016-2017 Trauma-Informed Learning Community. This is an exciting opportunity for mental health and substance...

Only in America, as the song says—only in America are there enough mass shootings in a single week to allow pundits and philosophers to make complicated points about the nature of responsibility and guilt that elsewhere might exist only in the realm of gruesome thought experiments. Having instructed us that the first of this week’s mass shootings was free from any ideological taint at all—that the Planned Parenthood killings were the work of a lone nut, completely...

W hen I speak in my capacity as a professor of neurosurgery at Stanford University or as an entrepreneur with a company worth $1.3bn, there is an assumption that I had a privileged background, one of affluence. In fact I grew up in poverty on public assistance with an alcoholic father and a mother impaired by a stroke who was chronically depressed and attempted suicide many times. My father was jailed repeatedly and we were evicted from our home on quite a few occasions. [For more of this...

It’s a debate that comes up over and over again, particularly right after tragic mass shootings like the one that took 14 lives Wednesday at a social services center in San Bernardino, California. Opponents of gun control argue that if the employees at Inland Regional Center had been armed, they could’ve protected themselves. Advocates say the key isn’t more firearms, but more gun control. So what does science say about whether gun ownership makes us safer? It says very...

The first time I heard a preschooler explaining a classmate’s disruptive behavior, I was surprised at how adult her 4-year-old voice sounded. Her classmate “doesn’t know how to sit still and listen,” she said to me, while I sat at the snack table with them. He couldn’t learn because he couldn’t follow directions, she explained, as if she had recently completed a behavioral assessment on him. Months before either of these children would start kindergarten,...

When a family has been divided by divorce, it creates added stress during the holidays with regard to visitation, gift giving and attending year-end school events. But it doesn't have to be that way. Divorced parents can set aside their differences; focus on communication, cooperation and compromise; and make the holidays less stressful on everyone. This was Ted and Linda's goal when they split up. "Since our separation happened just before Thanksgiving, Ted and I realized we needed to...

A s if it weren't enough to experience abuse, neglect, homelessness, hunger, or some combination of all of those things, many children face a world of adults who don't really understand how to help. Study after study documents the effects of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) on a person's health and brain development. Most recently, research published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology found that the more ACEs people had, the higher their risk of suffering heart disease,...

An international group of scientists meeting in Washington called on Thursday for what would, in effect, be a moratorium on making inheritable changes to the human genome. The group said it would be “irresponsible to proceed” until the risks could be better assessed and until there was “broad societal consensus about the appropriateness” of any proposed change. The group also held open the possibility for such work to proceed in the future by saying that as knowledge...

In 2013, an obese man went to Hvidovre Hospital in Denmark to have his stomach stapled. All in all, it was ordinary bariatric surgery — with one big exception. A week before the operation, the man provided a sperm sample to Danish scientists. A week after the procedure, he did so again. A year later, he donated a third sample. Scientists were investigating a tantalizing but controversial hypothesis: that a man’s experiences can alter his sperm, and that those changes in turn may...

Nearly half of U.S. homes don't have a landline and rely on cellphones instead, according to a federal report out this week. The number predictably has been climbing over the years, now surpassing even the households with both a landline and a mobile phone. And it's tracked by of all agencies the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. [For more of this story, written by Alina Selyukh, go...