Four years ago, Angela Stimpson agreed to donate a kidney to a complete stranger. "The only thing I knew about my recipient was that she was a female and she lived in Bakersfield, Calif.," Stimpson says. It was a true act of altruism —...
I was away at college doing much of nothing, just pushing back against sorrow as it pressed down. My mother called. She told me someone wanted to speak to me. There was a silence on the line, and then words: “What’s going on,...
I was rushing to change trains at Delancey Street in downtown Manhattan earlier this year when a tall young man stepped in front of me, blocking my way through the crowd. He said my name and I looked up. “Kelvin!” I cried. As we...
O AKLAND — Whisked away from his drug-addicted mother, then rejected by his adoptive mom, D’Anthony Dandy spent his childhood wondering where he fit in. Often, the trauma made him depressed. Sometimes it made him defiant. At school,...
With significant implications for early childhood education, new research reveals that a mindful disposition is associated with alleviating lasting physical and emotional effects of childhood adversity. A team of scientists from Temple University,...
“Callate ya!” Shut up! These are the words that remained with us after our visit to Sally Ride Elementary School in South LA, the words of a grandma who was called in to pick up her granddaughter at school, and the words that...
Chronic stress is hazardous to health and can lead to early death from heart disease, cancer and of other health problems. But it turns out it doesn't matter whether the stress comes from major events in life or from minor problems. Both can be...
Childhood trauma, including abuse, neglect, and family dysfunction, can be so severe or pervasive that it can change a person's physiology and put them at greater risk for diseases as adults, says San Francisco pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris....
I skipped a lot of school back in the day. A lot of school. I would pick up my best friend Patricia and head to school — only to make a left instead of a right and head out for the day. We weren’t Thelma and Louise, we were Ferris Bueller....
This summer I had the chance to visit Rikers Island in New York along with 15 other members of the Anti-Recidivism Coalition (ARC). The trip was fortunate because a divine intervention occurred. What was supposed to have been just a tour...
Exposure to diverse communities may boost infants' social learning, according to a new study. Hearing different languages in the park or supermarket could help children be open-minded and willing to learn from people who are different from...
“Do not feel absolutely certain of anything,” philosopher Bertrand Russell instructed in the first of his ten timeless commandments of teaching and learning in 1951. And yet formal education, today as much as then, is for the most...
Over the past week, Adrian Peterson, the Minnesota Vikings' all-world running back and one of the NFL's biggest stars, has become the face of corporal punishment in America. Peterson turned himself in to police over the weekend on charges of child...
Like too many young men in his East Oakland neighborhood, 21-year-old Shaka Perdue spent the earlier part of his youth “living like I was becoming a statistic,” as he put it. At 16, he landed in juvenile hall after robbing a pedestrian in...
Like everything else in the body, the white-matter fibers that allow communication between brain regions also decline with age. In a new study, researchers found a strong association between the structural integrity of these white-matter tracts...