Blog

By Carolyn Jones, EdSource, December 13, 2019 Long before California banned suspensions for “willful defiance” or disruption of school activities in K-8 classrooms, Los Angeles Unified embarked on an even more ambitious goal: eliminate defiance suspensions entirely. Six years after it implemented the policy, L.A. Unified officials, advocates and students say they’ve seen dramatic improvements in campus culture at many schools, providing lessons for California as it attempts to reshape school...

For the past year, The Kansas City Star has examined what happens to kids who age out of foster care and found that, by nearly every measure, states are failing in their role as parents to America’s most vulnerable children. https://www.kansascity.com/news/special-reports/article238206754.html Read more here: https://www.kansascity.com/news/special-reports/article238206754.html#storylink=cpy

By Lucas Manfield, Dallas Observer, December 10, 2019 Last year, Dallas' police and fire departments teamed up with Parkland Hospital to rethink how they responded to 911 calls involving mental health crises. They placed a social worker inside the dispatch center to triage calls and sent out a special team staffed with a mental health professional whenever possible. They targeted South Central Dallas, the area with the highest concentration of mental health-related calls. The hope was that...

By The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, Medicine, December 2019 In 2015, Congress charged the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine to identify strategies for a quick and significant reduction in child poverty. The resulting report, A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty, finds that many poverty-reducing programs, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit Program and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, promote babies’ healthy development. [ Please click here...

We are excited to have the keynote address presented by Dr. Joanne Klevens, MD, PhD, MPH, from the CDC and co-author of Preventing Child Abuse and Neglect: A Technical Package for Policy, Norm, and Programmatic Activities.

ACEs, Adversity's Impact A brief guide to self-harm and unhealed childhood trauma Video: These Firefighters are also fighting mental health stigmas Video: How adverse childhood experiences impact employee wellness with Diana Bishop Borderline personality disorder has strongest link to childhood trauma Being lied to by your parents in childhood predicts social challenges in adulthood Video: Adam Frankel on family secrets and intergenerational trauma Three ways childhood trauma affects...

https://www.aap.org/en-us/about-the-aap/aap-press-room/Pages/AAP-Says-Spanking-Harms-Children.aspx

By Rochelle Riley, Detroit Free Press, December 15, 2019 One wintry Tuesday morning, as Tavia Redmond welcomed her third-grade students to class, she asked young Michael why he had missed school the day before. “He told me that the reason he wasn’t here was because he was dead,” she recalled. “I said, ‘Well, you couldn’t have been dead and be back today.’ He said: ‘I was dead. I died over the weekend.’ ” Later, Redmond learned that Michael's older brother had tried to kill himself — again.

Our brains are hardwired to react viscerally to traumatic events. They then store those emotions in our central nervous, so that when we feel and experience similar future events, we will be alerted to new potential dangers. Emotional flashbacks, experienced by those living with complex post-traumatic stress disorder, are sudden and horrific, often prolonged, attacks from past highly traumatic events.

By Yuki Noguchi, National Public Radio, December 12, 2019 It has been five years, but the memory still haunts construction superintendent Michelle Brown. A co-worker ended his workday by giving away his personal cache of hand tools to his colleagues. It was a generous but odd gesture; no one intending to return to work would do such a thing. The man went home and killed himself. He was found shortly afterward by co-workers who belatedly realized the significance of his gifts. [ Please click...

By Dan Salmon, EurekAlert!, December 13, 2019 A major study led by researchers at La Trobe University in Australia has identified key themes that will be used to inform strategies to support Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander parents in the first years of their children's lives. The Healing the Past by Nurturing the Future project aims to break the cycle of intergenerational and complex trauma experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander people, by co-designing...

By Dan Hurley, The New Yorker, December 12, 2019 Tanner Bivins was declared dead on January 5, 2018, at a hospital in Paducah, Kentucky, the week before his sixth birthday. As the Louisville Courier-Journal reported, Tanner was emaciated and dehydrated, and his scalp was covered with sores. Authorities later found his home strewn with garbage and vermin. The house had no utilities and no heat; the temperature had dropped to eleven degrees the night that Tanner died. According to the National...