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My project for the Center for Health Journalism’s California Fellowship was focused on childhood trauma, zeroing in on a town in Northern California. In the fall, that town — Paradise, California — burned in a harrowing wildfire. The story quickly changed to one of community loss. The story of trauma in two counties My initial project was about Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACEs. ACEs are one way to quantify how much childhood trauma a person has experienced before the age of 18. Through...

The number of children and youth in foster care nationally rose for the fifth consecutive year, to 443,000, in federal fiscal year (FY) 2017. While still below the high of 567,000 in FY 1999 , the FY 2017 number is a 1.5 percent increase from FY 2016 and a 12 percent increase from FY 2012, when the number of children and youth in care began rising after more than 10 years of decline. At the state level, Child Trends’ analysis of the newly released Adoption and Foster Care Analysis Reporting...

Please use this link to go to our Resources Center where you can find Understanding ACEs and Parenting to Prevent and Heal ACEs handouts in Dari as well as in English. Both flyers were made with generous support from Family Hui, a Program of Lead for Tomorrow . Family Hui has made both flyers available in Dari, which is the national language of Afghanistan, so that they will can be useful to more families (Spanish translations are coming). These flyers can be downloaded, distributed, and...

Nurse @Wendie Skala worked with teens who were victims of street violence — and she always felt she was getting to them too late. Eventually, she learned about something called “adverse childhood experiences,” or ACEs : The idea that trauma early in life can cause disruptive and unhealthy behavior. And that’s when Skala says a “huge light bulb” went on. “Instead of saying, ‘What’s wrong with these kids?’ We could finally say, ‘What happened to these kids that they’re ending...

About two-thirds of the population have had at least one ‘adverse childhood experience’. Those with four or more are most at risk of serious and lasting effects on their health, writes Scotland’s Medical Officer Catherine Calderwood. Many people will have spent time together with their families over the festive break – which has both positives and negatives. Estate agencies tell me that big decisions are made – engagements, divorces, new families created – and their work is increased as...

PAYCHECK TO PAYCHECK. It's a phrase that conjures up an image of people in unusual – and often temporary – circumstances. The single parent, trying to keep the rent paid and kids watched and fed with a job that offers flexibility, but not necessarily a good salary. The person without a college or even high school education, relegated to a minimum wage job. The family in which one parent has been laid off. In fact, living paycheck to paycheck – meaning there's not a cash cushion to cover the...

Social workers and social scientists have a duty to educate, clarify and raise consciousness when empirically unfounded conclusions that can be harmful to marginalized populations are promoted as fact. Some may read Naomi Schafer Riley’s blog for the American Enterprise Institute – No, The Child Welfare System Isn’t Racist – and deem it as just another piece written from a shortsighted perspective steeped in white privilege. Others, however, may become even more convinced that implicit bias...

S ix inmates sat in the visiting room of California’s Corcoran State Prison, and each one held a piece of paper. The information in their hands was basic enough; it’s what anyone could find out about them on the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation website. But for these inmates meeting in September, the sheets contained something new. Sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole (LWOP) as juveniles, they grew up behind bars and expected to die behind...

The signals are blaring: Dramatic changes to our climate are well upon us. These changes — we know thanks to a steady drumbeat of alarming official reports over the past 12 months — could cripple the U.S. economy, threaten to make vast stretches of our coastlines uninhabitable, make basic food supplies scarce and push millions of the planet’s poorest people into cities and across borders as they flee environmental perils. All is not yet lost, we are told, but the demands of the moment are...

During and immediately after the 2016 presidential campaign, numerous reports emerged of an uptick in bullying behavior. As the mother of a bullied elementary school student told CBS News just after the vote: "The man that won the election has been modeling that it's OK to bully people ... and now children think it's OK to be mean too." Definitively proving such a dynamic is difficult, but a new study of Virginia schools provides the most compelling evidence yet that the 2016 campaign has...

Safety. It's something that many of us take for granted. But for many of the clients Intermountain works with, and especially the trauma-affected children that come to us in our residential program, safety is certainly not a "given." While it may seem odd to those who have not experienced childhood trauma or adversity, an individual who felt unsafe as an infant or child can have a disruption in their relational, physical, and emotional development that inhibits their brain's ability to...

As a teachers strike in Los Angeles begins, I am struck with the notion that the demands of UTLA are really about self-care and resilience for both students and adults. The union has repeatedly rejected the district’s offers, even when they could possibly agree on the salary, because it didn't meet the important demands of reduced class size and additional student support staff such as nurses, social workers and counselors. While the financial woes at the district level are real and complex,...