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Engaging resistant children and parents in effective trauma treatment is difficult at best. Conventionally, engagement and rapport building begins in the first face-to-face session. More often than not it’s a harsh start-up. Parents and kids enter the first session angry, frustrated, and hopeless. Arms are tightly crossed, and at the slightest provocation, all hell breaks loose with open conflict and confrontation between parent and child. Jay Haley , the founder of strategic family therapy,...

@Tian Dayton PhD Got one or more of these? Keep reading…… Everyone knows about stress. We work too hard, play too hard and sleep too little. We’ve got too many balls in the air and ignore self care. No me time, no down time. The result we’re stressed out! And everything suffers, our mood, our health, our work….to say nothing of everyone around us. Small problems feel bigger and our reactions to anything from waiting in a grocery line to how we are with our partners and kids are out of whack.

The challenge of the fast pace and the strain of living in the 21 st century is the chronic stress of keeping up with volume of information, expectations and adverse experiences that leads to stressors of daily living. Adults have become good at adjusting to and compartmentalizing these stressors. Children and adolescents however are struggling to keep up and are in fact caving under the weight of the stresses. In addition, many children lack adequate nurturing and supports needed to give...

America’s inmates do not want to perform slave labor anymore . They would also like fully staffed facilities (so that fewer of them get murdered or raped ); universal access to rehabilitation programs; voting rights; the power to press their grievances in the federal court system (a right that was significantly abridged by legislation passed under Bill Clinton ); and to reduce their own ranks by aligning our nation’s draconian sentencing laws with international standards, and ensuring that...

BUFFALO, N.Y. – Kids who faced daunting barriers to success in the classroom had a clear message for University at Buffalo researchers who asked them as young adults to look back on their experiences with maltreatment, homelessness and their time in school: Adults can do better. “It’s as though they’re asking us as adults not to give up on them, to stick with them,” says Annette Semanchin Jones, an assistant professor in UB’s School of Social Work (SSW) and lead author of the paper with...

Basketball superstar LeBron James continues to make offseason headlines. This time, it's for something that even 76ers fans can agree on. James' I Promise School model recognizes that a child's environment plays an important role in his or her success. A high IQ and personal initiative don't mean students will excel in the classroom, especially if they don't have support at home, don't know where their next meal is coming from or don't feel safe in their own neighborhood. James has opened...

LOS ANGELES -- I WAS JOSTLING for position with a gaggle of journalists and losing ground, sandwiched four-deep in a sea of bodies during media availability at the 2018 NBA All-Star Game in Los Angeles. It was hardly an ideal environment to broach such a sensitive, personal topic as mental health, but Cavaliers forward Kevin Love had hinted three weeks earlier in Cleveland that he might be ready to share. At that time, I was interviewing Channing Frye in the Cavs' locker room regarding his...

The effects of trauma can be complex and far-reaching, and no two responses to trauma are exactly alike. According to the American Psychological Association (APA), trauma is generally defined as an overwhelming, life-altering experience that can cause ongoing pain and distress, and sometimes results in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD). Because trauma response can be unique to each individual, self-care strategies for managing trauma...

By his own account, Alejandro Cruz-Guzman’s five children have received a good education at public schools in St. Paul. His two oldest daughters are starting careers in finance and teaching. Another daughter, a high-school student, plans to become a doctor. But their success, Mr. Cruz-Guzman said, flows partly from the fact that he and his wife fought for their children to attend racially integrated schools outside their neighborhood. Their two youngest children take a bus 30 minutes each...

A few times a month, San Francisco's immigration court becomes a day-care center of sorts. Toys, stuffed animals, and coloring books decorate the waiting room. Children as young as four years old have come here not to play, but to stand in front of an immigration judge and defend themselves against deportation. When I visited the court one afternoon this past March, about 20 kids had formed a single-file line as they waited to go through security. Wide-eyed boys in t-shirts and jeans cracked...

I am a believer in what I call "radical emotional composting." A young woman hid her pregnancy and travelled across the country to give birth and put her child up for adoption. She defied the rules of the time and breastfed her baby soon after her baby was born when no one was looking. A nurse caught her in the act and literally ripped her baby from her breast. Hours later the baby was placed in foster care where, along with other babies, they were severely neglected. This baby was me. I...

At the end of my presentations and lessons on ACEs I end with the following statement, "I understand that the data-driven and cross-sector prevention of ACEs and childhood trauma sounds daunting. To keep it simple, I recommend three actions." 1: Read. Our non-profit collective published and made free to the public Anna, Age Eight: The data-driven prevention of childhood trauma and maltreatment. Find a few quiet hours to read the ten chapters. You will discover that it provides a...