April 2018

Children these days deal with stress, distractions, peer pressure, over-stimulation, etc., and for this reason, the low-cost practice of yoga can benefit their well being immensely. Little ones have their own battles, races, and tension, and to bear it all, they require a calm mind and a healthy body. 1. Yoga Improves Concentration 2. Yoga Builds Confidence and Self-Esteem 3. Yoga Alleviates Stress (Something We All Face) 4. Yoga Promotes a Healthy Body and Mind 5. Yoga Teaches Body Balance...

My marrying an alcoholic never made sense to me. My mother developing the disease of alcoholism never made sense to me, either. And why my loved ones couldn’t get it together to stop or wrest control of their drinking was equally confusing. Yet I churned around and in and through this muck for almost four decades before my world was split wide open. It was 2003 and one of my loved ones entered a residential treatment program for alcoholism. I remember experiencing a giddy – “I knew it, I...

A friend of mine recently referred her grandchild and his pregnant wife to a Bringing Baby Home class, because she noticed that the wife had a horrible background of abuse and at times had difficulty functioning. What the grandmother noticed with this couple was a change in the family dynamics. the couple knows how to get along, the father is engaged in parenting, and the baby thriving. This is really starting at the root of the problem. 20 years ago, Drs. John and Julie Gottman worked with...

In college, it's hard to learn while you're hungry. That's a message Temple University higher education policy professor Sara Goldrick-Rab has been getting throughout her career. She self-identifies as a "scholar activist." She has advocated for free college, and in 2013 she founded the Wisconsin HOPE Lab , which aims to turn research about low-income students into policies that improve equitable outcomes in post-secondary education. [For more on this story by LAUREL DALRYMPLE, go to...

Vertigo Charitable Foundation (VCF) is excited to announce the launching of a new website, Me2csa.com , for adult survivors of child sex abuse to anonymously identify their abusers online. We have attached a Press Release, which provides more information about the new site. Please forward this information to any groups, organizations, and individuals that would have an interest in accessing the site. We strongly believe that there is strength in numbers. Although identifications will be...

Christine "Cissy" White is probably a familiar name to most of you. If not, check out her wonderful writing which was and is totally inspiring to me. I first "met" her through the Parenting With ACEs site - wonderfully written in her own authentic voice. It was her writing that made me consider the possibility of writing in my authentic voice as well and led me to eventually post several blogs. Then, at the December MARC Convening in Philadelphia, I met Cissy in person. I shared with her...

It’s a chilly March afternoon in Marysville, Ohio, and I’m riding around on a golf cart with Clara Golding Kent, the public information officer for the Ohio Reformatory for Women. It’s right after "count," when officials make sure the women serving time at Ohio's oldest prison are where they're supposed to be. Just now, the women here are heading to lunch, jobs and classes, or socializing in the yard. Ohio Reformatory for Women was built in 1916 but has expanded beyond the original stone...

When a woman has a baby, she loses an organ. The placenta, grown by her body for nine months of gestation, snaps off from her uterus and drops toward the birth canal. The meaty purple bag ribboned with thick blood vessels is pushed through the cervix five to 30 minutes after the baby and, depending on the culture, is carried away to be buried, rendered, or discarded. And that’s just the part about the placenta. The physical trauma doesn’t stop there. Expulsion of the placenta leaves a large...

It’s a question as frustrating as a hangnail, asked virtually every time I give a public lecture on teen brain development. It’s some form of: “is the digital world bad for the adolescent brain?” In my most recent book “Attack of the Teenage Brain,” I give an example of papers from two separate research groups examining video games and attentional states. Their findings reveal how not-ready-for-prime-time our answers are. Social media, contrary to its reputation, actually seems to improve...

She had a poster of Where’s Waldo? on the wall, presumably there to distract her patients from what was happening while they lay on the exam table. This was my third appointment, and on the drive over I had fought down rising waves of panic at walking back in to this room, with Waldo and her gloved fingers. When my physiotherapist had first recommended this treatment after months of physio exercises had failed to produce the desired results, I went home and cried. I called Dawn and told her...