June 2016

I've been struggling with how to talk with my daughter about what happened in Orlando. Another shooting. More death. Hate. She's heard the news. It's been discussed a bit at school too. But how do I talk to her as my own daughter, in between getting ready for school and dance? What can I say to her about homophobia or even what helps people recover? About what headlines and deaths grab our attention and which ones do not? I admit I'm at a loss. I don't have great words or wisdom or even a...

While we know ACEs have a profound impact on our adult health, it's good to be reminded that some of our adult choices and relationships also have a profound impact. This Ted Talk by Robert Waldinger does a nice job of summarizing the research findings from about 75 years of studying 700 men. Men who got brain scans, blood work, were interviewed and filled out questionnaires. Men who had vastly different childhood experiences. Robert Waldinger said: Since 1938, we've tracked the lives of two...

New federal data show a continuing deep gulf between the educational experiences of traditionally disadvantaged student groups and their peers on a broad range of indicators, findings that follow years of efforts by government and advocacy groups to level the playing field in U.S. public schools. Black and Latino students are still more likely to be suspended, more likely to attend schools with high concentrations of inexperienced teachers, and less likely to have access to rigorous and...

Growing up in York County, I was fortunate to have opportunities many children lack, including the opportunity to receive a quality education that prepared me for my career in pediatric medicine. Today, as a pediatric resident at Penn State Hershey Children’s Hospital, I have experienced first-hand how challenges in a child’s growth and development – if left unaddressed – can limit opportunities, including the opportunity to learn. That is why I want to see the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania...

An unfortunate side effect of the biological revolution of psychiatry is in perceiving emotional discomfort as undesirable or bad, something we shouldn’t feel, something that can be medicated away. And while medications can be life-saving and necessary with severely disabling conditions such as psychosis, mania, depression, and debilitating anxiety, to name a few, perhaps we’ve taken a troublesome short-cut along the way. I worry that mental health may now be seen as the absence of mental...

This headline is by a blog writer, Charles Pulliam-Moore, that summarizes a research study demonstrating this dreadful statistic.

One of my best friends, Heidi Aylward, is a high ACE scoring mother of two. She's also a feisty, funny and has a full life balancing work, parenting, friends and all the responsibilities of tending to home and loved ones. And she is a woman who used WIC . WIC defines itself as "The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) provides Federal grants to States for supplemental foods, health care referrals, and nutrition education for low-income pregnant,...

Morgan Gliedman’s 3-year-old daughter keeps a few pictures of her visits with her dad taped to the wall by her bed, and the rest in a little pink suitcase along with his letters. She’s full of ideas for what she’ll do with him when his “time out” is over: camping, baking bread, reading bedtime stories. The earliest that can happen will be when she is in first grade, and he is eligible for parole from his seven-year-minimum prison sentence on criminal weapons charges. Full article by Kj ...

One of my favorite organizations is the Mama Bear Effect . It's a few years old and is basically a bunch of grown-ups dedicated to keeping children safe - particularly from sexual abuse. Today, they posted something important on Facebook about not putting so much emphasis on teaching children to say "no" and rather expecting adults to keep children safe. I have to say that given the reality that most abusers are known to children, it's not likely that a child simply saying "no" to an abuser...

I wonder how we can better support all parents so they (we) get enough support to be the reliable rocks our children require? And where can we get assistance when that's not possible?

People sometimes feel bad for adoptive parents. They think maybe our kids say, "You're not my real parents" on a daily basis and that we go to bed crying each night because we can't have kids of our "own." Do they think we had to "settle" for adoption or fostering? Do they worry we feel less than as parents? We don't. It's true that some of us have fertility issues. And maybe have grief about that. It's true that our children may love us and their birth parents, foster family members. It's...

We don't hear enough from men who have been abused as children. Byron Hamel is helping to change that. This is an interview done with Hamel by the Trigger Points Anthology website . It's the first in a series they are running about fathering as a survivor of childhood abuse. If you can't read the entire thing, and you should, please read this: I honestly think most people believe an abused boy is inherently going to become an abusive or neglectful dad. I gotta call bullshit on that one,...