June 2018

In 2014, 63 percent of fathers who lived at home with a child ages 0 to 18 reported eating dinner with their child every day; an additional 27 percent reported doing the same at least several times a week. Only 8 percent of these fathers reported sharing dinner about once a week, less than once a week, or never. Positive involvement from fathers is linked to many benefits for children , including better self-esteem, lower levels of depression, and greater academic success. This involvement...

Infant mortality and mass incarceration are major issues affecting the black community. But while they are often thought of and dealt with on separate tracks, structural racism firmly connects these critical issues. Structural racism exposes black women to distinct stressors—such as contact with the criminal justice system—that ultimately undermine their health and the health of their children. Today, infants born to black mothers die at twice the rate as those born to white mothers. 1 This...

When it comes to reproductive health, it’s no secret that a pregnant mother’s choices and environment can severely impact her child’s epigenetics and health—especially mothers suffering from PTSD . But it turns out fathers who have suffered significant stress early on in their life may also epigenetically impact the physical and mental health of their offspring. It was previously thought that fathers only passed DNA to the mother’s egg during fertilization, but it was recently discovered...

Saw this great article by Jenny Anderson in Quartz this morning. Here are some excerpts (and thanks for sharing such great stuff Robin Cogan ). Read full article.

Applications due June 18. Application link included in this post

Excerpts from an excellent article by Smita Malhotra:

Excerpt from article by David Love.

In the fall, Echo will be rolling out the new Training & Certification Course (TCC) for selected candidates who want to become certified in the Echo trauma-informed, nonviolent parenting curriculum. This is the first time Echo will be offering the certification course since 2016. We've been spending the intervening time systematically revising the old parenting curriculum, bringing it up-to-date with the trauma and resilience information that we are already teaching in the parenting...

Jillian Broomstein starts to cry when she talks about the day her newborn son Jeremy was taken from her by New Hampshire's child welfare agency. He was 2 weeks old. "They came into the house and said they would have to place him in foster care and I would get a call and we would set up visits," she says. "It was scary." Broomstein, who was 26 at the time, had not used heroin for months and was on methadone treatment. The clinic social worker told her that since Jeremy would test positive for...

Link to entire piece here . Excerpt below:

A Duke study of an iPhone app to screen young children for signs of autism has found that the app is easy to use, welcomed by caregivers and good at producing reliable scientific data. The study, described June 1 in an open access journal npj Digital Medicine, points the way to broader, easier access to screening for autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders. The app first administers caregiver consent forms and survey questions and then uses the phone’s ‘selfie’ camera to collect videos...

About one in four women who become pregnant will miscarry, and one in 160 will experience a stillbirth. Of those women, a growing number are dealing with the devastating pain and grief in new ways, particularly in their use of social media. Sharing their personal stories, it seems, helps these couples deal with their grief and begin the process of healing. Sharing on social media helps families break through the isolation of miscarriage and stillbirth, according to Denise Cote-Arsenault, a...