August 2021

Through deeply personal conversations, Prevent Child Abuse America board member and renowned brain and trauma expert Dr. Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey offer a groundbreaking and profound shift from asking "What's wrong with you?" to "What happened to you?" in their new book "What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing". Focusing on understanding people, behavior, and ourselves, this new book opens the door to resilience and healing in a proven, powerful way. Please...

By Carley Stern, The New York Times, August 24, 2021 When Jackie Lynn’s niece gave birth after using heroin during her pregnancy, Ms. Lynn sprang into action. She thought she had turned the page on parenting, after raising two children and living alone for 14 years. But while her niece pursued treatment, Ms. Lynn moved to Oregon, from Washington State, in 2009 to care for the baby and his four siblings. Her job as a manager became untenable, so she took a pay cut — even as her expenses...

By Joanne Chen, Greater Good Magazine, August 23, 2021 In January 1995, Tariq Khamisa was 20 years old. Tony Hicks was 14. Khamisa, a college student, was working his shift delivering pizza the night Hicks’s gang tried to rob him. According to The San Diego Union-Tribune , when the gang leader handed Hicks a gun and told him to shoot, he did. Khamisa died. Hicks was tried as an adult and ultimately received a sentence of 25 years to life in prison. Justice seemed to have prevailed—a severe...

By Diane Mehta, New York Times, August 25, 2021 With some employers looking to bring staff back to work on-site, here’s how parents can ask for schedule accommodations. Kate Westrin, a mother of two in Denver, used to commute to the office four days a week for her job as a people experience manager at Xero, a cloud-based accounting software company. After working from home throughout the pandemic, returning to her previous schedule felt impossible, she said. With the Delta variant...

As humans, we have a basic, primal need to belong. Belonging is defined as ‘the feeling of security and support when there is a sense of acceptance, inclusion, and identity for a member of a certain group . It is when an individual can bring their authentic self to others, including friendships, family and work.’ Feeling disconnected, unimportant, or not cared about can translate into feelings of loneliness. This has led to much of the suffering our society is experiencing today. Cigna...

By Pooja Lakshmin, M.D., New York Times, Aug. 20, 2021 A psychiatrist offers these tools to her patients who worry that Delta will disrupt the school year. As a psychiatrist specializing in women’s mental health, I have spent the past few months celebrating alongside my patients as they planned family reunions and sent kids off to summer camp. But with the arrival of the Delta variant, old questions and a familiar despair have begun to resurface in our sessions: Patients find themselves...

By Leah Wright Rigueur, The Atlantic, August 11, 2021 My first two children entered the world to the sound of my laughter—peals of uncontrollable laughter. When my third child was born on a cruelly hot night last summer in a sterile delivery room, his experience was no different. My reaction to birthing a child may have seemed bizarre to a besieged and battle-weary hospital staff in the midst of a pandemic, but I believe that my joy was a normal response to my scenario. Celebratory joy felt...

As children transition back to school, this video discusses tips for parents around resetting the routine and having conversations about the change. For more practical parenting strategies, visit the Center for Child Counseling . Click here to see the video.

By Eric Moskowitz, Bostonia, July 28, 2021 Near the end of the strangest school year of her life, Julia, a Newton North High School freshman, found herself scrolling an Instagram feed full of her friends posting COVID-vaccine selfies. Some boasted that they felt like superheroes, newly powerful. One said she could finally exhale, calling it her “first deep breath” in over a year. Neither captured what Julia was feeling as she worked up the nerve to get her first shot. “I was really nervous...

By Veronica Chambers, The New York Times, August 18, 2021 The spring and early summer of 2020 was a tough time for me and many other parents. The deaths of George Floyd , Breonna Taylor and the spotlight on previous victims such as Elijah McClain broke our hearts again and again as we watched graphic videos of police-involved killings and stayed glued to the news. There were days that I woke up crying and went to bed crying. I tried to hide these tears from my daughter. But she had just...

Research links adverse childhood experiences, known as ACEs , such as abuse, neglect or experiencing or witnessing violence, to health and well-being challenges in adulthood. But in her research, Dr. Christina Bethell , director of the Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, found that many people who experienced ACEs also had positive experiences as children that made a difference in adulthood. Here, Dr. Bethell discusses...

By Amber M. Northern and Michael J. Petrilli, Fordham Institute, August 2021 America’s hardnosed focus on academic achievement in recent decades has not improved schools nearly enough. Part of the recent move to incorporate other educational goals, such as perseverance and self-discipline—often under the banner of “social-emotional learning” (SEL)—is a response to our schools and students still being off-track two decades after passage of No Child Left Behind and almost four decades after A...