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Marisa Luse was accustomed to juggling multiple roles: as the mother of a three-year-old son, a parent ambassador for the Boston Children’s Museum and a board member for the Boston Association for Childbirth Education. She was used to helping youth and families access and achieve their goals: a healthy family, a school-ready child. But when leaders of a Community Organizing for Family Issues (COFI) training asked Luse to name priorities for her own growth, she came up blank.

A hug may be comforting to many children, but for a child who has experienced trauma it may not feel safe. That’s an example used by Julie Kurtz, co-director of trauma informed practices in early childhood education at the WestEd Center for Child & Family Studies (CCFS), as she begins a trauma training session. Her audience, preschool teachers and staff of the San Francisco-based Wu Yee Children’s Services at San Francisco’s Women’s Building, listen attentively.

I started this post to share ONE brief about self-regulation in the first five years that was shared with me today (thanks @Jane Stevens). It's great and some excerpts are below and it can be used (and reused) freely as long as it has this citation: It's dense, long, and accessible. It's got a few graphics and a lot of clear language. My favorite thing of all is that it's so light on edupuking all over parents which means it is much more likely that we will read along :) This is stuff that...

Thoughts on the shift from, "What's wrong with you?" to "What happened to you?" Dear Monadnock Thrives & ACEs Connection: I have to admit, it has taken me some time to understand the value of shifting from, “What’s wrong with you?” to “What happened to you?” As a person with high ACEs, I realize I have been absolutely conditioned by our culture to resist the victim label (I resist thinking about what happened to me) and to ‘own’ my response to whatever has happened to me (I must pursue...

In a space that used to be an abandoned state hospital, Lora Lesak has created an early childhood classroom filled with natural light and comfortable chairs — a room designed to feel like a home. As director of Developmental Health Services for Allentown’s Community Services for Children, she says that’s exactly what children who’ve experienced trauma need. “We have gotten children that have needed to remain in the hospital for two weeks to be weaned of substances — whether it’s cocaine,...

"When Arline Geronimus was a student at Princeton University in the late 1970s, she worked a part-time job at a school for pregnant teenagers in Trenton, N.J. She quickly noticed that the teenagers at that part-time job were suffering from chronic health conditions that her whiter, better-off Princeton classmates rarely experienced. Geronimus began to wonder: how much of the health problems that the young mothers in Trenton experienced were caused by the stresses of their environment? It was...

Sesame Street for Military Families Sesame Street for Military Families has released new content! Visit the link to find interactive games, videos, and printable activities for military families to do with their preschool children. Topics include staying healthy together, creating fun and meaningful birthday traditions, encouraging children’s self-expression, making changes more comfortable, and so much more! NCTSN Child Traumatic Grief Series Supporting Military Children with Traumatic...

For most people, a single doctor’s visit can be a financial obstacle course. Many patients throughout the year pay hundreds or thousands of dollars in premiums, most often through workplace contributions. Then, at the doctor’s office, they are faced with a deductible, and they may need to pay coinsurance or make a copayment. If they have prescriptions, they’ll likely fork over cash for those, too. And that’s just for basic primary care for one person. Repeat that process for an entire...

Too many Americans are overweight and eat unhealthy food, a problem that falls disproportionately on poor and low-income people. For many urbanists, the main culprit has long been “food deserts”—disadvantaged neighborhoods that are underserved by quality grocery stores, and where people’s nutritional options are limited to cheaper, high-calorie, and less nutritious food. But a new study by economists at New York University, Stanford University, and the University of Chicago adds more...

Results of a national study led by public health scientist Elizabeth Evans at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, with others at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the University of California, Los Angeles, suggest that risk for alcohol and drug use disorders among United States military veterans is increased by childhood adversity, and in ways that are different between women and men and different compared to the civilian population. Evans, an assistant professor of...

On her third day alone in the house, 7-year-old Linda Fritts slept in her safe place in the closet. She arranged the shelves and fashioned a nest for herself atop a chest of drawers. “I would take stuffed animals in there and my books in there,” she says now. She read by flashlight, Nancy Drew or The Boxcar Children, the series about four inexplicably happy orphans who live by themselves in an abandoned freight car. “I was jealous,” Linda says. “They had each other.” [For more on this story...

Ask anyone about caregiving, and you’ll likely hear a story about personal sacrifice. Heather Boldon, a single mother from Minnesota, gave up her full-time job to care for her mother. She took a more than 50 percent pay cut, spent down her 401k, and lost her health insurance. When she was injured, she couldn’t visit a doctor to see whether she needed surgery. In New York, Delores McCrae, a home care worker, was evicted from her home and lived in a women’s homeless shelter where she was...