Tagged With "Greater Good Magazine"
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10 Ways Parents and Schools Can Prevent School Shootings Now (Op-Ed) (livescience.com)
As a parent, I understand the desire for practical responses to school shootings. I also absolutely believe the government should do more to prevent such incidents. But the gun control debate has proven so divisive and ineffective that I am weary of waiting for politicians to act. I study the kind of aggressive childhood behavior that often predates school shootings. That research suggests what communities and families can start doing today to better protect children. Here are 10 actions we...
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13 Reasons Why and Suicide Contagion [ScientificAmerican.com]
The Netflix series, 13 Reasons Why, has caused a furor. In the show, a high school student who has died by suicide has left 13 tapes, one for each person she believes have contributed in some way to her eventual decision. Each episode relates to an individual tape. The penultimate episode depicts the suicide in a gruesome manner. Some say the series is an accurate and sensitive portrayal of the inner angst of an individual that will help enlighten us as to the motivations behind suicidal...
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2019 State Trends in Child Well-Being [aecf.org]
By the Annie E. Casey Foundation. The 30th edition of the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s KIDS COUNT® Data Book begins by exploring how America’s child population — and the American childhood experience — has changed since 1990. And there’s some good news to share: Of the 16 areas of child well-being tracked across four domains — health, education, family and community and economic well-being — 11 have improved since the Foundation published its first Data Book 30 editions ago. The rest of the...
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25 Things You Do as an Adult When You've Experienced Childhood Emotional Abuse (www.themighty.com)
Excerpt from article by Juliette Virzi. It has been said that “no one escapes childhood unscathed.” But sayings like these can have an especially significant meaning for a person who has experienced emotional abuse as a child . The effects of emotional abuse can be both debilitating and far-reaching, often extending out of childhood and into adolescence and adulthood. For many, experiencing emotional abuse at a young age can affect their self-worth and relationships. For some, emotional...
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3 Concepts to Help Trauma Survivors Move Forward Into Healthier Relationships
It’s good, healthy and human to want love and seek it out. We live longer, healthier lives when we feel close to someone safe. Some people feel painfully disconnected, and long to open up to others. But then they stop themselves from reaching out. As therapists, we want to empower people to build more meaningful connections. For all of us, healthy relationships matter . In fact, deep relationships are essential to life as a healthy human being. For trauma survivors, the act of deepening...
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3 Signs You Have Emotionally Neglectful Parents [blogs.psychcentral.com]
It would be so much easier if emotionally neglectful parents wore a sign on their heads. And although many, if they are more obvious, like narcissistic, authoritarian or addicted parents, may be far easier to identify..., most emotionally neglectful parents are generally well-meaning. They want to be good parents, but they simply do not know what to do. They do not know that they need to validate their children’s emotions, or how to do it. Here’s the most important point: it does not matter...
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4 years after integrating ACEs science, Pueblo, CO clinic improves services for families; cuts ER costs, doctor stress
Four years ago, Dr. Leslie Dempsey would never have talked about ACEs — adverse childhood experiences — with her patients. Now ACEs is a common topic. “Just as I don’t feel awkward asking someone if they smoke or do intravenous drugs, I don’t really feel awkward talking about their childhood traumas in a way that it relates to their health. It’s just integrated into obtaining background and social history,” she says. Dr. Leslie Dempsey Dempsey is a physician in obstetrics who oversees a team...
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5 Ways Caring Parents Make Teen Anxiety Worse (heysigmund.com)
Your happy-go-lucky child has turned into an anxiety-ridden teen . It is a painful thing to watch. Activities that were once enjoyable are now avoided. Going to school is a daily miracle. Instead of driving to the mall, you are driving to the doctor with mysterious stomach issues. So how do you make this nightmare go away? How do parents help with teen anxiety? You can start off learning what not to do – and then go from there. Teen anxiety can look very similar among teens, but how parents...
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50 calm-down ideas to try with kids of all ages (www.mother.ly) & Note
Note: I usually refrain from parenting advice and how-to-do anything. To me, it's about as effective as how-to-eat healthy advice and sharing nutrition facts as though people eat chips because they don't know vegetables are healthier. However, for parents looking for ways to get, feel and be more calm, this is a list with a lot of ideas. A parent who is less stressed, overwhelmed and feels less stretched is going to parent better. That's good for kids, too and parents can do some of these...
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7 Reasons the Past is Keeping You Stuck (www.beatingtrauma.com)
Excerpt from blog by Elisabeth Corey.
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7 Ways to Help a Child Deal with Traumatic Stress
Traumatic stress feels awful. Thankfully, there are small things we can all do to help relax a hyperaroused nervous system.
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7 Ways to Help a Child Deal with Traumatic Stress (www.attachmenttraumanetwork.org)
Excerpt from article by Hllary Jacobs Hendel: To read this full article by Hilary Jacobs Hendel, go here.
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9 Signs You Need Better Self-Care and May Be a Trauma Survivor
Self-care is the sum of things you do for your emotional and physical wellbeing. Getting enough sleep, brushing your teeth, and eating well are classic examples of good physical self-care. How to take good care of yourself emotionally may be harder to see from the outside. Your ability to view your inner world with compassion and curiosity is one sign. Noticing your emotions and thoughts with gentle awareness is another inward sign of emotional self-care. Knowing how to find and turn to...
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9 things this adoptive mom would like everyone to know [upworthy.com]
Adoption is amazing. And it’s complicated. It can bring great joy. And it can bring great pain. Adoption is nuanced. And like anything else, it can be hard to see those nuances when it's not part of your life. That's particularly true when the media is so good at circulating adoption narratives that are a little problematic — like the baby left under the Christmas tree for his siblings to discover. I get why people thought it was sweet: A precious new life was placed into an...
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A Daughter's Letter to Her Alcoholic Father - I Love You and I Hate You
"Why don’t you love me? Why don’t you care enough to care?," writes the high school girl who wrote a letter to her alcoholic father but never mailed it. She asked me to share it on my blogs, instead. It’s the rawness of her hurt, so many years into her life, that drew me to share her letter. Helping children and adults understand the secondhand drinking (SHD) impacts a child experiences when growing up with a parent’s alcoholism* is essential to helping a child (or an adult child) heal from...
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A Day Out with the Kids (www.notesfromthelooneybin.wordpress.com)
Note: I often marvel when I read writing by parents who are struggling with traumatic stress. How hard parents will work, how deep the digging, how overwhelming life can be at times. It's not easy for families. There's not a lot of support or language even for parents doing this warrior level work invisibly or not so invisibly. It's rare to hear, know or read anything about these topics and I'm glad this is one place where experiences can be shared. Here's an excerpt as well as the link to...
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A dietitian's guide to raising a body-positive child. (ksl.com)
Preschool and elementary-age children are more dissatisfied with their bodies than ever before, according to one study . Girls as young as 3 already perceive heaviness as “bad” and thinness as “good,” and more than a third of 5-year-old girls restrict their eating in order to stay thin. So, let’s remember the goal as parents: raise resilient kids in a thin-obsessed culture. Your kids will have negative thoughts about their bodies. Our goal isn’t to prevent that; it’s to help them be...
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A Few Quotes I Love from The Silenced Child by Claudia M. Gold, MD
This book is so good. I am loving reading it and I have already underlined so many parts that I can't wait to read the whole thing to write a book review. I'm going to start sharing some quotes. First, what I love most is the warm and non-clinical tone. It sounds like it is written by a human being and that's appealing. The author writes about parents (and is one) with kindness and care and as a human being. O.k., at only 50 pages in, here are some of the gems so far : "Listening to parents...
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A good New Year's Resolution: Moms need to remember themselves.
From Anna Sutton via ACEs in Maternal Health group ... Love this table top conversation between Jada Pinkett Smith, her daughter and mother. Take home message... If you're a mom, don't forget who YOU are to yourself. You weren't always a mom. Your kids need to see this part of you so that they will remember to value themselves when they become parents. If you have a mom, remind her she's also a beautiful woman. If you're a partner, help her to find a safe, stress free...
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A Landmark Study Has Found Self-Control to be One of the Most Important Predictors of Success – Here’s How to Increase Self-Control In Children (heysigmund.com)
The need for self-control can feel like a tease at times and a bit of a pity, but its influence is spectacularly powerful. A landmark study conducted over three decades has found that the level of self-control children have as five-year olds, is one of the greatest predictors of their health, wealth and success as adults. Knowing how to increase self-control in children can help them on a path that sees them thrive. The Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study , a New Zealand...
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A Love Letter To Those Who Break The Cycle Of Abuse (www.scarymommy.com)
So if you are a parent from a wounded background striving to raise your kids differently, if you are silently waging your own battles the rest of the world can't see, I want you to know that you are awesome. Parenting is damn hard, even with good psycho-emotional tools, so naturally it may feel impossible sometimes. But you've got this. Keep choosing that phone booth. Don't give up. When you feel weary, remember this: The rewards for your efforts to break the cycle of abuse are vast and...
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A New Year's Message
Happy New Year and forget about old-time resolutions! I’d like to pose something different than loosing weight or getting organized: giving ourselves a gift, the gift of attention. I have a very particular activity to recommend – one that served me very well as I describe in Chapter 5: Coming Our as a Survivor in my book Healing My Life from Incest to Joy: “It came to me one morning as I sat in front of my mirror doing my hair and makeup. I looked into my own eyes and said, “I’m proud of...
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A Reflection of Real Life and the Amazing Influence of People: The Saga of C-PTSD Continues
Cissy Note on Leisa's Amazing Post: This post isn't about parenting, specifically, but it is about C-PTSD which many parents are living with, sorting through and recovering from. I felt so much compassion for and admiration of Leisa reading this. I even felt some compassion for myself. I wonder how many others, while facing our ACEs feel the compassion of others or ourselves? I wonder if anyone, while battling symptoms, feels respected or admired? There can be so much shame. I hope that if...
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A Shared Sentence The Devastating Toll of Parental Incarceration on Kids, Families and Communities (www.acef.org) & Commentary
Here's a link to the policy report put out earlier this year by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Here's a summary of what's in it in case you want to explore it more. More than 5 million U.S. children have had a parent in jail or prison at some point in their lives. The incarceration of a parent can have as much impact on a child’s well-being as abuse or domestic violence. But while states spend heavily on corrections, few resources exist to support those left behind. A Shared Sentence offers...
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A Sherpa Helping Us Scale Mountains of Loss & Fear: The Impact of Sebern Fisher's Work
“You can recover from all that happened to you.” That was the dose of hope I received from Sebern Fisher during a short telephone interview. She is the author of Neurofeedback in the Treatment of Developmental Trauma: Calming the Fear-Driven Brain. Her book is excellent even if you never plan on using neurofeedback. She helps explain why and how developmental trauma devastates and how it is different than single-incident trauma or traditional post-traumatic stress. Honestly – if you read her...
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Empowering Kids In An Anxious World [NPR.org]
Rates of anxiety and depression among teens in the U.S. have been rising for years. According to one study , nearly one in three adolescents (ages 13-18) now meets the criteria for an anxiety disorder, and in the latest results from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Youth Risk Behavior Survey, 32 percent of teens reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness. And there's more bad news, grown-ups: The authors of two new parenting books believe you're part of the...
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Every Woman Was Once a Girl: Why We Need to Talk About the Unique Biological Effects of #ToxicChildhoodStress and #FemaleAdversity on Women’s Bodies and Brains
This is Part Two of my Female Adversity: The Female Body and Brain on Toxic Stress series. (CRUCIAL NOTE HERE BEFORE YOU READ: Boys’ immune systems become dysregulated in response to #toxicstress too, and that leads to disease and changes to the brain that we also need to talk about more openly AND compassionately. Today I’m focusing on girls’ unique immune response to #toxicstress.) So, exactly what happens in a girl’s body, in response to #toxicstress, that leads girls to be more likely to...
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EveryDay Strong: Teaching kids about family history helps increase resilience [heraldextra.com]
Resilience, or the ability to overcome challenges in life, is a trait many parents hope their children will develop. Resilient children are more likely to have good emotional and mental health. Research has shown that children who know more about their families and family history are more resilient and tend to do better when facing challenges in life. This may be because seeing patterns of overcoming failures and surviving hard times can help children recognize that people can recover and...
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Family Anxiety Challenge - Changing the Neural Pathways In Our Brains
I am a therapist who has to make an effort each day to manage my anxiety and negative emotions. Therapists are not usually open about their mental health in our culture; we are looked to as the expert and someone who has it "all together." But I became a therapist for two reasons, to help understand my brain, and to use what I learned to help others. I find that being transparent about my mental health inspires others to share their truths. Human beings are a work in progress. We know this...
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Fathering as a Survivor (www.triggerpointsanthology.com)
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,...
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Fathers, Sons, and Intimacy: A Story of Moving Past Childhood Adversity
Seth’s natural impulse was to shy away from showing affection to his girlfriend. That made perfect sense to me since he grew up with a father who rarely showed affection to anyone in the family. Seth’s grandfather was an alcoholic who punished his children harshly. Seth understood his father received very little love and tenderness and probably never received any physical comfort like a hug or pat on the back. The lack of intimacy between father and son extended back through the generations.
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Five Things to Know about Military Families with Linda Sanford
Note: I adore Linda Sanford. She is also the author of one of my favorite books, Strong at the Broken Places: Overcoming the Trauma of Child Abuse which came out in 1991. So when I heard she was speaking at a local event hosted by The Riverside Trauma Center, about military families I had to go. I had not considered the stress faced by military families, many of who are also parenting with ACEs, as well. “There are five things I want you to know about military families,” said Linda Sanford.
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FLYERS: Understanding ACEs & Parenting to Prevent & Heal ACEs
We are excited to share two flyers which can be downloaded, distributed, or used freely. One is brand new and the other is a revision. They are titled as follows (and attached below): Parenting to prevent and heal ACEs Understanding ACEs 1. Parenting to prevent and heal ACEs This brand new flyer us based on the work of Donna Jackson Nakazawa who worked with us and generously allowed us to paraphrase content from her book, Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology & How...
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Forgiveness?
I saw the funniest meme today by Sue Fitzmaurice. I don't know her writing but this made me laugh so hard that I will certainly be reading more about her. Forgiveness is tough. As I age I find myself feeling more and more forgiving - and much more often than I did when younger. When I was younger, it felt like forgiveness was a way of saying what was done (when it came to abuse) or not done (when it come to neglect) was o.k. It wasn't o.k. as in ideal or healthy or good for me. I didn't even...
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Free Mind Matters Online Series -- Build skills to overcome anxiety and increase resilience
In appreciation of and support for the tremendous work you are doing under challenging circumstances, Dibble will be hosting a free, 12-week Mind Matters online series with Dr. Carolyn Curtis and Dixie Zittlow. Unprecedented times, such as these, are stressful and call for everyone to think about ways to help others and themselves. Thus, we see this as an opportunity to offer free, professional development and help you and your staff practice self-care. Join us as we teach the Mind Matters...
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Gathering in Topeka, Kansas for the Educators’ Art of Facilitation Chapter III
I never believed that a man who abuses anyone physically, emotionally or verbally is simply a monster.That's too simple.There is a reason why men do what they do, and don't do and in order to help men and women to not be hurtful to themselves or others we must as I said in my last post ”help them heal.” We must advocate for a world in which we don't punish, we transform. I have always believed this on many issues, from domestic violence to drug addiction to other acts of criminality. We...
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Gathering in Topeka, Kansas for the Educators’ Art of Facilitation continued
We can not solve problems from a distance from ourselves or from each other. The way we muster the courage to heal is to walk the journey together. Any effort to create policy change, structural change, or even programatic change will not succeed unless there is an explicit healing perspective. It begins with a deep understanding that we all come hurt and that those hurts often mean that in striving to relieve our own pain we hurt each other. “Hurt people, hurt people.” It is simplicity on...
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Girls From Low-Income Backgrounds Are Truanting Because They Can’t Afford Sanitary Products (www.buzzfeed.com) & Commentary
Girls from lower-income backgrounds are missing days of school because they can’t afford sanitary products. A campaigner with Freedom4Girls, a organisation that provides women and girls in Kenya with sanitary products, told BuzzFeed News they were contacted by a concerned police officer working in a school in Leeds who had noticed a pattern in some girls’ truancy. “There is a problem, but we just don’t know how big,” campaigner Tina Leslie told BuzzFeed News. She was told by the officer,...
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Going beyond asking what happened: building beloved community
“Our goal is to create a beloved community and this will require a qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative change in our lives.”- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “beloved community is formed not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world.” –bell hooks One of the most notable descriptors of trauma-informed care is shifting the question of what is wrong...
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Good Parenting vs. Bad Neighborhood
Hello my name is Julius Patterson. I am currently a intern at Hopeworks N' Camden. I am twenty three years old and i am also a student at Camden County College. I found this article very intriguing because of past situations that i have encountered and i feel like i can relate on a personal level. Growing Up In Disadvantaged Areas May Affect teens Brains, But Good Parenting May Help By: Sarah Whittle, Julian G.Simmons, Nick Allen Summary & Analysis by: Julius Patterson Growing up in...
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Grace Mattern: The importance of recognizing white privilege [concordmonitor.com]
The last time you handled a challenge well, were you called a credit to your race? When you go shopping, do store clerks watch you closely or follow you? Do you have trouble finding a hair salon nearby that knows how to style your hair? When you buy greeting cards and magazines, is it difficult to find ones with people the same race as you? If you answered no to these questions, you’re almost certainly white. There’s also a good chance you’ve never looked at your whiteness this way.
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Grateful in a Grand Way
Children don’t come to live with their grandparents or relatives because everything is going great. The transition can be tough for the new family. As a grand“Parent” guardian of my grandson, I’ve written previously about the sad stuff, the tough stuff, and there’s a lot of it. It’s easy to get sucked into the negative, rehashing the entire past, the guilt, the anger, and projecting into an ugly future. Today is the last day of National Adoption Month. It is a month I celebrate, not as a...
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Great Basic Parenting Tips & Why I Have Such a Hard Time Sharing Them
At least once a week I struggle about what to share here. This is my most recent example. It's a series of tips on the U.S. Department of Education . These are great hand-outs with comprehensive information about child development that's not too long, abstract or hard to read. Here's the list (also attached below). I especially like the flyer for talking about feelings which has the tag line "Talking is teaching." And the short summary of milestones at different ages and stages from birth to...
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Greatest Mother’s Day Gift
Tomorrow is Mother’s Day. I have been given the greatest gift a mother could ask, my daughter- back. Last year a month before Mother’s Day I began a heart wrenching journey. My oldest daughter was in a serious car accident. She suffered a traumatic brain injury, broken neck, broken back, broken foot, but she was alive. She was a single mom. I became the guardian of my toddler grandson. I wasn’t prepared to become a mother in that way again. I was prepared to be a doting, spoiling...
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Growing up in disadvantaged areas may affect teens’ brains, but good parenting can help [TheConversation.com]
New research has found growing up in a disadvantaged neighbourhood may have negative effects on children’s brain development. But for males, at least, positive parenting negated these negative effects, providing some good lessons for parents. Living in a disadvantaged neighbourhood (where there are more people who have low income jobs or are unemployed, are less educated, and have less access to resources) can cause stress, and has been linked with psychological and social problems in...
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Guilt vs. Shame (www.nicabm.com)
There's a blog post by Ruth Buczynski, PhD on the National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine website that links to a great infographic explaining the difference between guilt and shame. It's worth checking out. What I found most helpful though is something I've never really heard of or understood - irrational guilt. Irrational guilt is defined as "a feeling of psychological discomfort about something we've done against our irrationally high standards." Who knew? I...
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Happy Mother's Day! Remembering The Greatest Generation of Moms...
“I waited.
And waited…
And then…I waited some more.”
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Healing in place: Game on to flip the COVID19 threat into a positive experience for our children
As I was considering the children sheltering-in-place this morning and reflecting on lessons from my own childhood, I wondered: Can we heal-in-place too? I was born after the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, another collective trauma affecting everyone. Yet, it was nevertheless passed on to me by the adults in my life in the form of constant reminders that the U.S. could be blown into bits any second. When I started school, there were constant “hide under the chair” earthquake drills I took to be...
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Health Care System Fails Many Transgender Americans (npr.org)
In the basement of Casa Ruby in Washington, D.C., transgender men and women in their late teens and 20s, mostly brown or black, shared snacks, watched TV, chatted or played games on their phones. Many of them, said Corado, are part of the 31 percent. That's 31 percent of transgender Americans who lack regular access to health care. The finding comes from a new poll by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Corado pointed to one crucial word...
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Helping children from going limbic (www.fatherhoodchannel.com)
Cissy's note: Excerpts from the most helpful article I have read so far about parenting during COVID-19 are below, from the Fatherhood Channel. It reminds me that my curiosity, interest, and ability to offer a safe space are most important even if my inclination is to want to know what to say and to do. It's an article that helped me exhale instead of feeling guilty - and that alone is a relief.