Blog

Dear ACEs in Pediatrics members: I am looking forward to seeing many of you at the National ACEs Conference next week in San Francisco! I will be attending the Pediatric symposium. You'll recognize me as the person typing away on my computer, hoping to capture some of the highlights to share later on in blog posts here and elsewhere on ACEs Connection. I've spoken or corresponded with many of you over the last year. It's been my great pleasure in learning from the community, getting ideas...

Two powerful articles published in the Annals of Family Medicine examined the issue of white privilege within the medical community. In the first piece, 1 author Max J. Romano, MD, MPH, from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, Maryland, opens with an anecdote of an experience during work at a hospital, when he witnessed other staff members making generalizations about a recently deceased patient based on that patient's race: "One hospital staff member removed a...

Much has been written about what happens to mothers hormonally during pregnancy and after, but what about fathers? In a first-of-its-kind study, University of Notre Dame Assistant Professor of Anthropology Lee Gettler and lead author Patty Kuo, visiting assistant professor of psychology, focused on how dads' biology around the birth of their children relates to their parenting down the road. They partnered with Notre Dame psychologists and Memorial Hospital of South Bend to analyze...

A new California survey of pregnant and new mothers paints a bleak picture of what it’s like to be a black mother. In Listening to Mothers in California, black mothers reported not being heard by their health providers and said they experienced discrimination during childbirth. They also experienced higher rates of anxiety and depression during and after pregnancy than white women. The findings add fuel to a growing sense of urgency on maternal health. On Wednesday, California Gov. Brown...

The JPB Research Network on Toxic Stress , led by Dr. Jack Shonkoff, is working on developing biological and behavioral markers for adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and resilience that they believe will be able to measure to what extent a child is experiencing toxic stress, and what effect that stress may be having on the child’s brain and development. The JPB Research Network on Toxic Stress is comprised of scientists, pediatricians and community leaders, and is a project of the Center...

Fred Rogers, in his 1969 testimony before the Senate subcommittee on communications in defense of public television, transforms a clearly skeptical Senator Pastore from, "Alright Rogers you've got the floor" to, "Looks like you just earned the 20 million dollars." How does he accomplish this transformation? One line from Senator Pastore gives us some insight. Several minutes into Mr. Rogers testimony he says, "This is the first time I've had goosebumps in the last two days," to which Rogers...

Parents who have experienced adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), such as abuse, neglect, or household dysfunction, are more likely than parents without these experiences to have children with behavioral health problems, according to an analysis of data from several large, nationally representative surveys of US households that addressed ACEs and children’s behavioral problems and diagnoses. Of the more than 2500 children for whom researchers had data, one-fifth had a parent who reported...

Children who are abused might carry the imprint of that trauma in their cells—a biochemical marking that is detectable years later, according to new research from the University of British Columbia and Harvard University. The findings, based on a comparison of chemical tags on the DNA of 34 adult men, still need confirmation from larger studies, and researchers don't know if this tagging—known as methylation—affects the victims' health. But the difference in methylation between those who had...

In shelters from Kansas to New York, hundreds of migrant children have been roused in the middle of the night in recent weeks and loaded onto buses with backpacks and snacks for a cross-country journey to their new home: a barren tent city on a sprawling patch of desert in West Texas. Until now, most undocumented children being held by federal immigration authorities had been housed in private foster homes or shelters, sleeping two or three to a room. They received formal schooling and...

"The infants often cry and cry. Some of the toddlers go limp when caregivers pick them up. Others hug every adult in sight. Some older children with younger brothers and sisters act as if they are little parents. “They’re very protective, and they struggle with being separated from their siblings,” says Tiffany McDonald, a Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center social worker. “It’s a survivor skill,” says Mary Greiner, a Cincinnati Children’s physician and expert in child abuse and...

When prompted by a life coach to comfort the child inside of her, Kim Montleon, a young mother at the center of the documentary film, Wrestling Ghosts , says emphatically: “I can’t do that; I’m afraid I won’t come back!” That’s the beginning of Montleon’s two-year struggle to dig deep into her own harrowing childhood trauma to find a way to heal so that she can nurture her young children. The documentary by filmmaker Ana Sofia Joanes was screened to more than 140 people on Saturday,...

“Like so many rape survivors in this country living through this particular moment in history,” Deborah Copaken wrote last week, “I have been so brought to my knees by this latest allegation that I, too, was inspired to speak out.” After Copaken described her experience, her former pediatrician got in touch with her, and shared his letter with The Atlantic. [For more on this story, go to https://www.theatlantic.com/letters/archive/2018/09/pediatrician-i-didnt-discuss-sexuality-patients/571516/ ]