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Why do fictional television shows often do better than factual journalism at giving viewers a truer sense of the world in all its complexity? Here’s a big reason: TV script writers understand that viewers can deal with nuance and contradictions. Good TV, whether cable or broadcast, shows us fully rounded people grappling with challenges that viewers can identify with on some level, invented and over the top though they may be. They can be larger than life, like the mafia-don-in-therapy Tony...

New Medicaid rules in several states mean low-income people will have to work, or prove they're too unhealthy to work, to receive health coverage. Other states want permission to require the same, which could affect millions of Americans living in or near poverty. Before these requirements get into full gear, a team of University of Michigan researchers is offering specific recommendations to help states ensure that work requirements don't harm the health of people enrolled in Medicaid. The...

During a routine checkup at the pediatrician’s office, I got my first real look at how my 4-year-old daughter feels about the subject of siblings. A nurse asked my daughter if she had any brothers or sisters. “No,” she said, shaking her head, a look of slight revulsion and incredulity on her face, as if she didn’t understand why she was being asked. “Well, I do have Rufus and Tallulah,” she said, with a smile like a ray of sunshine. The nurse looked at me expectantly. “They’re our pit...

If you haven't seen the documentary Won't You Be My Neighbor? , I encourage you to see it as soon as possible. What makes Morgan Neville's biographical documentary so necessary, in fact, is that it shows Rogers was exactly what he appeared to be. Someone who devoted his life to taking seriously and responding to the emotions of children. In a word: to love. Read more from NPR here .

This excellent book is part story and part 20-step manual for creating trauma informed schools and classrooms. I have had the honor and challenge of raising a traumatized child. In addition, I have spent my career in education, as a special education teacher, principal of a public school, principal of an alternative placement school for children with behavioral challenges, and currently as a special education director, confronted with the challenges of educating children with trauma...

By the time the federal government started sending immigrant children to Shiloh Treatment Center in 2009, the warning flags were waving blood red. Three children had died after being physically restrained at Shiloh and affiliated facilities in rural Texas run by the same man, Clay Dean Hill. A teenager from California died after running away and getting hit by a truck. Texas officials repeatedly had cited Hill’s residential centers for troubled youths after caretakers were found to have...

Bill Dorsey works as a shift supervisor at the Ada County Juvenile Justice Detention Center in Boise, Idaho. Outside of his daily duties, Dorsey also provides a valuable service to the youths held in detention — he teaches music. By providing guitar, mandolin and drumming lessons, Dorsey creates a space for kids to learn skills and find their passion by engaging in healthy, communal activities. Since Dorsey began his informal musical instruction, the detention center now incorporates a...

On February 9 , President Donald Trump signed into law the most significant reform to foster care since the federal government got into that business. This fundamental re-ordering of the government’s role in child welfare extends far beyond the 437,000 children living in foster care today. A 2017 study found that one in three U.S. children will be investigated as victims of child maltreatment by the time they turn 18. That means millions of American children will have the experience of a...

From 2000 to 2016, the United States’ use of controversial for-profit prisons to lock up inmates increased by nearly half, according to a new report by The Sentencing Project called “ Capitalizing on Mass Incarceration .” During a similar period, between 2002 and 2017, the number of immigrant detainees in private prisons soared 442 percent. In 2016, there were 128,063 prisoners—or 8.5 percent of the state and federal prison populations—housed in private prisons, an increase of 47 percent...

Editor's note on Aug. 8, 2018: This piece has been substantially updated from a version published in 2014. A solemn little boy with a bowl haircut is telling Mr. Rogers that his pet got hit by a car. More precisely, he's confiding this to Daniel Striped Tiger, the hand puppet that, Rogers' wife, Joanne, says, "pretty much was Fred." "That's scary," says Daniel/Fred. He asks for a hug. The boy hugs the tiger. Not a dry eye in the house. That scene is from Won't You Be My Neighbor, the hit...

WASHINGTON — The toughest issue facing advocates working to abolish youth prisons may be what replaces them. It’s both an obstacle to change and a practical question that follows success. “Pushing for the closure of youth prisons is often the radical idea,” said Hernán Carvente Martinez, national youth partnership strategist at Youth First Initiative . “The question you get is ‘You want to shut it down and replace it with what?’ “Do we build something smaller?” he asked. “That is the part...

It was Bea Duncan who answered the phone at 2 a.m. on a January morning. Her son Jeff had been caught using drugs in a New Hampshire sober home and was being kicked out. Bea and her husband, Doug, drove north that night nine years ago to pick him up. On the ride back home, to Natick, Mass., the parents delivered an ultimatum: Jeff had to go back to rehab, or leave home. Jeff chose the latter, Bea said. She remembers a lot of yelling, cursing and tears as they stopped the car, in the dead of...