Blog

I am not a fan of finger pointing. I certainly don’t wish to point a finger at myself. But in the interest of keeping a national dialogue about preventing epidemic levels of childhood trauma on track, let’s be clear that all of us collectively allow unsafe childhoods, filled with adversity, to remain a standard feature of these United States. In Anna, Age Eight we write, “We do not control the actions of one broken person doing harm to one child, but we do influence the surrounding...

Communities across the country are leveraging the power of cross-sector networks to build momentum for the ACEs and resilience movement. Learn more about their strategies in this seven-part series from the Mobilizing Action for Resilient Communities Shared Learnings collection. GETTING ON THE SAME PAGE: DEVELOPING A STRATEGIC PLAN Philadelphia + San Diego County | Strategic Planning Read more THE LEARNING GOES BOTH WAYS: ENGAGING COMMUNITY MEMBERS IN RESILIENCE WORK Boston + Wisconsin |...

The aim of a new federal law is to reduce the number of children who end up in the troubled foster care system — the biggest reboot of the child welfare system since 1980. But already, the Family First Prevention Services Act, signed into law by President Donald Trump in February, is generating some controversy. A key point of contention: how it will treat extended family members caring for children outside the foster care system — and whether they will be eligible for financial assistance.

STOW, Mass. — As soon as Julie Eldred was granted probation for stealing jewelry to buy drugs, she got busy fulfilling the judge’s conditions. She began an intensive all-day outpatient treatment program. She even went an extra step and started daily doses of Suboxone, a medication that can quell opiate cravings. Then she relapsed and snorted her drug of choice — fentanyl. To stop from plunging into free fall, she asked her doctor for a stronger dose of Suboxone. She stayed clean the next...

Infant mortality and mass incarceration are major issues affecting the black community. But while they are often thought of and dealt with on separate tracks, structural racism firmly connects these critical issues. Structural racism exposes black women to distinct stressors—such as contact with the criminal justice system—that ultimately undermine their health and the health of their children. Today, infants born to black mothers die at twice the rate as those born to white mothers. 1 This...

I woke up in an ambulance. The last thing I could remember was standing on a ledge in an auditorium and practicing for my school’s choir performance. I was in ninth grade, it was my first field trip in my new home here in the United States, and I was nervous. Then everything went black. I had fainted. Although my front teeth bore the brunt of my fall and saved me from serious injury, I had broken them all. As the paramedic gently explained to me why there was blood gushing from my mouth, he...

When Terrence Davenport first heard about the so-called gig economy, he was working at a free-meal program in his hometown of Dumas, Arkansas, a tiny village surrounded by cotton fields. Around 40 percent of Dumas’s roughly 5,000 residents lived in poverty. Most young people who left for college, as Davenport had done, never came back, and both the town’s population and its median salary—about $23,000 a year—were shrinking. “What did you eat today?” Davenport would ask kids he passed on the...

Oklahoma now has the highest incarceration rate in the U.S., unseating Louisiana from its long-held position as “ the world’s prison capital .” By comparison, states like New York and Massachusetts appear progressive, but even these states lock people up at higher rates than nearly every other country on earth. Compared to the rest of the world, every U.S. state relies too heavily on prisons and jails to respond to crime. The graphic above charts the incarceration rates of every U.S. state...

We as a nation have crossed so many ugly lines recently, yet one new policy of President Trump’s particularly haunts me. I’m speaking of the administration’s tactic of seizing children from desperate refugees at the border. “I was given only five minutes to say goodbye,” a Salvadoran woman wrote in a declaration in an A.C.L.U. lawsuit against the government, after her 4- and 10-year-old sons were taken from her. “My babies started crying when they found out we were going to be separated.”...

Adolescence arrives with a surge of emotional energy. It can empower youth to expand their capabilities, make new friends, depend less on parents, and live more passionately. The influence of parents remains important in a child’s life, and is necessary to support teens in making good choices. Adolescence is also a time when some teens look to experience alcohol or drugs (such as heroine, cocaine, marijuana, and prescription medicine, among other substances). All too often, tragic results...

Excerpt from article by David Love.

As we are well into the second year of this calamitous presidency I cannot avoid reflecting on some of my memories as well as my experiences as a psychotherapist. I grew up in Germany during the immediate post-World War II period. These days the new political “climate” in the US has some features similar to the years immediately before Hitler’s election as Germany’s new chancellor in 1933. 1 The new US administration that started 15 months ago strikes me as proto-fascistic, profoundly...