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On an early fall evening, hundreds of students, ranging from 1st-graders to high school seniors, filed onto the stage of a cavernous auditorium at a San Francisco Bay Area high school. One by one, they marched to the microphone to state their name and their milestone in achieving perfect attendance for at least a year: Some had made the goal for four years, some for seven years. One girl, a recent graduate, received a trophy in absentia, for 12. Twelve years without a single tardy, let alone...

With massive demographic shifts taking place, the way we raise, educate, and care for all children has reached a new level of importance. Ensuring children’s health and well-being in the U.S. is critical to the nation’s economic and political future, according to The New Importance of Children , a report co-funded by the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health and Children’s Hospital Association. Declining birthrates mean that each child is proportionately more important to society...

Today you'd probably lump me in with the middle class, but I carry some residue of having grown up poor. I work with people who work hard to help the poor, but have not themselves ever been poor. There are things they don't understand.

Belleruth Naparstek was the last featured guest in our Parenting with ACEs chat series last week. She is a psychotherapist, author, and guided imagery pioneer. She is the creator of the popular Health Journeys guided imagery audio series and author of Staying Well with Guided Imagery and Invisible Heroes: Survivors of Trauma and How They H eal. During the chat, Naparstek shared a bit about guided imagery and how and why it can be effective for those of us with ACEs and/or post-traumatic...

What if we replaced the word "addict" with: “A human being who suffered so much that he or she finds in drugs or some other behavior a temporary escape from that suffering"? Part 2 of a 2 part interview. Read part 1 here . The Fix: In " Trump, Clinton and Trauma ," you detail the pathology of Donald Trump, writing, “What we perceive as the adult personality often reflects compensations a helpless child unwittingly adopted in order to survive. Such adaptations can become wired into the brain,...

Anyone who’s watched a cop show on television in recent decades has a decent understanding -- or at least a memory -- of the rights accorded to those arrested: the right to an attorney, the right to remain silent and all the other protections given to the accused over the past half-century, following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1966 decision in Miranda v. Arizona. But juvenile offenders often don’t have a clear understanding of what those rights entail. Back in 2013, the American Academy of...

On her day of reckoning, Sgt. Yulanda Williams did not wear the blue. Stomach churning, too nervous to eat much breakfast, she drove across the Bay Bridge into the city. Her mother had pleaded with her to reconsider, but she had given her word: She was going to tell the world about the racism in the San Francisco Police Department. Williams entered the massive white stone library on Larkin Street, within sight of City Hall. A blue-ribbon panel organized by the district attorney was...

America's science community can breathe a sigh of relief: The provisions to tax graduate student tuition and eliminate the student loan interest deduction have been removed from the final version of the GOP tax bill. These provisions would have made it more expensive to attend graduate school, and would have discouraged students from low- and even middle-income families from considering a career in science. Losing these students would ultimately harm all of us because, as Science...

It's no secret why drug users come to George Patterson in a mall parking lot just outside Phoenix to get their clean needles, syringes and other supplies on Tuesday afternoons, instead of heading to the pharmacy down the street. "It's really low-barrier the way we are doing it," Patterson says. "All you have to do is find us." Patterson asks for no IDs, no signatures and no questions — all of which can dissuade IV drug users from seeking out clean needles or the overdose reversal drug...

By now we know that racism is a discussion that everyone needs to have, yet it’s easy to become overwhelmed by it all. These discussions can challenge what we know. There is still much we don’t know about each other and the impact of race and racism in our homes, our schools, our workplaces, our local governments. Many of our families and communities are simply microcosms of the greater society that often miseducates us. When we enter school, we learn about the fact of slavery but too often...

When you think about gratitude and its place in our culture, you might not immediately think about morality—that is, matters of right and wrong. Often, we make gratitude sound like it’s all about you. In the domain of self-help, we hear that gratitude is the single most important ingredient to living a successful and fulfilled life—or that when we are grateful, fear disappears and abundance appears. In fact, research does support the idea that gratitude helps people who practice it. They...

[Editor's note: Dr. Harise Stein at Stanford University edits a web site -- abuseresearch.info -- that focuses on the health effects of abuse, and includes research articles on ACEs. Every month, she will post the summaries of the abstracts and links to research articles that address only ACEs. Thank you, Harise!! -- Jane Stevens] Quinn K, Boone L, Scheidell JD, et. al. The relationships of childhood trauma and adulthood prescription pain reliever misuse and injection drug use. Drug Alcohol...