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Liany and Maria Villacis grew up in a family that did everything together. Each summer, even when money was tight, their parents made sure to take a week’s vacation, no matter how modest. Last summer, when Liany, 22, was in a finance training program in Chicago, her parents and twin sister took their family vacation in the Windy City. Their closeness was a result of circumstance as much as blood: The twins were born in Pasto, Colombia, where their mother, Liany Guerrero, hailed from a...

New results from an NPR survey show that large numbers of Asian-Americans experience and perceive discrimination in many areas of their daily lives. This happens despite their having average incomes that outpace other racial, ethnic and identity groups. The poll , a collaboration among NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, also finds a wide gap between immigrant and nonimmigrant Asian-Americans in reporting discrimination experiences,...

In October 2014, less than two months after entering North Augusta High School in Aiken County, South Carolina, Logan Rewis paused to drink from a fountain in the hallway between periods. As he straightened up, water fell from his mouth onto the shoe of his social studies teacher, Matt Branon, who was standing nearby. Logan says it was an accident, but Branon thought Logan had spat at him. “My bad,” the 15-year-old with bushy sandy-brown hair and blue eyes says he told Branon after the...

America has rarely seen more division, polarization and disunion than at this moment. And yet our best selves long for connection. Deep down, we know that separation is an illusion, that there is no us and them, just us. We want to remember that we belong to each other, no matter how we voted a year ago. Sometimes, college professors make their students read my book about Homeboy Industries, “Tattoos on the Heart,” against their will. (I’m not complaining.) Gonzaga University, in Spokane,...

On a gloomy day in September, Lisa Hayden rushed through the circular door of the Yurok Tribal Court in Klamath, California, with her 1-year-old son on her hip. Hayden, 31, worried that the day wouldn’t turn out any different from all the others she’d spent in court trying to protect herself from her ex-husband. For 12 years, starting when she was pregnant with their first child, Hayden alleges, her ex-husband had held guns to her head, punched her, and called her terrible names. The abuse...

Only a few years ago, school desegregation was a topic confined to history books—a tumultuous chapter of the civil rights era, starting with Brown v. Board of Education and ending, ignominiously, with the backlash of white parents in the 1980s and '90s. But over the past three years, thanks to the renewed efforts of advocates and researchers, a surprising resurgence has taken shape. Authors and activists are once again highlighting America's failure to successfully integrate its schools as a...

Almost half of children in the U.S. have experienced trauma, according to new data released by the Child & Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. This is troubling because other research shows that the consequences of trauma are far-reaching and can last into adulthood. Kids who experience adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are more likely to have trouble calming themselves down, focusing, and even making and keeping friends, the...

The amount of close and comforting contact between infants and their caregivers can affect children at the molecular level, an effect detectable four years later, according to new research from the University of British Columbia and BC Children's Hospital Research Institute. The study showed that children who had been more distressed as infants and had received less physical contact had a molecular profile in their cells that was underdeveloped for their age--pointing to the possibility that...

The Attachment & Trauma Network announces the full agenda of the first National Creating Trauma-Sensitive Schools Conference, February 18-20, 2018 at the Washington Hilton in Washington DC. The conference will feature keynotes by Dr. Susan Craig & Melissa Sadin, Robert Hull, and Dr. Mona Johnson. A Building Trauma-Informed Community luncheon will be held on Tuesday. And Jim Sporleder will be our special guest at a screening of Paper Tigers on Sunday night. "We had an overwhelming...

Excerpts below from the article by Stephanie Zacharek, Eliana Dockertman and Haley Sweetland Edwards: Read full article and cover photos/video.

In 2006, while on a family vacation, Gordon Hartman, a San Antonio home builder, went to a hotel swimming pool with his daughter, Morgan. She was born with physical and cognitive disabilities; at 12, she had the cognitive age of a young child. Other children were swimming as well, two of them throwing a ball. As Hartman tells it, Morgan slowly made her way to them, and not being verbal, hit the ball. The frightened children collected their ball and scrambled out of the pool. Morgan turned to...

For Donald Trump and the populist wing of the Republican Party, immigrants are the enemy, taking jobs away from Americans and eating up public revenue. Since being elected, Trump has sought to curtail immigration in several ways: moving to cut legal immigration by as much as half over the next decade; building a wall along the Mexican border; ending the DACA program that protected so-called DREAMers from deportation; and even limiting “startup visas” for high-tech entrepreneurs entering the...