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Advancing Parenting just received a small grant from First 5 Kern! The funds will be used to place the fifty parenting tips on 130 Golden Empire Transit buses and shuttles in Bakersfield. Yeah!!! These tips will be read 1000s of times by 1000s of people! Visit advancingparenting.org to read the fifty tips...and while you're at it order one for your private vehicle(s)! This is one kind of proactive, passive/public parenting education that will prevent adverse childhood experiences!

Elaine Waxman and Corianne Scally of the Urban Institute Research Hub have released a new study examining emerging interventions that integrate housing and health services for low-income people, focusing on interventions where health care organizations have taken a significant leadership role. The research pairs over 30 expert interviews with six in-depth case studies to paint a detailed picture of emerging strategies and their potential to be sustained, expanded, and replicated elsewhere.

Are you a mental health professional or caregiver? Would you like to know how to avoid burnout or compassion fatigue? Many of us know that we need to watch out for compassion fatigue (Figley, 1995) but are at a loss on how to do this. Compassion fatigue is “a state experienced by those helping people or animals in distress; it is an extreme state of tension and preoccupation with the suffering of those being helped to the degree that it can create a secondary traumatic stress for the...

This post first appeared at In These Times . Ever since the earth-shaking election of Donald Trump, there have been innumerable articles arguing that Democrats brought this upon themselves by losing white, working-class voters in the Midwest. These articles have been met with a torrent of essays urging Democrats to focus on becoming the party of diversity. And, coming back from the dead like a bloated zombie corpse is Mark Penn and Andrew Stein’s New York Times piece calling for a return to...

Ashley McCall was teaching her third grade students about American voting rights last year when one of them asked a question she couldn’t answer: How do older people of color process the evolution of the right to vote? McCall, a black teacher whose student body is mostly of color, asked her own grandparents to do a video conference with the class. They fielded students’ vibrant inquiries about having lived in the south during the civil rights era. “It was awesome,” says McCall. McCall says...

When New York Magazine published a story about the apocalyptic dangers of climate change last month, it was shared widely, and with alarm. People tweeted things like “Read this and get very, very scared,” or otherwise prescribed fear and worry as the appropriate reaction to the piece. They were mimicking the tone of the story itself, which starts by saying “It is, I promise, worse than you think,” and goes on to avow that “no matter how well-informed you are, you are surely not alarmed...

There won’t be any more cheese sandwiches served at Elk Grove Unified schools. The region’s largest school district will no longer give students a bland, alternative lunch when they run out of meal funds or forget their lunch money. Elk Grove Unified is joining districts across the region and nation that are changing rules so that children who come up short for lunch money aren’t embarrassed with a different meal than what their peers receive – or not fed at all, as has been the case...

In the years after the Great Recession, Stockton, California, became the poster child of financial ruin. The mid-sized city was crushed by the housing collapse , and made national headlines for the resulting high foreclosure rates , drastic municipal cuts, record violent crime , and finally, bankruptcy . For these reasons and others, it has featured at the very top of Forbes’ annual list of “America’s Most Miserable Cities” more than once. [For more of this story, written by Tanvi Misra, go...

Grab a coffee, sit back and enjoy the read! I think its an interesting one. The beginning will become more clear as you near the end. I'm writing this because I have NEVER understood how a oerson could feel such disdain for someone that they dont even know personally. I started WomenNotAlone during a time when I was going through some major life changes and felt alone and unsupported in life. Iam wondering if that "alone" feeling I once felt could very well be at the core of all the hatred...

Mindfulness can improve health in other ways as well. One mindfulness-based program even helps treat eating disorders. People who binge on food are overly sensitive to outside cues, says Jean Kristeller. She is a psychologist at Indiana State University in Terre Haute. Kristeller created a program to help combat binge eating. Called Mindfulness-Based Eating Awareness Training, or MB-EAT, it helps people reconnect with their bodies. The goal is to make diners more aware so that they can...

And heroin led to the most deaths among 15- to 19-year-olds, CDC says The rate of opioid drug overdose deaths among older teenagers in the United States has taken a turn for the worse, a new federal report finds. The number of drug overdose deaths among 15- to 19-year-olds rose 15 percent for males from 2014 to 2015 and 35 percent for females from 2013 to 2015, according to the report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Heroin was the most common cause of fatal opioid...

Despite rhetoric at the federal level, Illinois’ struggles are a reality that will not end in the foreseeable future. Because Illinois had been without a state budget for more than two years, vital organizations that serve our children, families, and communities have either scaled services back dramatically or have disappeared. Yet the basic needs for attention to health for children with special needs, their families, and the communities in which they live are still very visible. From the...