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In a quiet room in Old Town Alexandria the students sit quietly on mats, facing an altar with mala beads and a meditation singing bowl. For the next eleven days they will spend most of their waking hours together, bonding as they go through rigorous training to become yoga teachers. It might be any teacher training program in this yoga-obsessed metropolitan area, but look at the students snap to when the teacher says, “Eyes front.” See how the guest lecturer’s “’Morning, everyone,” elicits a...

Childhood traumatic experiences have strong links to dozens of adult health conditions, such as HIV, heart disease and cancer. In states that track such data, childhood trauma is considered a cause in between 11 and 89 percent of those health conditions. On average, whenever a toxin impacts more than 10 percent of health conditions, awareness grows and lawmakers, advocates and public health officials become interested in how to stop it to save lives, said Allison Sampson-Jackson. [For more...

This blog post is about the complex relationship between a parent’s incarceration and a child’s academic success. For me this relationship is personal and scholastic. I was in fifth grade when my father, a lawyer, received a two-to-five year prison sentence for larceny. Although my family was confronted with the same challenges other families face when a parent is incarcerated (i.e. housing and food insecurity, inadequate heath care, childcare challenges, etc.), we also had considerable...

Prevention is the mantra of modern medicine and public health. Benjamin Franklin said it himself: “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Unfortunately, childhood adversities such as abuse and neglect cannot be prevented by vaccinations. As we now know, a large proportion of adults go through adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and can exhibit symptoms such as substance abuse. The symptoms seen in adults can in turn expose the next generation to adverse outcomes – creating a...

If you know anything about New Orleans public schools, you probably know this: Hurricane Katrina wiped them out and almost all the schools became privately run charters. Many of those schools subscribed to the no excuses discipline model — the idea that if you crack down on slight misbehavior, you can prevent bigger issues from erupting. That was also true of Crocker College Prep, an elementary school in New Orleans. It had strict rules about everything. Students had to sit up straight at...

At least once a month, as part of the MV Times’ ongoing Mental Illness series , Dr. Charles Silberstein will write a column that directly addresses issues Islanders have with mental health. Dr. Silberstein is a psychiatrist at Martha’s Vineyard Hospital. There is an article that is being shared a lot on Martha’s Vineyard. It is about an addiction specialist who suggests that as assuredly as people bleed after being cut, a child who is abused seeks comfort. And for people who have had...

A tree of resilience and leaves of individual messages created by summit participants in Athens, GA A few months ago, I left my very comfortable life in sunny San Diego in pursuit of a new career opportunity in Atlanta, Georgia. There were many questions running through my mind about what this new adventure in the South would bring, and one of those questions had me wondering what was happening in Georgia in regards to awareness and understanding of ACEs and the implementation of...

Life is hard enough. Too many people live in poverty. Too many children are not supported emotionally (or economically) by their parents or guardians. Childhood illnesses run rampant in certain communities. Young people are often exposed to situations within their homes or communities that they should not witness ever: drug use, overuse of alcohol, shootings and stabbings, physical abuse (of others and perhaps personally), verbal abuse, mental illness including deep depression, unemployment...

As with almost every social undertaking, youth employment involves numerous stakeholders, each of which has its own perspective, goals, issues and vested interests. Youth, employers, parents, funders and the community at large can come together at the same table to participate in the adolescent work experience. That doesn’t mean they’ll all order from the same menu. It’s difficult to prove what juvenile crime rates might be in the absence of a youth employment program. However, there seems...

As a teenager he was sleeping in a park and trying to wash his clothes in a river so he would be clean for school. Matthew Cox was one of too many children who did not get adequate help soon enough, Future Generations Commissioner Sophie Howe has said. She wants the education system and agencies working closer on adverse childhood experiences (ACE). Mr Cox, now 22, works in a call centre and dreams of starting his own landscape gardening company. It is an amazing turnaround for a man who...

E very year, pioneers gather together on the West Coast of North America to present ideas that have the potential to change the world. I have attended the TED Conference a few times over the past few years, on the hunt for cutting edge ideas that could accelerate our progress toward a Culture of Health , a vision where people from all walks of life have the opportunity to be healthy and fulfilled. [For more of this story, written by Lori Melichar, go to ...

For parents of an adolescent with an eating disorder , determining the best treatment approach to meet the needs of both your child and yourself can be extremely difficult. It has to be effective. It has to include the family. Simply, it has to work. For a growing number of families, the approach that fits all the above criteria is Family-Based Treatment (FBT), a philosophy giving families an active, transparent and supporting role not only at home, but inside clinical settings. Most...