Blog

When I read about the crisis in Texas foster care system, all I can think about is my beautiful younger sister Nannette. Nannette got out of foster care, but she didn't survive. She became a statistic, a victim of the consequences of what experts call adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs. Research has shown that ACEs accumulate over time, and the number of these experiences in childhood predicts morbidity and mortality in adulthood. It doesn't say it on her death certificate, but Nannette...

According to the National Survey of Children’s Health, nearly 35 million children in the United States are living with emotional and psychological trauma. For these children, the effects of abuse, neglect, poverty, violence, imprisonment, homelessness, and loss come at a serious cost to their health and educational attainment. Their traumatic experiences impair their ability to learn, alter their brain chemistry and development, prompt feelings of isolation and helplessness, and may even...

Sarah Stillman, a long-form journalist for The New Yorker who often focuses on social injustice, is one of the 23 winners of the 2016 MacArthur Foundation fellowships announced today. She has written about the juvenile justice system’s treatment of children as adult offenders who were placed on sexual offender registries due to sexual misconduct as juveniles and about youngsters enlisted as confidential informants for police, a high-risk job. [For more go to ...

Are we regressing emotionally as a society? The rise of a presidential candidate who feels the need to respond aggressively to every slight, real or perceived — and the perception that he is seen as somehow more “real” or “authentic” than our current, less-reactive commander in chief — suggests as much. The fact that we’re rewarding such behavior with fame and, perhaps, power sends a terrible message to kids. But parents have a counterweight they can employ, one which apparently teaches...

A national coalition of groups dedicated to ending the school-to-prison pipeline wants all law enforcement officers out of schools for good. The Dignity in Schools Campaign released a new policy platform today that says officers should not be a regular presence in schools and emphasizes the need for trained staff such as behavior interventionists and restorative justice coordinators to promote safe and healthy schools. When law enforcement must respond to an incident at a school, schools and...

Every once in a while I do one of the free-write assignments I give out during a workshop. Free-writing has been one of the most enjoyable healing techniques I've tried. Enjoyable and healing haven't always existed in the same sentence for me. Affordable and healing haven't either. Maybe that's why I love free-writing so much. For me, the process is always joyful even if what is written about is heavy. It seems that way for many others as well. I enjoy sharing it with others once a month,...

In June 2010, Brené Brown, a research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work, gave a TEDx talk in Houston on “the power of vulnerability,” condensing six years of research on shame resilience into a spare 20 minutes. Disarmingly hesitant at first, she didn’t so much address the audience as she seemed to confide in it, telling two interwoven stories: one about her academic research into shame and vulnerability, the other about the spiritual and psychological...

The Aspen Institute announced Tuesday it has launched a commission to accelerate the transfer of research about social and emotional skill-building — which includes developing the interpersonal skills that organizers say contribute to success in school, college and work — into teaching practices across the nation. Seven Californians are members of the National Commission on Social, Emotional and Academic Development. Linda Darling-Hammond , president of the Learning Policy Institute, is one...

All learning should be personal – we are teaching individual students, after all – but when advocates talk about “personalized learning” they are often describing programs and teaching methods that look unlike the typical school. They envision school as a place where students have more control over their own studies; where they are not constrained by age or grade level; where children can move through subjects as fast or slowly as they need. Educators, researchers and advocates still quibble...

Jack’s Story: Jack is a 45-year-old architect, recently married for the first time. He came to therapy to deal with long-standing feelings of depression . His wife, ten years younger than Jack, wanted to start a family. Jack had spent years keeping a cool and cordial distance from his critical father. Now, as his wife pressed him to become a father himself, he felt flooded by sadness and insecurity. Could he be a good father? What if he messed it up? Having done much reading, Jack came into...

Law enforcement officers were regularly stationed in 10 percent of schools in 1997. By 2014, school resource officers were stationed in about one-third of schools. Now, two decades since the number of school-based police officers started to explode, a coalition of over 100 education and social justice organizations are calling for a course correction. The Dignity in Schools Campaign ― a coalition of organizations, parents and students from 27 states ― wants heavily policed campuses to be a...

A man was attempting to murder a toddler in San Diego, and Norm Stamper shot and killed him. The year was 1972 and Stamper, a police lieutenant in San Diego at the time, recalls that his heart pounded, his breath quickened and his vision narrowed into a tunnel. “I couldn’t have told you what was going on four-feet away, to the left or to the right,” he says. He pulled the trigger, the man fell and an official inquiry found that Stamper’s actions were justified. Stamper went on to become...