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Using Meditation to Help Close the Achievement Gap [Well.Blogs.NYTimes.com]

Closing the so-called achievement gap between poor inner-city children and their more affluent suburban counterparts is among the biggest challenges for education reformers. The success of some schools’ efforts suggests that meditation might significantly improve children’s school performance – and help close that gap. In 2007, James Dierke, then the principal of the Visitacion Valley Middle School in a troubled neighborhood in San Francisco, was determined to improve both the quality of...

Unwell and unashamed [WashintonPost.com]

For several years, she wrote about her bipolar disorder under a pseudonym. She described how she’d been hospitalized four times, twice since her first child was born. She explained how she went off her medication during both of her pregnancies and how each time — once as the mother of a newborn and then again weeks into her second pregnancy — she was escorted from her home in police handcuffs, defiant. She blogged to connect and reach other mothers grappling with mental illness. Ultimately,...

Sex Harassment and Teens: Title IX Moving Into High Schools [WomensNews.org]

Soon after having an honest conversation about sex with a male friend of hers last year, she started hearing him whispering “dirty slut” or “I know you want it” to her in math class. This year another male friend repeatedly tried to touch her armpit hair and asked if her boyfriend licked it. The 17-year-old New York City student said she felt very uncomfortable during these encounters but didn’t tell her teachers because she wasn’t sure if it was a big deal and she was worried that it would...

Local organizations learn different way to approach traumatization [JohnsonCityPress.com]

“What if all along ... kindness was the cure?” Becky Haas, director of the Targeted Community Crime Reduction Project at the Johnson City Police Department, recalls asking Police Chief Mark Sirois that about solving homelessness. While the simple phrase came out a bit jocular during a seminar on Wednesday morning, sincerity lingered in Haas’ voice. Haas and Dr. Andi Clements, psychology professor and assistant chair at East Tennessee State University, tag-teamed a 4.5-hour long free seminar...

Babies and Toddlers Risk Emotional Damage and Post-Trauma Stress in Toxic Homes

Saving your children, family and loved ones from inter-generational post-traumatic stress... Following is an excerpt from my latest book, My Journey of Healing in Life After Trauma, Part 2. "Extensive research has shown babies will pick up on toxic circumstances and behaviors and demonstrate post trauma stress symptoms as they become older. The goal of My Journey of Healing, Part 2 is to specifically help parents with stress triggers to save their kids from becoming emotionally damaged...

Trauma-Informed Parenting: What Adoptive & Foster Parents Can Help Teach, Part 2

Part One There are many adults with low ACE scores who parent children with high ACE scores. They are some of the best parents I know. They are often feisty and fierce advocates who tirelessly seek out support, strategies and solutions to make the lives of their children easier and better. The ones I admire most have helped me be a better person, a better parent and expedited my personal recovery as well. Without calling it such, they provide a trauma-informed love. Here are 12 lessons I've...

Trauma-Informed Parenting: What Adoptive & Foster Parents Can Help Teach, Part 1

People sometimes feel bad for adoptive parents. They think maybe our kids say, "You're not my real parents" on a daily basis and that we go to bed crying each night because we can't have kids of our "own." Do they think we had to "settle" for adoption or fostering? Do they worry we feel less than as parents? We don't. It's true that some of us have fertility issues. And maybe have grief about that. It's true that our children may love us and their birth parents, foster family members. It's...

Whiteness Project: “I just wanted people to assume I was white.”

"Whiteness Project is an interactive investigation into how Americans who identify as white, or partially white, understand and experience their race. Whiteness Project is conducting interviews with people from all walks of life and localities in which they are asked about their relationship to, and their understanding of, their own whiteness. Each video interview is paired with a statistic that provides a greater societal context and offers an opportunity for self-reflection by the audience...

Looking for good ACEs Screening tools for Adults and/or Children

I do a lot of training and consulting in the area of trauma. I have a list of all the SAMHSA approved trauma screenings for adults and children and all the work from the NCTSN as well in terms of trauma screenings. Most of these screen for PTSD events or symptoms (especially in the adult arena). I am not a believer in using the ACE short version as a "screening tool" (i.e. just asking if any of those 10 events have happened with a client during a intake process). I like the NEAR approach in...

One in Five Americans Has Sacrificed Spending to Make Rent [CityLab.com]

Households in the U.S. are having a hard time making ends meet. Even as Americans continue to recover from the hammer that hit them in the late 2000s, they face severe and rising rents and jobs that are geographically concentrated in just a handful of metro centers. A new poll conducted by Ipsos on behalf of Enterprise Community Partners finds that 21 percent of respondents had to cut back their spending to make their rent or mortgage, or that they were unable to pay their rent or mortgage...

Making Stress Work for You [PsychCentral.com]

Stress gets a lot of negative press, and for good reason. Chronic stress is linked to a host of health and emotional problems. Yet stress comes in a variety of forms. Despite what the news headlines say, some types of stress are actually good for you. Consider the acute stress events of exercise and learning to ride a bike. Done properly, these events invoke a desired adaptation in mind and body. In fact, research shows that moderate levels of short-term stress stimulate genesis of new brain...

On Governors Island, Mountains of Junk Where Children Find Adventure [NYTimes.com]

On a recent sunny afternoon, a 6-year-old boy picked his way through a scrap heap on Governors Island. It contained old doors, shredded lawn chairs, a decrepit exercise bike and a bundle of metal crutches. At the center were a pile of tires and a few dozen planks, balanced precariously against a spiral column, like pickup sticks. As the boy, Zayne Cowie, climbed up the pile of tires, he passed an old car seat, a painted canvas. When he reached the highest tire, he ducked between two planks...

Not White, Not Rich, and Seeking Therapy [TheAtlantic.com]

Last year, Decker Ngongang realized he needed to find a good therapist to help him with a lot of little stresses that were piling up. “I grew up in a single-parent household,” he said. “A lot of the things I wanted to talk about were just childhood-related, but also the stress of being a black man in America.” He figured it would be similar to getting someone to take a look at a knee injury. Ngongang has good insurance through his work as a consultant for NGOs in Washington. So he opened up...

This Chicago doctor stumbled on a hidden epidemic of fetal brain damage [PBS.org]

The agitated mom had three kids in foster care and she wanted them back. But she didn’t understand how to parent. She’d never worked. She had a short fuse. She was slow and didn’t seem to learn from experience. Dr. Carl Bell studied the young woman. Flat cheeks. Thin upper lip. Folds at the corner of her eyes. It hit him like a thunderbolt: She had subtle features of fetal alcohol syndrome. Bell had seen thousands of patients like this over the past 40 years and been baffled by their...

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