When many people hear child poverty in America, the first stereotype is an inner-city child and discussions about solutions to poverty often focus on concentrated poverty in urban areas. But in a nation where over 16 million...
Rodney Zimmers was 21 years old and 135 pounds when he got off heroin and cocaine for good. Three years later, he was still drug free but had ballooned to 250. He blames his weight gain on the high-calorie, high-sugar food served in...
For scientists the concept of psychological resilience began in the 1970s with studies of children who did fine – or even well in life – despite significant early adversity, such as poverty or family violence. For a long time a...
They are the hidden homeless. They are families, out of economic necessity, that share a dwelling with another family. Some live out of their cars or couch surf with someone they may or may not know. Some bed down in tents along the Jordan...
The children’s television show Sesame Street has always had a way of reflecting the zeitgeist in shades of Muppet fur. Consider, for instance, the evolution of Cookie Monster. For his first few decades on air, he was a simple...
About 300 community and public health advocates, policy makers, educators and other leaders are attending the Foundation for Health Generations’ summit on September 17-18 in Seattle, WA. The conference, “Coalescing for Change:...
The long-awaited Community Resilience Cookbook launches today. We’ve been talking about the nine innovative communities that are leading the way in trauma-informed practices ever since the National Collaborative on Adversity and...
*** This is a series of short articles about ACEsConnections members and the work they are doing to implement practices based on ACEs research.*** Over her 40 years in health care, Rona Renner has been a registered nurse, parenting coach,...
It is becoming increasingly obvious that the benefits of regular exercise go far beyond what was thought of conventionally. Of course exercise can help you lose weight, feel better, increase strength and reduce risk of injury. It also increases...
States face no real federal pressure to reduce racial and ethnic disparities in the juvenile justice system, a new report says. The report by the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, to be formally released in early...
Ever since the release of A Nation at Risk in 1983, schools have become a battleground for opposing views about how best to educate our children. Battle lines have formed around such contentious issues as whether parents should have the option...
The sordid Ray Rice scandal has opened a much-needed dialogue about domestic violence. In February Rice and Janay Palmer, then his fiancée and now his wife, had an altercation at an Atlantic City casino that left Palmer unconscious. A...
Resilience, the subject of a large-scale study published recently in The Gerontologist, reminds me of what a Supreme Court justice once said of pornography: It’s hard to define, but we know it when we see it. We’ve all noticed...
People disagree, quite strenuously, on the best curriculum for teaching children to read. But all participants in the reading wars agree on some other things: Early reading is crucial — a child who does not read proficiently by third...
As our children were growing up, one of their playmates was a girl named Jessica. Our kids would disappear with Jessica to make forts, build a treehouse and share dreams. We were always concerned because — there’s no polite...