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Six-year-old Jada feels a persistent expectation of danger. She overreacts to provocative situations and has difficulty managing her emotions, which often flare up without warning. To her teachers, Jada appears touchy, temperamental, and aggressive. She is easily frustrated, which makes her susceptible to bullying. When something happens at school that triggers Jada, she may lash out in fury. How can teachers manage a kid like Jada who may have suffered trauma, but whose emotional reactions...

Last month, Congress passed the First Step Act, a prison-reform bill intended to reduce recidivism. Do you think this bill will actually change the realities of mass incarceration? It’s important but insufficient, in terms of the actual number of people in jails and prisons. We’ve gone from 300,000 people in jails and prisons in the 1970s to 2.2 million people today. We have to radically reorient ourselves and start talking about rehabilitation, restoration and how we end crime. And if we do...

The U.S. has some of the best perinatal care on earth, but kids die before the age of 1 here at a higher rate than the most of the developed world. A big part of the problem is that high-risk pregnant women and newborns aren't getting the right care during their time of need. That's a problem lawmakers across the country are increasingly trying to address. Indiana, for instance, recently passed a law establishing a system that rates hospitals on the complexity of neonatal and maternal care...

New York is now the 15th state to ban sexual orientation "conversion therapy" for minors. The state legislature voted Tuesday, and the bill passed 54 to seven in the Senate and 123 to three in the Assembly, according to NBC News . Conversion therapy laws prohibit licensed mental-health practitioners from subjecting minors to treatment that aims to change their sexual orientation or gender identity. For years, scientific and human rights organizations have discredited conversion therapy for...

AUSTIN (Nexstar) -- Texas spent more than $55 billion in 2017 to help children faced with maltreatment. That’s according to advocacy group TexProtects, who released a report Wednesday highlighting the costs of adverse childhood experiences, also known as ACEs. ACEs include child abuse, child neglect and household dysfunction. “The research is clear, we know that trauma early in life can change the architecture of a child’s developing brain,” said TexProtects CEO Sophie Phillips. “Therefore,...

F or Duke University sophomore Mila de Souza, including social-emotional learning in schools should be common sense. By that, she means it should be second nature for schools to support students’ mental health, teach children how to work well with others, and become a place where both educators and scholars can learn to value one another’s diverse experiences. “I feel a lot of schools are focusing on just education and making sure these students are able to pass tests, but not really...

South Dakota on Tuesday became just the eighth state to join the national Enough Abuse Campaign, a grassroots movement providing adults and communities with the knowledge and skills to prevent child sexual abuse in their communities. The Center for the Prevention of Child Maltreatment, Children’s Home Society and the South Dakota Department of Social Services made the announcement Tuesday as part of Children’s Day at the Capitol in Pierre. The Enough Abuse Campaign offers educational...

Last September, the Trump administration unveiled a controversial proposal — a policy that, if implemented, could jeopardize the legal status of many immigrants who sign up for some government-funded programs, including Medicaid. The Trump proposal is still working its way through the public comment and evaluation process, and could go into effect as early as this year, though some state attorneys general say they would challenge any such policy in the courts. In the meantime, some doctors...

Rugged, sepia-colored land stretches for miles around the Marcelino Serna Port of Entry in the small town of Tornillo, Texas. This border gateway across from Guadalupe, Mexico, was known as the Tornillo Port of Entry until 2016, when it was re-named after Private Marcelino Serna , a Mexican citizen who crossed illegally into Texas in 1916 and enlisted in the U.S. Army. He went on to become the most decorated Texas soldier of World War I. A few years ago, the government had big plans to...

Several years ago NPR had a story about temper tantrums, describing a study showing that the sounds children make during a tantrum indicate that they are primarily sad rather than angry. The written version of the story opens with description of tantrums as " the cause of profound helplessness among parents." I thought this was an interesting choice of words, as I have always thought of tantrums as representing a sense of helplessness in children. In fact, in my over 20 years of practicing...

Dr. Felitti and Dr. Anda deserve the Congressional Medal of Honor or the Presidential Medal of Freedom or a Nobel or all three for their work. Perhaps that would give them the forum to push for the primary prevention of adverse childhood experiences.

It's no surprise to scientists that variety is the very essence of biology, not just the seasoning, but most previous studies of key brain cells have found little variability in a common cell process that involves how genetic information is read and acted on. The process, called epigenetics, involves chemical or structural "tweaks" to gene activity that don't affect the underlying genetic code itself, but do affect when and how a gene becomes available to be read for its protein-encoding...