LeAnne Simpson’s 6-year-old daughter had thrown plenty of tantrums before the pandemic. But after a few weeks of lockdown, minor frustrations that used to lead to short-lived outbursts were now setting off writhing-on-the-floor freakouts . “First, she’d get so frustrated she couldn’t talk,” Simpson said. “Then she would start screaming, drop to the floor and roll around flailing her arms, often kicking or hitting me if I came close to her.” Simpson tried every tantrum-defusing strategy she...

After the U.S. education system fractured into Zoom screens last spring, experts feared millions of children would fall behind. Hard evidence now shows they were right. A flood of new data — on the national, state and district levels — finds students began this academic year behind. Most of the research concludes students of color and those in high-poverty communities fell further behind their peers, exacerbating long-standing gaps in American education. A study being released this week by...

Just how stressed are teachers? A recent Gallup poll found teachers are tied with nurses for the most stressful occupation in America today. Unfortunately, that stress can have a trickle-down effect on their students, leading to disruptive behavior that results in student suspensions. One of those overburdened teachers is Jennifer Lloyd, a high school English teacher in Maryland and a graduate student at the University of Missouri. She has noticed how perceptive her students are to her mood...

When Leigh M. Ragsdale-Knoderer took over as principal of Jefferson Elementary, a public school in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, she was committed to helping reduce disciplinary actions. With a background as a teacher at an alternative school, Ragsdale-Knoderer felt that discipline, such as suspension, wasn’t always the right response to negative student behavior like substance misuse or abuse. “It goes deeper than coming to school under the influence,” she said, noting that there were substance...

Brooke Brown has taught English language arts and ethnic studies in Tacoma, Wash., for the past 14 years. In September, the state named her 2021 Washington Teacher of the Year. Ms. Brown is also a biracial Black woman and a participant in a new program in her region aimed at retaining teachers of color, in a state where 88% of teachers in 2019 were white, according to a state agency. The program, the Educators of Color Leadership Community, “has been instrumental in me not just finding my...

Eleven years ago my friend Sally was diagnosed with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, the degenerative motor-neuron disease which gradually renders you unable to move, to eat, to talk, and in the end to breathe. She had just turned 40, two kids, happily married to a prince of a guy, so much to look forward to, for all of them. And then this horrible suffering. This “very slow car crash” was her husband’s description and I can’t get that image out of my head. The wreckage, the...

Kids are resilient. Kids bounce back. Tell that to Dave Brethauer , a performance coach in Chicago, who told Genetic Literacy Project that he spent the better part of his adult life “fighting to find” himself following the trauma he experienced as a child. “From the time I was five till 14 I had an abusive stepdad in my life,” he said. To cope, he found himself turning to alcohol, sex, overeating, and exercise addictions – anything to steer his mind away from the memories and pain that...

First-year medical student Sean Sweat "didn't want to tiptoe around" issues of race when she sat down with 11 of her classmates to write a new version of the medical profession's venerable Hippocratic oath. "We start our medical journey amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, and a national civil rights movement reinvigorated by the killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery," begins the alternate version of the oath, rewritten for the class of 2024 at the University of Pittsburgh...

Have you ever noticed how tough it is to be present? We spend so much time planning and worrying about the future or dwelling on the past. "We're in a trance of thinking. We're time traveling," says Tara Brach, a world-renowned psychologist and mindfulness teacher. "We're in the future, we're in the past." And all this ruminating gets in the way of enjoying life — we can miss out on the good stuff. If you reflect on your life, Brach asks, how often can you sense that the fear of failing or...

This election will test the country’s core. Who are we? How did we come to this? How did this country elect Donald Trump and does it have the collective constitution to admit the error and reverse it? At the moment, Joe Biden is leading in the polls, but the fact that Trump is even close — and still has a chance, however slim, to be re-elected — is for a person like me, a Black man, astounding. I assume that there are many women, Muslims, immigrants, Mexicans and people from Haiti and...

Members of Heaven’s Gate, a religious cult, believed that as the Hale-Bopp comet passed by Earth in 1997, a spaceship would be traveling in its wake—ready to take true believers aboard. Several members of the group bought an expensive, high-powered telescope so that they might get a clearer view of the comet. They quickly brought it back and asked for a refund. When the manager asked why, they complained that the telescope was defective, that it didn’t show the spaceship following the comet.

Mental health experts offer advice on how to handle the return to indoor life the cooler weather will bring. Abby Guido is dreading the winter. The cold will force her family back into the same kind of lockdown they faced in the early days of the pandemic. “It’s constantly on my mind,” said Ms. Guido, 41, an assistant professor of graphic and interactive design at Temple University. Ms. Guido’s husband, Chris, has lymphoma, so the family needs to be particularly careful. He’s in remission,...

CHICAGO — When the coronavirus began sweeping around the globe this spring, people from Seattle to Rome to London canceled weddings and vacations, cut off visits with grandparents and hunkered down in their homes for what they thought would be a brief but essential period of isolation. But summer did not extinguish the virus. And with fall has come another dangerous, uncontrolled surge of infections that in parts of the world is the worst of the pandemic so far. The United States surpassed...

The killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and the loss of far too many Black lives to list, have left our nation anguished and outraged. More than 1,000 people are killed by police every year in America, and Black people are three times more likely to be killed than White people. We can take steps and make reforms to combat police violence and systemic racism within law enforcement. Together, we can work to redefine public safety so that it recognizes the humanity and...

Preston Woodruff held it together for months during the pandemic—working in his garden and making musical instruments in his workshop, sharing meals with his daughter, and walking in the woods behind his home. Then a sneeze sent him over the edge. Mr. Woodruff was sleeping soundly when he woke to an uncomfortable feeling in his nose. He rolled over and reached for the box of tissues he keeps on his nightstand. None peeked up from the top. He tried—and tried—to dig one out. The entire wad...

Discipline disparities between Black and white boys have driven reform efforts for years. But Black girls are arguably the most at-risk student group in the United States. BINGHAMTON, N.Y. — Zulayka McKinstry’s once silly, sociable daughter has stopped seeing friends, talking to siblings and trusting anyone — changes Ms. McKinstry dates to the day in January 2019 when her daughter’s school principal decided that “hyper and giddy” were suspicious behaviors in a 12-year-old girl. Ms.

COVID-19 is a devilishly versatile disease, attacking all manner of body systems and doing all manner of damage—to the lungs, the heart, the liver, the kidneys. Though it doesn’t attack the mind directly, the pandemic the virus has caused has been devastating to mental health, and in many cases, the most vulnerable group is women. In a new study conducted by CARE , a non-profit international aid organization, investigators have found that while almost nobody is spared from the anxiety, worry...

The White House has opened an investigation into Princeton University, accusing it of civil rights violations after its president admitted racism exists at the school. Earlier this month, Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber published a letter to the university community in which he acknowledged that the university has and continues to be shaped by systemic racism. "Racism and the damage it does to people of color nevertheless persist at Princeton as in our society, sometimes by...

When Laurie Noble was growing up, in Fort Bragg, California, in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, her family’s home doubled as a government weather station. The house was equipped with rain and wind-speed gauges, thermometers, a barometer, and a recording barograph, and the family belonged to a network of part-time observers paid by the federal Weather Bureau, the forerunner of the National Weather Service, to fill in gaps between its professionally staffed stations. By the time Noble was a...

At some point in your life, you will likely experience the anxiety of sitting in a hospital room, waiting for a serious medical diagnosis. Even those lucky enough to avoid that situation will likely accompany a loved one—a parent, grandparent or child—who is receiving the news. You might remember the stiffness of the chair, the pattern of the hospital gown or the doctor’s folded hands. Whatever the diagnosis—cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes or even COVID-19—the event is not one you will...

In May, a 15-year-old boy set up a socially distanced visit with a friend. They met on opposite sides of a sidewalk — a full six feet apart — and talked. But when the teenager returned home, he brought with him a new set of Covid-19 fears, according to John Duffy, the boy’s therapist and a child psychologist in Chicago. How could he be sure six feet was a safe distance?, the teenager wanted to know. He began washing his hands more frequently. He stopped touching countertops. And he hasn’t...

After his roughest days in a New York City emergency room, physician Matthew Bai feels his whole body relax when he sees his wife and 17-month-old daughter. “My light at the end of the tunnel is going home to family,” Bai says. When Manhattan’s Mount Sinai Hospital started to overflow with COVID-19 patients in late March, however, Bai and his wife decided she should take their toddler and stay with her parents in New Jersey. The risk of spreading the virus to his family was too great. Now...

A growing understanding of how responsive relationships and language-rich experiences for young children help build a strong foundation for later success in school has driven increased investment and sparked innovation in early learning around the world. The rapidly advancing frontiers of 21st-century biological sciences now provide compelling evidence that the foundations of lifelong health are also built early, with increasing evidence of the importance of the prenatal period and first few...

When a young person experiences trauma, there is no single answer regarding how that experience may impact them in their later years. Two 12-year-olds experiencing the exact same kind of trauma, for example, may have two very different responses — one crumbles and the other rises. One processes it deeply and the other suppresses it. One becomes a powerful force for change in the community and the other struggles to make their place in the world. Furthermore, what may be considered traumatic...

T he world is learning more about the uncommon but puzzling ways Covid-19 can show up in kids, keeping worried parents on the lookout for symptoms of the disease. We should also be concerned about how toxic stress brought on by the pandemic, or made worse by it, will affect children’s developing brains and bodies and their future health. In millions of households, kids are experiencing an incredible amount of stress and anxiety. They’ve lost the stability and safety of schools and day cares,...

“For the past six months we have been living through a pandemic.” I say that as a matter of fact because the truth is that at some point our innate systems begin to falter. Our organisms were not meant to stay on high alert for extended periods of time. Much like other systems, our fight, flight, or freeze responses are intended to help us navigate acute life or death situations and then organically return to balance. In order for us to be in our healthiest state, these systems must maintain...

While current events have resulted in an increased awareness of social justice and racial equity for some, racial and socioeconomic disparities in education continue. The overwhelming achievement gap between districts is considered a direct result of the available resources at various schools. Private educational institutions have infinitely more flexibility than public school districts. This year, due to public health mandates considered necessary to reopen schools, public districts are...

It seems that with each passing day, the uncertainty of Fall re-entry plans creates an increasing amount of anxiety in us all . Whether we are parents or educators, we are all trying to grapple with the same impossible question; Will it be safe for children and staff to return to school in September? Unfortunately, we will likely not know the answer to that question until our children have already been in classes for close to a month. However, whether in-person or virtual, the...

In a recent New York Times article, the discussion over when and how to reopen schools is beginning to include emerging data from reopening strategies abroad. While this is a hotly contested issue, the debate over how to reopen schools or whether to reopen at all has been a topic of conversation since the first school closure. In all areas of our lives we have begun to ask the hard questions, “when will it be safe enough to resume our normal daily activities?” and “what precautions are...

In a recent episode of the podcast Unlocking Us, Brené Brown discusses the power of shame and how it is not an effective tool for social justice. She goes on to explain that shame is in fact real pain that is defined as the “intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love, belonging, and connection.” It is in fact so powerful that when we experience shame, it triggers a fight, flight or freeze response. She identifies shame as a tool of...

At this point, COVID-19 has been a part of our lives for nearly six months now. While the most recent current events are not unfamiliar social problems, this pandemic has provided us with a stronger lens with which to see many of the underlying inequities within our communities. This article, “The Moral Determinants of Health,” explores these inequities by illustrating the systemic imbalances within the field of medicine and the amount of resources we allocate to solving problems as opposed...

The Neurobiology of Trauma: Somatic Approaches to Resilience By Jennifer Walsh As we have all come to experience over the past several months, trauma is simply a component of the human condition. While it affects both individuals and communities in a variety of ways, we have all experienced difficult, stressful, or even traumatic events over the course of our lifetime. Although social workers have traditionally worked with these vulnerable populations, there are numerous professionals...