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There is mounting evidence that children who experience early adversity are at heightened risk for developing physical and psychological sequelae later in childhood; moreover, such sequelae can be biologically embedded, impacting multiple biological systems (including the epigenome), thereby elevating the risk that these effects will persist into adulthood. Two common forms of adversity that affect tens of millions of children each year are maltreatment and removal from parental care and...

United States Army Command Sergeant Major Gretchen Evans' life changed forever in 2006. This was her ninth combat tour since joining the Army in 1979. It was early spring, Afghanistan, and snow still peaked the mountains, but the chill in the air was beginning to shudder into the warmth that heralded the time for going home. One instant shortly before departure would change her homecoming from routine to medically urgent. While taking enemy fire, a nearby rocket blast left Evans with a...

Read about Feeling Good MN, an organization working to prevent and treat childhood trauma in Central Minnesota, and learn more about other local resources here !

Activating the Neural Circuits of Kindness, Caring, and Love Practical Neuroscience for Transformation Dr. Rick Hanson presents a FREE eight-part video series— The Compassionate Brain —that explores effective ways to change your brain and heart and life. In each interview, Dr. Hanson is joined by a world-class scholar/teacher, including Richie Davidson, Dan Siegel, Tara Brach, Dacher Keltner, Kelly McGonigal, Kristin Neff, and Jean Houston. They discuss different ways to use the power of...

Pediatrics, August 2018, VOLUME 142 / ISSUE 2 by Adam Schickedanz, Neal Halfon, Narayan Sastry, Paul J. Chung BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) include stressful and potentially traumatic events associated with higher risk of long-term behavioral problems and chronic illnesses. Whether parents’ ACE counts (an index of standard ACEs) confer intergenerational risk to their children’s behavioral health is unknown. In this study, we estimate the risk of child...

As students enter college this fall, many will hunger for more than knowledge. Up to half of college students in recent published studies say they either are not getting enough to eat or are worried about it. This food insecurity is most prevalent at community colleges, but it's common at public and private four-year schools as well. Student activists and advocates in the education community have drawn attention to the problem in recent years, and the food pantries that have sprung up at...

The Chronicle of Social Change is highlighting each of the policy recommendations made this summer by the participants of the Foster Youth Internship Program (FYI), a group of 10 former foster youths who have completed congressional internships. The program is overseen each summer by the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute. Each of the FYI participants crafted a policy recommendation during their time in Washington, D.C. Today we highlight the recommendation of Ixchel Martinez, 28,...

Editor’s note: Earlier this month, the White House surprised many observers by declaring a successful end to the War on Poverty . Now, the future of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is in the hands of Congress as it negotiates a farm bill. So CityLab visual storyteller Ariel Aberg-Riger is taking a closer look at food aid for low-income Americans. [For more on this story by ARIEL ABERG-RIGER, go to https://www.citylab.com/design/2018/07/how-the-other-half-eats/566411/ ]

It’s a Wednesday morning at the Family Health and Birth Center (FHBC), a prenatal clinic and birth center housed within a larger federally qualified health center called Community of Hope. The clinic is located in a shopping mall, across the street from a Safeway grocery store, next door to an Aldi store, and situated in a predominantly Black and low-income part of the city, that, like most of Washington, D.C., is rapidly changing. The lot on which the clinic stands is set to become condos,...

There are slightly more than 2 million people incarcerated in the United States — that's nearly equal to the entire population of Houston. Among those prisoners, thousands serve time in solitary confinement, isolated in small often windowless cells for 22 to 24 hours a day. Some remain isolated for weeks, months or even years. "You're shut off from the world and you wait," says Olay Silva, a 41-year-old inmate serving time in Bismarck, N.D.'s maximum-security prison. Silva spent six months...

What to do when financial stability is beyond one’s grasp? Over the past decade, a coterie of pundits and think-tank scholars have arrived at a surefire answer , a simple one that comes with a snappy title and puts the onus on the individual: pursue the “success sequence.” The slogan refers to a time-honored series of life events: graduating from high school (at least), getting a full-time job, and marrying before having kids (in that order). As the conservative columnist George Will wrote...

PHILADELPHIA — Before they were separated at the southwest border, Ana Carolina Fernandes’s 5-year-old son loved playing with the yellow, impish Minion characters from the “Despicable Me” movies. Now his favorite game is patting down and shackling “migrants” with plastic cuffs. After being separated from his mother for 50 days, Thiago isn’t the same boy who was taken away from her by Border Patrol agents when they arrived in the United States from Brazil, Ms. Fernandes said last week. When...