Blog

Our journal and others have published a myriad of studies on the deleterious effects of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) on the developmental and physical well-being of infants and children. But what about the generational effect on offspring of parents who experienced ACEs growing up? Two studies we are early releasing this week shed some light on answering this question. First Racine et al. ( 10.1542/peds.2017-2495 ) present the results of their examination of maternal ACEs on the...

In an era of “us” and “them,” be an “other” -- someone trying to understand how we all live together. Journalism about the multicultural nation America will become -- with Otherhood, a PRI podcast created and hosted by Rupa Shenoy. March 26th Episode: What happened when a professor called his class "white racism." Two words made him the target of death threats. [To listen to this Otherhood podcast by Rupa Shenoy, go to...

"We did it!" Evaluation of an intervention promoting emotion regulation skills for adults with persisting distress due to adverse childhood experiences. Our first ACE Overcomers study will be published in May in Child Abuse and Neglect and available online: your personalized Share Link: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1Wl82X18YDkQA This link provides you with free access to the article until April 30th. Excerpt from the article: "...the present findings provide evidence that participation in...

Never has it been more important to focus on creating a more trauma-informed culture in Central Florida than now. Bad events anywhere are visible 24-7 to adults and children all over the globe. In our own community, we have daily news cycles of the trauma and displacement of over 100,000 people from Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Evacuees fled to Florida as we began our own recovery from Hurricane Irma. Many suffered homelessness, poverty, food insecurity and more. All of these events...

Schools in 15 southern Illinois counties can participate in a program to help students deal with stress outside the classroom. The Consortium for Educational Change and the Partnership for Resilience received a 50-thousand dollar grant to support a program to limit the impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences or ACES. The consortium's executive director Mary Jane Morris says many students in the area suffer from broken homes or other trauma. [For more on this story by BRAD PALMER, go to...

As pediatricians, we see the toll of too many firearms: children who are killed and injured, children who are exposed to violence, and children who live in fear, every day, of being shot. We say enough. It’s not just the shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Sandy Hook Elementary School, or any number of mass school shootings in recent years. It’s also shootings that happen in and outside the home, whether murder, suicide, or unintentional. Every year over two thousand children...

Access to financial services in the United States, like most everything else in this country, is highly unequal. According to a 2015 survey by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, approximately 7 percent of American households are unbanked (meaning they have no checking or savings account), and an additional 19.9 percent are "underbanked." The percentages are higher—approximately 50 percent—among both low-income and minority households. While some of this is driven by consumer...

We know that, statistically speaking, kids who spend time in Los Angeles County’s foster care system — or any foster care system, for that matter — have worse outcomes when they reach adulthood than youth who’ve never wound up in the child dependency system at all. Over the past few years, new California state laws that are sensitive to this problem, along with community-based programs and dedicated child advocates, have helped to ameliorate those bad stats to some degree. Yet there is...

Given the extent to which fear and resentment of other races is driving our politics , it’s an excellent time to revisit a key question: Are such attitudes inherent, or learned? A 2017 study from China suggested the former, finding infants as young as nine months show preferences for people with skin tones that resemble their own. A new, much larger study offers more hope for humanity. It reports that American five- and six-year-olds largely reject the belief that an individual’s personality...

At the age of 50, the federal law that seeks to protect older American workers from age bias has been enfeebled by court decisions that have widened loopholes for employers and narrowed the ways employees can seek redress. When Congress enacted the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) in 1967, the law was treated as something of an addendum to the Civil Rights Act, which had been passed three years earlier and banned bias on the basis of race, gender, religion and, later on, sexual...

Carlos Flores was 17 when he and three accomplices tried to rob a bar in Queens, N.Y., in 1981. An off-duty police officer named Robert Walsh intervened, and he was shot and killed. Mr. Flores was convicted of second-degree murder, a conviction that carried a maximum sentence of 25 years to life in prison. But because he was not the shooter, the judge gave him 21 years to life. Mr. Flores is now 54. He has served 37 years behind bars. The last time he got written up for a disciplinary...

Hundreds of thousands of people rallied in Washington, D.C. on Saturday to express outrage at recent mass shootings in American schools, and to push Congress to enact stricter gun laws. But for many students in the U.S.—and especially students of color—gun violence at school isn’t the only problem. Rather, it’s the violence they face regularly in their homes and yards, in their neighborhoods and communities. There hasn’t yet been a worldwide march focused on that kind of violence—so they...