Blog

In my last post , I wrote about why I started teaching my kids to meditate. In this post, I’ll share how I taught them, and what I did when they lost interest. I want to start out by saying that I don’t think formal meditation is the best way to teach mindfulness to young children. Kids often do better with concrete, fun activities, especially when they can move their bodies. (I’ve shared over 100 different ways to teach mindfulness to children in my book, Ready, Set, Breathe: Practicing...

I feel very fortunate that I discovered social work because it was just by chance that I did. I moved to Texas from Chicago when I was 22. Until that point I had attended two different universities where I had several different majors. In Texas I started a new college but was still unsure of a major — I knew I wanted to do something that made a difference, but I didn’t know what that would be. Then one evening I saw a news story about a social worker working for Child Protective Services...

Ask anyone about caregiving, and you’ll likely hear a story about personal sacrifice. Heather Boldon, a single mother from Minnesota, gave up her full-time job to care for her mother. She took a more than 50 percent pay cut, spent down her 401k, and lost her health insurance. When she was injured, she couldn’t visit a doctor to see whether she needed surgery. In New York, Delores McCrae, a home care worker, was evicted from her home and lived in a women’s homeless shelter where she was...

On her third day alone in the house, 7-year-old Linda Fritts slept in her safe place in the closet. She arranged the shelves and fashioned a nest for herself atop a chest of drawers. “I would take stuffed animals in there and my books in there,” she says now. She read by flashlight, Nancy Drew or The Boxcar Children, the series about four inexplicably happy orphans who live by themselves in an abandoned freight car. “I was jealous,” Linda says. “They had each other.” [For more on this story...

SAN JOSE — Law-enforcement and education officials in San Jose are drawing a line on the chalkboard over campus police officers at the city’s public high schools, revising policies to make clear their job is to ensure safety, not dole out discipline to unruly students. San Jose police officers received a department-wide memo this week notifying them of a revision in the duty manual that makes clear they report to the city, not school administrators, and that their job is not to enforce...

Results of a national study led by public health scientist Elizabeth Evans at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, with others at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the University of California, Los Angeles, suggest that risk for alcohol and drug use disorders among United States military veterans is increased by childhood adversity, and in ways that are different between women and men and different compared to the civilian population. Evans, an assistant professor of...

Introducing a new collection from Mobilizing Action for Resilient Communities (MARC), "Community Voices: Creating a Just, Healthy and Resilient World." These stories, captured by Anndee Hochman, highlight the power of cross-sector collaboration to build community resilience. They were inspired by the conversations we had and the places we visited during our 2016-2017 site visits to all 14 communities participating in MARC.

Before Deanna Beck had ever heard of the 1998 ACE study, before she became principal of Northwood ABC Elementary School in Anchorage, she was a special education teacher who saw the ways trauma scrawled through her students’ lives. On the one-minute reading tests Beck administered, she would notice steady progress—40 words a minute, then 50—followed by dramatic drops; a child would suddenly be stumbling along at three or four words a minute. Pictured: Deanna Beck at Northwood ABC Elementary...

When we talk about trauma, we are usually referring to the things done TO us -- childhood abuse and neglect, growing up poor, violence by a partner, exposure to war... But the more we were exposed to these traumas from an outside source, the more likely we are to adopt what I call "inside traumas" -- the things we believe and do today that can actually make the effects of old traumas worse . They start as an innocent flight away from pain, but if they persist, they actually create more...

Algorithms are behind pretty much everything these days, from music and movie recommendations to GPS navigation to forensic technology . Ever the early adopter of new technologies, the criminal justice system has been using predictive algorithms for decades to guess everything from where crimes might occur to which criminals will appear at court hearings or re-offend. The data-driven tools were supposed to take human error out of the equation in a system plagued by racism and discrimination...

According to a report released this week by the Prison Policy Initiative, since 2009, a movement toward justice reform, along with the high cost of over-incarceration to cash strapped states, has slowly reduced state prison populations around the nation. Yet, according to the new report, in the majority of states, the decrease in numbers has been among male inmates, not women in jails and prisons. Some state, California among them, were successful in also bringing the women’s numbers down.

Too many Americans are overweight and eat unhealthy food, a problem that falls disproportionately on poor and low-income people. For many urbanists, the main culprit has long been “food deserts”—disadvantaged neighborhoods that are underserved by quality grocery stores, and where people’s nutritional options are limited to cheaper, high-calorie, and less nutritious food. But a new study by economists at New York University, Stanford University, and the University of Chicago adds more...