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The amount of close and comforting contact between infants and their caregivers can affect children at the molecular level, an effect detectable four years later, according to new research from the University of British Columbia and BC Children's Hospital Research Institute. The study showed that children who had been more distressed as infants and had received less physical contact had a molecular profile in their cells that was underdeveloped for their age--pointing to the possibility that...

The Attachment & Trauma Network announces the full agenda of the first National Creating Trauma-Sensitive Schools Conference, February 18-20, 2018 at the Washington Hilton in Washington DC. The conference will feature keynotes by Dr. Susan Craig & Melissa Sadin, Robert Hull, and Dr. Mona Johnson. A Building Trauma-Informed Community luncheon will be held on Tuesday. And Jim Sporleder will be our special guest at a screening of Paper Tigers on Sunday night. "We had an overwhelming...

Excerpts below from the article by Stephanie Zacharek, Eliana Dockertman and Haley Sweetland Edwards: Read full article and cover photos/video.

In 2006, while on a family vacation, Gordon Hartman, a San Antonio home builder, went to a hotel swimming pool with his daughter, Morgan. She was born with physical and cognitive disabilities; at 12, she had the cognitive age of a young child. Other children were swimming as well, two of them throwing a ball. As Hartman tells it, Morgan slowly made her way to them, and not being verbal, hit the ball. The frightened children collected their ball and scrambled out of the pool. Morgan turned to...

For Donald Trump and the populist wing of the Republican Party, immigrants are the enemy, taking jobs away from Americans and eating up public revenue. Since being elected, Trump has sought to curtail immigration in several ways: moving to cut legal immigration by as much as half over the next decade; building a wall along the Mexican border; ending the DACA program that protected so-called DREAMers from deportation; and even limiting “startup visas” for high-tech entrepreneurs entering the...

Hello my name is Julius Patterson. I am currently a intern at Hopeworks N' Camden. I am twenty three years old and i am also a student at Camden County College. I found this article very intriguing because of past situations that i have encountered and i feel like i can relate on a personal level. Growing Up In Disadvantaged Areas May Affect teens Brains, But Good Parenting May Help By: Sarah Whittle, Julian G.Simmons, Nick Allen Summary & Analysis by: Julius Patterson Growing up in...

A new study suggests that stress experienced early in life damages the ability to assess risk, creating young adults with poor decision-making skills. Punishment—or the threat of it—is generally considered an effective way to shape human behavior; it is, after all, the foundation of our criminal justice system. But what if there’s a subset of the population for whom this paradigm simply doesn’t apply? New research suggests that there is such a group: survivors of childhood trauma. University...

The devastation to struggling small towns and cities of Appalachia and the Northeast unleashed by the opioid epidemic has brought renewed attention to the connection between the physical health of individuals and the economic health of their communities. Indeed, the opioid crisis is an especially pernicious example of the many national-scale public health challenges that disproportionately affect economically distressed places throughout the country. Our organization, the Economic Innovation...

WILMINGTON, Del. — Laquita Gardner, a sales manager at a furniture rental store here, was happy to get a raise recently except for one problem. It lifted her income just enough to disqualify her and her two young sons from Medicaid, the free health insurance program for the poor. She was relieved to find another option was available for the boys: the Children’s Health Insurance Program, known as CHIP, that covers nearly nine million children whose parents earn too much for Medicaid, but not...

When it comes to law enforcement in America, there are two culture wars under way. One has been championed at the federal level by the Trump administration: an effort to rigorously defend police and shift public policy away from punishing officer misconduct. But the second, less visible—and, in some ways, opposite—war has been ongoing at the local level for over a half-century, with African American officers working to mitigate racial bias and abuse of power from within the profession.

Parents who believe in “spare the rod, spoil the child” might be setting their children up to become violent toward future partners, according to a study published Tuesday in the Journal of Pediatrics . “We asked 758 kids between 19 and 20 years old how often they had been spanked, slapped or struck with an object as form of punishment when they were younger,” said the study’s lead author, Jeff Temple, an associate professor at the University of Texas Medical Branch. “Kids who said they had...

During the past two decades, more and more scientists have studied mindfulness —a Buddhist-inspired collection of practices aimed at helping us to cultivate moment-to-moment awareness of ourselves and our environment. Their early findings triggered an enormous amount of enthusiasm for meditation. Sometimes, however, journalists and even scientists (who should know better) have overstated the physical and mental health benefits, which has fed growing skepticism about mindfulness. Indeed, the...