Blog

No one knows how to talk about climate change right now. I don’t have an idea about where to begin, and I write about it professionally. On the one hand, the natural consequences of climate change seem increasingly severe and devastating. Just in the past two years, I’ve written about how global warming will probably cause more mega-droughts in Arizona and New Mexico; how dangerously sweltering summer days are three times likelier to occur today than they were in 1900 ; and how even slightly...

Hi Everyone: Join in the chat with Dr. Gold here: http://www.acesconnection.com/g/Parenting-with-ACEs/chat-event/an-ace-informed-pediatrician Cheers, Jane

Seth’s natural impulse was to shy away from showing affection to his girlfriend. That made perfect sense to me since he grew up with a father who rarely showed affection to anyone in the family. Seth’s grandfather was an alcoholic who punished his children harshly. Seth understood his father received very little love and tenderness and probably never received any physical comfort like a hug or pat on the back. The lack of intimacy between father and son extended back through the generations.

After leaving foster care, Jessica Francis had to grow up alone, often looking to Google for guidance. “I had to figure out a lot of things on my own,” Francis said in an interview on the Foster Movement Podcast , produced by the Christian Alliance for Orphans (CAFO). In the podcast’s pilot episode, Francis shared her personal experience of navigating the foster care system starting at age of 12 before later pursuing higher education and career. Without any other options, young adults...

Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor is missing a key area as she doles out an extra HK$5 billion a year in education spending . The main beneficiaries will be students of self-financed degree programmes in private universities, as each would receive a HK$30,000 subsidy, while local students attending universities on the mainland would get a ­ HK$5,000 subsidy.Contract teachers would benefit as well, as most would become tenured staff. [For more of this story, written by Victor Fung, go to ...

South Korea is renowned for its rapid economic and technological advancement, but when it comes to mental health there is a lack of resources, experts have warned. “The atmosphere around mental health is not so good in terms of the perception about mental illness, government investment and budget allocation,” said Park Jong-ik, a professor of psychiatry at Kangwon National University. With a rapidly aging society and a struggling economy taking priority on the national political agenda,...

Late one night several years ago, I got out of my car on a dark midtown Atlanta street when a man standing fifteen feet away pointed a gun at me and threatened to “blow my head off.” I’d been parked outside my new apartment in a racially mixed but mostly white neighborhood that I didn’t consider a high-crime area. As the man repeated the threat, I suppressed my first instinct to run and fearfully raised my hands in helpless submission. I begged the man not to shoot me, repeating over and...

Campus Kilpatrick Brings Complex Hopes and Expectations “This is a sentinel moment,” said Los Angeles County Probation Chief Terri McDonald, when it was her turn to get up and address the expressly invited crowd at the Friday, June 30, opening for Campus Kilpatrick, the long-awaited juvenile probation facility that carries on its shoulders a great many complicated hopes and expectations. The road to the official ribbon cutting that took place around noon on Friday in the chaparral-covered...

This article is excerpted from Breakaway Learners: Strategies for Post-Secondary Success with At-Risk Students , published by Columbia University’s Teachers College Press. The refrain is so commonplace that if I had a nickel for every time I heard it, I would be a wealthy woman. Educators across the pipeline from early childhood through Grade 20 keep articulating some version of this statement to administrators: “Get me better students.” Graduate school professors lament what they perceive...

In 2012, John de Koning’s company did something surprising: they decided their number one priority would be the happiness of their staff. His employer, IT firm Incentro, based in Utrecht, the Netherlands, once operated as a traditional online services provider, with a top-down hierarchy of bosses and employees. But after a market downturn between 2002 and 2005, the management rebooted to become less flashy but more fun; a place where talented, ambitious young professionals would want to...

[Editor's note: Dr. Harise Stein at Stanford University edits a web site -- abuseresearch.info -- that focuses on the health effects of abuse, and includes research articles on ACEs. Every month, she will post the summaries of the abstracts and links to research articles that address only ACEs. Thank you, Harise!! -- Jane Stevens] ACEs are only Part of the Picture While there has been a refreshing and inspiring upswing in interest in ACEs over the past several years, and while ACEs are the...

One of the more fascinating experiences of my doctoral studies at Columbia University was delving into the writings of Richard Hofstadter in Shelia Kamerman’s policy class, particularly his 1944 book: Social Darwinism in American Thought which I found to be eye opening. The concept was new but seemed plausible: some Americans embraced Charles Darwin’s theories of natural selection to explain the existence of what appeared to be an intractable underclass. Therefore, arriving at the conclusion...