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The new program provides videos, activities, storybooks, games and other resources, in both English and Spanish, to help children with their early development. Specific topics include reading and writing, moving your body, exploring emotions, dealing with divorce and helping kids grieve. The program features the Sesame Street Muppets and is primarily sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. [For more of this story go to ...

Every novelist, psychologist, anthropologist and your Aunt Jane have wanted to know this. What motivates people and what’s going on when their behavior is irritating or just plain doesn’t make sense? At Echo, we encourage adults to look beneath the behavior of children and to understand ‘behavior as communication.’ It may be that the child is choosing a way of communicating that is hard for you to deal with but that doesn’t diminish the fact that the behavior is driven by some deep need or...

Please use this PSA to serve the mission discussed below. You can expect Spanish and Vietnamese language versions within a couple of months. We all know we don't want children experiencing violence or abuse or neglect or other forms of Adverse Childhood Experiences, because the more of them a child experiences, the higher the risk that they will experience negative developmental, emotional, behavioral, social, and medical consequences, consequences that can be life-long. But what do want...

May is Mental Health Awareness Month , and that seems as good a time as any for me to break my year-long hibernation to shout this to the rooftops: My child, Alex , was the most amazingly vibrant, feeling, loving, creative force you could imagine. Alex was full of life. Alex committed suicide last year, at the age of 14. I am shouting out my pride to drown out the idea that mental illness is something to be ashamed of. What I am ashamed of are profound shortcomings in awareness about this...

For years, Tony Hillery owned and operated a limousine service in New York City. But after the recession hit, his business dwindled. In 2011 he decided to use his downtime to volunteer at a public elementary school in Harlem — a small step from which an entirely new career took root. The idea for his nonprofit, Harlem Grown , began in the school lunchroom. Hillery quickly recognized a need for good nutrition, ambitious goals and role models. He started recycling, and the kids jumped in to...

Harvard researchers posing as the parent of a depressed 12-year-old called hundreds of child psychiatrists and pediatricians looking for appointments, and discovered what many actual parents know through bitter experience: Most of the time the calls were fruitless. The group phoned 913 doctors listed as network providers by Blue Cross Blue Shield organizations in Boston, Chapel Hill, N.C., Houston, Minneapolis, and Seattle. After two attempts, they were able to get an appointment with a...

Some kids just need a break. And they get two in Britt Sexton’s art classes at Beach High School. “I have an alarm that goes off twice a period,” Sexton said. “This Beyonce song comes on. And the kids stop what they’re doing.” Then she and the students do squats. Twenty of them. “It gives them a chance to get up,” Sexton said. “Some of them will dance while they’re squatting.” It’s her way of implementing one of the principles of a pilot program at the Long Beach Unified School District...

When child welfare systems infuse trauma-informed care into everything they do, kids experience fewer placements and fare better in foster care, according to new Casey-funded research. In a five-year study conducted by Child Trends , researchers focused on kids served by KVC Kansas, a nonprofit offering child welfare and behavioral health support through a public/private partnership with the Kansas Department of Children and Families. As part of the study, administrators, staff and foster...

The psychological effects of being bullied don't necessarily stop when the bullying does. That's the conclusion of a newly released study published in the journal Pediatrics. "Students who expressed more frequent peer victimization in fifth grade were more likely to have greater symptoms of depression in seventh grade, and a greater likelihood of using alcohol, marijuana, or tobacco in 10th grade," reports University of Delaware psychologist Valerie Earnshaw , the study's lead author. She...

In early March, a white autistic man in his 20s got in trouble for eating a cookie. He was shopping at Cub Foods in Roseville, Minnesota, a typical big grocery store, and took a cookie from a "free cookie" display in the bakery section. Then he finished shopping, paid for his groceries, and went back to get another cookie. That's when Timothy Knutsen—another shopper, but one whose livelihood happened to involve training security guards in the proper use of pepper spray—stepped in, holding a...

Jails across the United States will be a bit less crowded on Mother's Day. After raising tens of thousands of dollars, organizers behind the first Mama's Bail Out Day—timed with the holiday—will be bringing home " as many mothers as possible ." That bail, sometimes just a few hundred dollars, is all that separates them from their families and communities on the outside. The idea is at once practical and ambitious, relying on hundreds of individuals to collectively raise money to provide...

This Module delineates the dynamics of couples interaction and suggests effective tools for working with these issues.I am very excited about this module, as couple relationship and parenting is where, as adults, our own early attachment and adverse experiences most REVEAL themselves.  It can also be a place where resiliency shines.