Blog

A few years ago, I was prompted to write a short e-book, The Happy Family , on the strategies we use in our home to promote more happiness. It all began with a formal family gratitude practice in January 2013, and morphed into 10 different strategies that create more harmony and respect in families. With mindful awareness practices infusing our home life, 10 strategies seemed to emerge simultaneously from the literature I was surveying in neuroscience, positive psychology, Buddhist...

Women are more likely to be anxious when they live in a poor community than in a more affluent one, a new British study suggests. But researchers say the same isn't true for men. "We see from our study that women who live in deprived areas not only have to cope with the effects of living in poverty, but are also much more susceptible to anxiety than their peers," said study lead author Olivia Remes. She's a candidate at the University of Cambridge Department of Public Health and Primary...

Should youth incarcerated in California juvenile halls and camps be entitled to new underwear? Should family and friends be assured that their visits to youth in detention facilities be in person rather than through video screens? Should these youth be guaranteed more time outdoors for exercise and fresh air? These are some of the concerns that advocates and formerly incarcerated youth are pushing for as California considers revisions to its regulations for its state and county detention...

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On May 13th, 2017 , Resilient KC, an initiative to build a trauma informed community through the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce, in partnership with Sesame Street in Communities will host a unique event, a Resiliency Rally . We are thrilled to open the event up to our regional community and hope that people from all walks of life will come out and learn about local resiliency tools they can add to their toolkit. Throughout the day, community members will be sharing stories of...

Download the Summit Flyer here . The summit’s schedule-at-a-glance is provided below. Full details of the summit are provided in the Summit Packet . Events which are free are denoted with an asterisk (*). Thursday, June 1, 2017 Tabernacle Baptist Church Family Life Center 7:30am – 8:30am: Registration 8:30am – 3:15pm: Workshops on Building Trauma Sensitive Schools and Building Trauma Sensitive Clinical and Support Services 4:15pm – 4:45pm: Meet and Greet 4:45pm – 5:30pm: Dinner and Music...

The Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) came about because the federal government and states had a long history of treating Native American* parents as unfit just by their being Indian. As recently as the 1970s, mothers knew to hide their children when strange white sedans appeared on the reservation because social workers would scoop up children and quickly arrange for them to be adopted by white families, often in the Midwest or further east. During Congressional hearings held in the 1970s,...

Jefferson County, Mississippi, is home to 7,297 people, and 2,870 of them are hungry. The county’s food insecurity rate, 38 percent, is the highest in the nation, according to the latest Map the Meal Gap report . The report, released last week by the hunger relief organization Feeding America, collates data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Current Population Survey to stitch together a portrait of food insecurity at the state...

In our over-stressed world, many health care providers, social workers, and caregivers are suffering from slow yet painful burnout. Many of the rest of us, working long hours and raising families, seem to be approaching burnout, too. Sometimes we may feel that we’re too exhausted to keep giving to others, even though giving is a primary source of happiness in our lives. So how can we keep giving without burning out? We’re told that self-care is the answer: Give yourself a treat; you deserve...

What happens when we feel empathy for another person? What are you feeling when that chronically anxious student sinks further into his chair or your teenage girl sobs through her closed bedroom door? Empathy, or the capacity to “feel with” and share others’ emotions, can be a beautiful gift that connects us with each other. Yet it can also feel heart-wrenching and even unbearable at times. Researchers tell us that our initial empathic responses can shift in one of two directions—toward...

In 2001, a nonprofit drug treatment provider called Bridges joined a bold new venture with the Sacramento County Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). It was aimed at better serving the children of parents who had come into contact with the child welfare system because of drug use or addiction. The resulting Specialized Treatment and Recovery Services (STARS) program would sit at the center of the county’s family drug court, developed to help address Sacramento’s dismal...

In 13 counties across the U.S., Americans can now expect to die younger than their parents did. And the eight counties with the largest declines in life expectancy since 1980 are all in the state of Kentucky. That’s according to a new study out Monday in the journal JAMA: Internal Medicine , for which researchers examined geographic changes and inequality in life expectancy across the U.S. [For more of this story, written by Olga Khazan, go to ...