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It’s first period on a Wednesday, and Alejandra is chewing gum, bouncing her foot, and goofing off with friends in a reading class for students learning English. The teacher—a substitute for the morning—writes vocabulary words on the whiteboard: “improves,” “silence,” “activists.” When she gets to “dangerous,” Alejandra springs to life. “Not safe!” she bursts out. Danger is familiar for Alejandra, who declined to use her real name because she was involved with gangs in her home country of...

Richard Besser, MD, former acting director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and ABC News’ current chief health and medical editor, has been named president and chief executive officer of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), the nation’s largest charitable foundation devoted exclusively to health and health care. Dr. Besser will succeed Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, MD, who has led the $10 billion foundation for the last 14 years. During her tenure, the Foundation has...

As with any remarkable change, the 2016 presidential election, a swirl of intense acrimony that foreshadowed current events, actually produced a couple of major opportunities for the ACEs movement. It stripped away the ragged bandage covering a deep, festering wound of classism, racism, and economic inequality. This wound burst painfully, but it’s now open to the air and sunlight, the first step toward real healing. The second opportunity is how the election and its aftermath are engaging...

Once he learned about the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study, Mark Dessauer realized that, for some kids, life was like entering a Tough Mudder endurance run every single day. In those events, competitors face adrenaline-churning situations; they clamber up slippery slopes, dodge electrical wires or wriggle under barbed fencing. “It hit me: those are the conditions of kids who are suffering from ACEs,” Dessauer says. “That’s their race every day.” Dessauer is vice president of...

There has been such a great response to our infographic on the journey to becoming trauma-informed that we wanted to share the Spanish version we created in case, like us, you also provide services in Spanish. We are also working with a printer to make poster-size versions available and will send them to you at cost. (Please contact jletarte@echoparenting.org) Or, please visit our website and download this and our growing collection of infographics for free. A su servicio!

Child abuse survivors are not selfish people. In fact, we have a toxic habit of putting our needs last and the needs of everyone else first. We do this for two reasons. First, not only were we taught to put the needs of others ahead of our own but we quickly discovered making sure our abusers were happy and cared for was a way for these people to leave us alone. Second, if you had a narcissistic parent, you were constantly punished for being “selfish.” Anytime a child puts his or her basic...

On Thursday, the Republican senator Deb Fischer of Nebraska introduced a bill aimed at addressing paid family leave. The Strong Families Act creates a tax incentive—25 percent of what employees are paid during the leave—for businesses to offer two weeks of paid family leave a year. Versions of the bill has been introduced during the past two Congresses: The Strong Families Act is one Fischer introduced in 201 4 , and pushed again in 2015. But the timing and current political climate may be...

Earlier this month, Jonathan Martin jotted off a sad tweet. “I’ve lost count of the number of people who say they’ve had ministry jobs threatened/been fired for speaking out in some way in this season,” the Christian author and speaker wrote. Confirmation rolled in: one story from a church planter in California, another from a former worship leader in Indiana. These are “not people who would historically self-identify as progressives, at all,” Martin told me later. They’re “people who see...

If a child grows up with addiction, that is probably not the only risk factor in the home. ACEs or adverse childhood experiences tend to cluster; once a home environment is disordered, the risk of witnessing or experiencing emotional, physical, or sexual abuse actually rises dramatically (Anda, et al., 2006). While addiction, with an emphasis today on opioid addiction, is very much a part of the political and public discourse, the needs of the children hurt by addiction in the family – too...

In this video, Dr. Pam Cantor, president and CEO of Turnaround for Children, provides an overview of ACEs science -- in particular, the ACE Study, the neurobiology of toxic stress, the health consequences of toxic stress and how to create resilience-building schools. She asks: "What if it were possible to change the context of a child's life thorugh the design of our schools? What if schools were designed to be physically and emotionally safe, relationship rich, to buffer stress, to support...

At a popular dumpling shop in Manhattan, the newest dumpling on the menu is made with food waste. The owners partnered with the chef Dan Barber, who has been leading a movement to help restaurants begin to address the problem of food waste; by one estimate, a single restaurant can throw out 25,000 to 75,000 pounds of food every year. In 2015, Barber temporarily converted the menu at his restaurant Blue Hill to feature food waste. In January 2017, he opened another iteration of the pop-up,...

People seeking easy answers to the problem of perpetual poverty, or hoping to justify their political ideology about why some achieve upward mobility and others do not, should likely look somewhere other than author J.D. Vance ’s memoir “ Hillbilly Elegy .” Vance’s widely acclaimed 2016 book skyrocketed to the top of the New York Times’ best-seller list, in part because it helps connect the dots about Pres. Donald Trump’s rise to power. But Vance also detailed his own family’s struggles in...