NOVEMBER 2015 A Healthy Early Childhood Action Plan: Policies for a Lifetime of Well-being highlights more than 40 policy target areas that are key to achieving national goals of reducing toxic stress and Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)...
Mary Oliver is one my favorite writers. She had a terrible childhood and rarely speaks or writes about it. Not directly. She doesn't share the content of her trauma. She shares how writing, outside of her home, and being out in nature, changed her...
The SlideShare presentation below is from the latest webinar in the Community Matters series, Community Development From the Ground Up: An Innovative Approach in Baltimore’s Oliver Neighborhood. It shares the story of...
Happy Thanksgiving, Many things to be grateful and thankful about. My wife and I are starting off the holidays with a pledge to donate proceeds from one of our best selling books, "Five Seconds to Go" to ACEs awareness and foster kids. Please...
In part one of the series Breaking the Cycle, reporter Katie Eastman explains the Adverse Childhood Experiences study and why it's important to a local school. Inside brick walls along Western Avenue in Albany, there’s a movement -- one...
I found out the father I never knew died. I wrote two pieces about the grief, sadness, relief and rage. One of the things I love about the ACEs community is that all of the individual ACEs are equal and matter. There are adult survivors...
In the report "Making the Case for Linking Community Development and Health: a resource for those working to improve low-income communities and the lives of people in them" by the Center for Social Disparities in Health, Build Healthy Places,...
As we contemplate why our brains work the way they do after experiencing ACEs etc, I felt it worthwhile to comment on also thinking about the bigger picture currently happening around us: The United States has now declared a global travel alert...
As I read stories like this, (Juneau Empire) there seems to be a common thread-developmental trauma (or Adverse Childhood Experiences). They change your brain, and you react. When I talk about ACE's, I state my belief that we cope through the...
Lafayette Square across from the White House is a popular spot for people with a political bone to pick. Next to the persistent "ban nuclear weapons' sign, protesters come here to picket in front of the president's home. On Wednesday, there's a...
I feel like a Father Knows Best prude when I rail against the sale of alcohol at amusement parks and college sporting events . It’s not that I’m a killjoy bent on ushering in a new wave of prohibition. ...
Four aces typically make a winning hand in poker. Four ACEs in life, however, means the deck is stacked against you. ACE stands for Adverse Childhood Experience. Researchers have identified 10 exposures—abuse, neglect, traumatic...
Regularly attending child care may have numerous developmental benefits for children who live in chaotic, disorganized home environments, suggests a new study. Numerous studies have linked chaotic households - homes that are overcrowded, noisy,...
Proposition 47 was an initiative passed by California voters in 2014 that recategorized a number of petty crimes as misdemeanors rather than felonies. The savings from the reduced prison sentences that resulted from this measure are earmarked for...
"It’s hard to talk about two vulnerable subjects. Parenting. Childhood abuse. But we all know shame breeds pain. It’s important to be able to share. We need support to be break-the-cycle parents." ...