When Victor Carrion , MD, was a pediatric psychiatry fellow in the mid-1990s, he had an “a-ha” moment about some of his poorly behaved patients that set the trajectory of his career. These kids had been traumatized, and the...
n the United States, the metropolitan statistical area (MSA) is a convenient and damning fiction. Here's a passage from the Census Bureau defining an MSA: Under the standards, the county (or counties) in which at least 50 percent of...
A high-school girl who refuses to follow school rules is body-slammed to the ground, ripped from her chair, and thrown past rows of desks. The school resource officer’s use of force, caught on video, unleashes national outrage and costs...
The plight of babies born to parents who cannot raise them, whether for financial, emotional or other reasons, is older than Moses. Solutions to such problems are rarely anything other than heartbreaking, but in the past decade laws have been...
The headlines and sound bites described behavior gone wrong — a teenager in a South Carolina classroom refusing to put away her cellphone and a police officer using physical force to respond to a nonthreatening situation. He arrested her...
Two Princeton economists startled other Americans — and themselves — when they uncovered a trend that had escaped the medical and scientific world: Between 1999 and 2013, white middle-aged men and women in the United States,...
Johnny Gonzales kneels next to his client, Jorje Mendez, who is struggling through the last set of pushups at the gym. "Give me eight of them!" says Gonzales. "Be strict. This is where all the gains are made, right here. If you can do this, you...
Children are much more likely than not to grow up in a household in which their parents work, and in nearly half of all two-parent families today, both parents work full time, a sharp increase from previous decades. What hasn’t...
We have a pressing discipline problem that begins in classrooms and for far too many children ends in prison. As I watched the video of the recent assault on a South Carolina student in her classroom, I thought about my own experiences in...
Approximately 775,000 youth in America are involved in gangs. According to Kids Play USA Foundation , adolescents who don't have adult supervision at least three days a week are twice as likely to hang out with gang members and three...
The day the Shop ‘n Save opened, Hill District resident Bobbie Street filled her cart. Cruising the supermarket’s gleaming aisles, the then-66-year-old told the Pittsburgh Gazette she was especially happy to be...
I’ve long argued for the advantages of a diverse neighborhood. On the most basic level, diversity is required to attract the wide range of creative talent that drives innovation and economic growth. But it’s also the case that...
An eighteen-year-old male student’s sexual encounter with a fifteen-year-old female student at St. Paul’s School has led to his being sentenced to one year in jail, followed by five years of probation, and registered for life as a...
Epiphany is defined as a “sudden and striking realization.” But it doesn’t work that way with me. My epiphanies sometimes simmer gently for years, particularly one that emerged in the aftermath of a class I took...
By: Cheryl Sharp, MSW On October 9th , while President Obama was attempting to console the victims of the October 1st mass shooting at Umpqua Community College (UCC) in Oregon, two more students were killed, and five people were wounded at...