Blog

By Scott N. Markley, Taylor J. Hafley, Coleman A. Allums, Steven R. Holloway, and Hee Cheol Chung, Housing Matters, September 29, 2021 In the decade following the 2007–08 housing crash, the Black-white wealth gap expanded, largely because Black people experienced disproportionate foreclosures spurred by predatory and subprime loans. Homeownership plays a large role in wealth building, so many researchers and policymakers have focused on increasing Black homeownership rates to narrow the...

By Tuyen Tran, EdSource, September 29, 2021 W hether you agree or disagree with the end of the war in Afghanistan, as the conflict draws to a close, our attention now must shift to the challenge of resettling tens of thousands of Afghans across America. Of critical concern will be how we welcome and accommodate Afghan children within our education system. Today’s Afghan evacuees will be our students tomorrow. Long a magnet for newcomers, California will become home for many of these refugee...

By Jennie Day-Burget, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, September 30, 2021 A recent report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) finds that approximately 10.5% of families experienced food insecurity in 2020—the same percentage as 2019. That finding may not seem groundbreaking. But it is truly stunning. How is it possible that rates of food insecurity did not increase during the worst pandemic in a century? After all, the economic upheaval caused by COVID-19 was swift and severe, with...

By Tim Arango and Shaila Dewan, The New York Times, September 30, 2021 Police killings in America have been undercounted by more than half over the past four decades, according to a new study that raises pointed questions about racial bias among medical examiners and highlights the lack of reliable national record keeping on what has become a major public health and civil rights issue. The study , conducted by researchers at the University of Washington and published on Thursday in The...

By Jenny Brackman, Vice President of Forward-Facing Institute From Strangers to Safety Jenny’s experience in Forward-Facing Me I wrote this reflection in 2018, back when Eric Gentry was a relative stranger and I was just beginning my journey with self-regulation and intentionality. Since then I’ve had the privilege to lead dozens of people through these groups, and each time the experience has been just as magical. When I had the opportunity to participate in a small group using Eric...

I’ve had patients who realized they were using their excess weight as a form of protection from the outside world and/or the opposite sex. In childhood, they experienced sexual trauma. Since then, in an attempt to make themselves invisible or undesirable, they purposely—albeit sometimes unconsciously—kept on weight. Naturally, this makes any effort to lose weight in adulthood much more challenging.

By Guest Author, 9/30/21, positiveexperience.org/blog Meet our four new talented students who will be joining us this fall! Suki Lee, Tracy Xin Li, Raymond Graham, and Yixin Li will be working with us on several projects, helping us grow our knowledge and expand our practice. Every one of them brings their own perspective and expertise to our team. Our team is excited to work with them and learn from them! Suki and Yixin will be analyzing data gathered from three surveys with 9,000 parent...

CUMAC’s two-story facility in Northern New Jersey has the look and feel of a standard food bank, with a warehouse, a handful of trucks, a client-choice pantry, and even a small garden. In practice, the operation has a mission that goes much further than giving out food or even addressing the root causes of hunger. In the view of Executive Director Mark Dinglasan, problems related to food insecurity go back — way back — to childhood traumas and the harmful impacts they collectively have on...

One of the most egregious behaviors a parent or other caregiver can do to a child is to abandon them, allowing them to suffer alone. The damages done to the child when grown are significant and should not be ignored. In this article, we shall examine together what childhood abandonment is, how it affects adults, and ways to mitigate the power it has over our lives. What is Abandonment? All children are entirely dependent upon parents or caregivers for their safety in their environment. When...

By Debra Kamin, The New York Times, September 29, 2021 Pedro García Hernández, 48, is a carpenter in the southeastern Mexican state of Tabasco, a rainforest-shrouded region of the country where about half of the residents live below the poverty line. He ekes out a living making about 2,500 pesos ($125.17) a month from a tiny workspace inside the home he shares with his wife, Patrona, and their daughter, Yareli. The home has dirt floors, and during Tabasco’s long rainy season, it’s prone to...

By David Zipper, Bloomberg CityLab, September 28, 2021 Twelve lanes of Interstate 35 slice through the heart of the city of Austin. But that doesn’t appear to be enough: The highway is often choked with truck and commuter traffic, which is only thickening as the regional population balloons . A recent study named Austin’s section of I-35 the worst bottleneck in Texas. The Texas Department of Transportation, known as TxDOT, says it knows what to do: Widen the freeway. The agency proposes...

By Leyland Cecco, The Guardian, September 29, 2021 A federal court in Canada has paved they way for billions in compensation to First Nations children who suffered discrimination in the welfare system, after a judge dismissed a pair of legal challenges by the government. Two years ago , the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal ruled that the federal government had “wilfully and recklessly” discriminated against Indigenous children living on reserves by failing to properly fund child and family...