Blog

I was so happy to hear Dr. Melissa Merrick speak about a public health approach to dealing with aces. https://www.acesaware.org/heal/educational-events/ Her message was the importance of prevention...especially primary prevention. When a vaccine for the corona virus is developed there won't be any need for face masks, school shutdowns, event cancellations, quarantines, hospitalizations, etc., etc., etc. The same is true for the adverse childhood experiences associated with unsupportive and...

Teaching children how to better navigate crisis, right now.

“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” Martin Luther King’s words resonate at a much deeper level during these times of uncertainty. The outbreak is compelling us to face our codependence. Fortunately, the virus seems to be sparing the young and the healthy. We would be in a much darker place if collectively we were worried about our children’s risk of dying. In some way, the people...

Hypervigilance has been a painful part of my life since I was able to form an independent thought. If you have never experienced this phenomenon, then you do not understand how hypervigilance negatively affects the lives of those, like me, who know it intimately. In this piece, we shall discover together the definition of hypervigilance, the neuroscience behind it, and how being always on the alert for danger keeps us from forming long-term intimate relationships. What is Hypervigilance?

As children grow and develop, engaging with the larger community around them provides a sense of “mattering” — a sense that their participation in the community really does matter. The emergency conditions now in effect provide numerous opportunities to children and teens to pitch in. Here are a few ideas . . .

By Gerry Smith, The Washington Post, March 16, 2020 BEIJING--The grocery stores were brimming with shoppers and produce. Around the corner, a line was forming outside a stall selling pillowy white steamed buns. The gray, brick-lined alleys of this old imperial capital, deserted several weeks ago, were congested again by newly licensed drivers struggling to park their outsized Audis. I knew then: Beijing was slowly, unmistakably, returning to normal. [ Please click here to read more .]

Hi Everyone: As many of you already know (especially for those of you who are living in the San Francisco Bay area), I am now under a shelter-in-place directive until April 7th. This was announced yesterday afternoon, so a major readjustment was required very quickly. There are times when I feel disoriented with the speed of change and the adaptations I need to make to my daily routine. One major change was that I can no longer swim! As many of you know it is the love of my life and an...

By Tom Gerken, British Broadcasting Corporation, March 16, 2020 More than 35 Facebook groups have been set up in 72 hours to serve communities in places including Ottawa, Halifax and Annapolis County in Nova Scotia, with more than 30,000 members between them. People are joining the groups to offer help to others within their communities, particularly those who are more at risk of health complications related to coronavirus. The pandemic has led to acts of kindness around the world, from...

By Nicholas Kulish, The New York Times, March 16, 2020 Shortly before midnight on Thursday, the author Shea Serrano was at his home in San Antonio, lying comfortably on his sofa watching television. He could not shake a bad feeling about all the low-wage and hourly workers losing desperately needed tips and shifts because of the coronavirus outbreak. He felt he needed to do something. So he tweeted. What for many would be a futile act — venting into an endless stream of chatter, jokes and...

Dr. Heyman Oo, a 34-year-old primary care pediatrician, first learned about the science of adverse childhood experiences in medical school at a grand rounds held around 2012 at Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego, which she attended from 2009 to 2014. The presenter was none other than Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, a pediatrician who went on to become California’s first Surgeon General. The founder and former director of the Center for Youth Wellness drew millions of views for her TED talk on...

We have an abundance of helpful links and posts swirling online to support families and school systems as we adjust to our new normal of learning while self-isolating at home. Thousands of free academic resources from the NYT student writing prompts, to the Anti-Racist, Anti-Oppressive Homeschool Resource list, to this excellent collection from BuzzFeed, and the ever-growing crowd-sourced collection aptly named Amazing Educational Resources are being shared. Our schools do so much more than...

In January, California took a historic leap forward to promote universal ACEs screening of the state’s 13 million adults and children in the Medi-Cal program. The eventual goal is to promote ACEs screening for all patients, but this is a first step in dealing with a major issue that ACEs science has identified: that many children will develop serious health problems later in life because the healthcare system is not currently set up to detect the roots of those problems. The term ACEs, which...