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Now a new study looking at 400,000 youths from 88 countries around the world suggests such bans are making a difference in reducing youth violence. It marks the first systematic assessment of whether an association exists between a ban on corporal punishment and the frequency in which adolescents get into fights. And, says Frank Elgar , the study's lead author and an associate professor at the Institute for Health and Social Policy at McGill University in Montreal, "The association appears...

Roberto Rivera was a troubled, addicted youth engaged in criminal behavior who discovered his path to transformation in the pit of his traumatic pain. He harnessed the fire of early childhood trauma to change himself from being a problem to being a solution, not just in his own life, but also in the lives of many, many other under-privileged and under-performing young people. The name of his solution is Fulfill The Dream (FTD). FTD is a unique, hip-hop(e) based, Social Emotional Learning...

I recently return from my vacation in New Orleans. My daughter traveled there the year prior and made the St. Charles Street streetcar sound like a travel back into time. This was no Disney ride. It's a working mass transit and we were on it during the rush hour. My Diane and I were separated and she found a seat up front. I was content to stay in the back and hold on. Doing the tourist thing of asking the question of "Where ya from?" Low and behold I'm standing with another Buffalo Bills...

Visit advancingparenting.org. We are a small nonprofit pioneering an innovative and powerful kind of child abuse prevention/parenting education that reaches everyone, everywhere, all the time. Bumper stickers! Yes, bumper stickers with parenting tips one them! Parenting tips on vehicles will be read 1000s of times by 1000s of people of all ages for years to come! The tips are behaviors and practices generally recognized as supporting the healthy development of children. They address...

This year I came up with an effective strategy using an app on my iPhone. I have been working with 3-6 graders showing them how their heart rate tells a story about how they are feeling in response to external stimuli. I show them through a series of three experiments which measure their heart rate under three different circumstances.

My Kindle eBook "Don't Try This Alone: The Silent Epidemic of Attachment Disorder" will be free on Amazon for 5 days this Mon Oct. 29 thru Fri Nov 2! On Monday, go to my Kindle link below for a free copy: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07BN2J4TN

I am reading The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, which speaks, in part, of the culture of “safetyism” that has taken hold in American discourse and higher education. The authors draw from ancient wisdom, psychological theory, and science to make the case that it is bad for human beings to be made too safe. Research has recently shown that diligently keeping young children away from peanut products—the norm since the 1990s in the US—has vastly raised the...

More than one person shared this LA Times article by Melissa Healy with me this week so now I'm sharing with all of you. It was published in the LA Times. Here's an excerpt. After reaching the age of 45 — old enough to see the effects of any inherited factors that might influence longevity — the sons of POWs were roughly 11% more likely to die at any given age than were the sons of men who had not been held prisoner. In an even more telling comparison, the researchers turned up 342 POWs who...

Anyone who follows Dr. Bruce Perry on Twitter knows he's got lots of feelings and opinions about how some are using the ACE study and ACE scores. It's not always easy in Tweets to understand the depth of his questions and concerns. If, like me, you respect his work and views and wish you knew more, you are in luck. In this episode of Explore Health which aired on PBS yesterday, he is interviewed and speaks about ACEs. Here are some of the things he said: To watch the entire Explore Health...

On September 12-14 change agents from across the world came together for the 2018 Healing Justice Alliance Conference in Denver, Colorado. The conference had over 350 attendees and focused on violence intervention and prevention from multiple perspectives. The mission of the Healing Justice Alliance is: "To connect and support hospital-based, community-linked violence intervention and prevention programs and promote trauma-informed care for communities impacted by violence." The conference...

So many of America’s troubles are intractable. Hyper-partisanship and the culture wars can make reducing gun violence or obesity seem hopeless. But mass incarceration is different. There is ample evidence that America’s states can lock fewer people up and still preserve public safety. Just look at Minnesota, which bangs up people at half the rate of neighbouring Wisconsin, though the crime rate in both places is about the same (see article ). In a few weeks’ time voters in Wisconsin and in...

The highest proportion of juveniles since data collection began in 1997 are being held for status offenses or technical violations, according to the Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention . The Pew Charitable Trusts has created a data visualization that lets you search these statistics by state. The numbers come from a single day in 2015. They include all youth who were in juvenile residential facilities, such as group...