Blog

“Dear the most highly respected judge and court, I’m writing this because I love my mom. My mom is very important to me. I have no idea what to do without her. Even though my mom’s afraid, she’s not giving up.” This is the beginning of a plea written by a 13-year-old girl to the Department of Homeland Security. The goal: to get her mother the insurance coverage she would need to enter a clinical trial. Two years ago, the girl’s mother learned she had advanced stomach cancer. Undocumented and...

“Have you ever watched a Puerto Rican novela?” Dr. Susana Rivera asked a room full of therapists and social workers. “I don’t know what they say to their therapists, but by the third visit, they always get committed. I tell my families, ‘We don’t do that.’” Based on the work of Dr. Michael de Arrelleno of the National Crime Victims Research and Treatment Center at the Medical University of South Carolina, Rivera teaches practitioners how to adapt trauma-based cognitive behavioral therapy for...

Rasheed Aziz remembers visiting Baltimore in 2006. The empty, hollow buildings sprawled the entire block, he says. Buildings lacked roofs, doorways were boarded up, and tree limbs grew into missing windows. Aziz is the founder of CityWide Youth Development, which he began in central Florida to bring economic development to impoverished neighborhoods using manufacturing and entrepreneurship. In 2006, he decided to move himself—and his nonprofit—to Baltimore after his trip there. During that...

It’s well known that mental health is a significant issue for young people. Recent research suggests that at least 10% children and young people between the ages of five and 16 in the UK experience a problem such as anxiety and depression. If left untreated these problems can spiral and lead to issues such as drug abuse, suicide attempts and criminality in adolescence and adulthood. But what if primary school children were offered counselling as a matter of course? Early intervention would...

After any disaster, parents and other adults struggle with what they should say and share with children and what not to say or share with them. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) encourages parents, teachers, child care providers, and others who work closely with children to filter information about the crisis and present it in a way that their child can accommodate, adjust to, and cope with. Where to Start – All Ages No matter what age or developmental stage the child is, parents can...

“When I think about resilience at the community level,” Lourdes Rodriguez says, “I think about communities that understand that the conditions creating adversity are bigger than an individual.” In physics, resilience is an object’s ability to bounce back into its original form after sustaining a shock. In communities, it means something much more. Wendy Ellis, project director of the Building Community Resilience (BCR) collaborative at the Milken Institute of Public Health at George...

10 Dead in Santa Fe, Texas, School Shooting; Suspect Used Shotgun and Revolver Inevitably, predictably, fatefully, another mass shooting breaks our hearts. This time, it is a school shooting in Texas. But what is perhaps most heartbreaking of all is that they shouldn’t be shocking. People all over the world become furious and try to harm others, but only in the United States do we suffer such mass shootings so regularly; only in the United States do we lose one person every 15 minutes to gun...

People who were abused as children are more likely to be abused as an adult Exploring the impact of what can sometimes be hidden crimes. 27 September 2017 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/peoplewhowereabusedaschildrenaremorelikelytobeabusedasanadult/2017-09-27 More than half (51%) of adults who were abused as children experienced domestic abuse in later life, new analysis has revealed 1 . Domestic abuse includes sexual assault, non-sexual abuse and...

So Your Grant $ Don’t Go Far? Then be little but loud! Using your voice with people of influence can move others to action. Be they business, foundation or policy makers; you have credibility (earned or not) just by virtue of being a foundation. You can provide a stronger voice for the cause represented by the nonprofits that do the work you care about. That voice can be through social media, through newspaper editorials, through presentations to civic groups, etc. You can involve volunteer...

The adult human head would never make it out of the birth canal, as I say in my new book Don’t Try This Alone: The Silent Epidemic of Attachment Disorder at https://www.amazon.com/dp/1976120128

NOTE: Adapted from the author’s previously posted article, America After a School Shooting: The Mindset Must Change . In the wake of the Santa Fe Shooting , we are likely to respond with the same blame focus as with the Parkland school shooting (more gun control, a broken mental health system, bad parenting, bad President, etc.) instead of how our mindset needs to change. After the 22 nd US school shooting this year, we need to look at root causes instead of focusing on surface problems. Not...

Health policy stakeholders, government agency staff, child health policy advocates, elected officials, and healthcare providers are invited to join a webinar entitled: "Playing Catch-up -- How to Address US’ Lag in Reducing Child Mortality Rates" A recent study published in Health Affairs revealed that the United States lags behind all other wealthy nations in reducing its overall child mortality. In depth analysis by co-author, Dr. Christopher Forrest of Children's Hospital of...