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The first time I am arrested, I am 12 years old. One sentence and I am back there, all that little girl fear and humiliation forever settled in me at the cellular level. It’s the break between seventh and eighth grades, and for the first time I have to attend summer school because of my math and science grades, and I am angry about it. No other Millikan kids come here, to this school in Van Nuys, for remediation, only me. The summer school I attend is for the kids who live in my...

Federal officials lost track of nearly 1,500 migrant children last year after a government agency placed the minors in the homes of adult sponsors in communities across the country, according to testimony before a Senate subcommittee Thursday. The Health and Human Services Department has a limited budget to track the welfare of vulnerable unaccompanied minors, and realized that 1,475 children could not be found after making follow-up calls to check on their safety, an agency official said.

Last week, a prototype of a simple, 360-square-foot dwelling called the Plugin House appeared outside Boston City Hall. The crisp white box, unfurnished but with portals for plumbing and electricity ready to go, took about 5 hours for a five-person team to assemble. It’s the brainchild of James Shen , who is in Boston this year from China as a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, and it represents something significant: In a city where everything from roof decks to...

Among the homes, schools, daycare centers, and churches of Los Angeles' Wilmington neighborhood, hundreds of pumpjacks extract oil, their dinosaur-like heads bobbing up and down. A predominately working-class and Latino immigrant community of 58,000, Wilmington sits atop the third-largest oil field in the continental United States. Five oil refineries release steam from nearly 200-foot stacks, their pipes and tanks clanging and hissing. Many of Wilmington's residents work in the oil industry...

What happens when you don’t blame kids for bad behavior? An elementary school in Columbus, Ohio is trying to find out. Katherine Reynolds Lewis writes: The Ohio-based photographer Maddie McGarvey spent a couple days at Ohio Ave recently meeting and spending time with the students, teachers, and administration trying to shift teachers’ perspective on trauma and their relationships with children. “How are [the children] going to learn a positive way of dealing with conflict if we’re not the...

For Public Health and Health Professions Research Day at the University of Florida, I connected with Peace4Tarpon (P4T) to look into some of the data they had been collecting since since early 2016. I did this as part of my final internship for the Master of Public Health program. In surveys that Peace4Tarpon had been distributing through meetings and outreach, they had been collecting demographic information and ACEs data. ACEs have also been measured on a national scale through the 2010...

The University of Florida has fostered a strong relationship with Peace4Tarpon, through the College of Public Health and Health Professions, for a few years now. Recently, the conversations between the two were focused on how they could partner to take the aims and methods of the trauma-informed initiative beyond Tarpon Springs and into a more accessible, formal format. This sparked the idea to create a course available to learners who can take the information and spread the culture of...

This month, Utah’s free-range parenting law goes into effect. The bill amends the definition of parental neglect regarding children. In Utah it is now okay for parents to let their kids play in the park alone or walk to and from school by themselves. There have been instances in the past where parents have faced legal trouble for letting their children have this independence. The first thing I thought when reading about this policy is that it doesn’t address the bigger problem and could...

Finally it begins; the talk of the struggle in Napa County has transitioned to the walk (or the march) , and thanks to Ashley Ochoa and Jenny Waken, voices of Napa County residents are being heard! I was so excited to be a part of this march, to see the lit up and excited faces of so many who came together with the same passion for change, and the same drive to fight (safely) for a difference that's long over-due! The challenge of having a dual diagnosis can be a detrimental reality ending...

If I had diagrammed my family when my children were young, well most any age really, had I been really honest I’d have made myself smaller than anyone else. What I learned through my own ACA/codependency recovery, was that if I kept doing that, I was not in fact serving my children nor myself nor my husband. Trauma has the effect of shrinking us, we get hurt and we withdraw, we get scared and we shut down, we become emotionally constricted, we’re less present and less spontaneous. Recovery...

“I love you,” I say to my daughter. “Of course you do,” she says, I’m awesome.” She was twelve. The mother in me smiled. The girl I was shook her head inside and wondered h ow would it have been to feel both loved and lovable while a child? I do not know. I will never know. It does not matter how wonderful my present. It does not matter who I will become. I can’t change the past. The past is a country I never want my daughter to travel near or in. I am an exile, from my past, my child self.

For more of this article by German Lopez , please click here .