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Illyasha Peete spent the first years of her son’s life listening to his whistling breaths on the pillow next to her. “I was always afraid that he was going to stop breathing at night, so for two years, he slept in the same bed as me,” she said. As a single mother of an asthmatic son in Memphis, Tennessee, Peete worked hard to provide her child with the medical care he needed. Her son took medications, received allergy shots, and used a nebulizer, a machine that pumps vaporized medicine into...

The number of homeless students in the United States has doubled in the past decade. During the 2013-14 school year, more than 1.3 million students were homeless, a 7 percent increase over the previous school year, according to a new report by the advocacy group Civic Enterprises and the polling firm Hart Research Associates. A disproportionate number are students of color or identify as LGBT. As alarming as those numbers are, the fact that figures on homeless students exist at all is a step...

F or the second day in a row in mid-October, René Bross got a call from Ridgeview Elementary about a problem with her 10-year-old son. She feared it was another altercation with his teacher, like the day before. When she arrived this time, she found her son, who is diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder, face down on the ground, with the principal and a teacher's aide on top of him. Bross took him away and told the school he was never coming back. She was notified shortly after that her son...

In cultural mythology—the bedrock of which is that all women are instinctively maternal, and that all mothers are loving—the daughter who goes no contact and cuts her mother out of her life is deemed selfish, immature, and ungrateful. I know this firsthand, having divorced my mother at the age of 38; I did not see her again before she died, some thirteen years later. I’ve seen people adjust how they view me —among them, doctors who ask about my mother’s medical history and the look on their...

I love having a dead dad. For the first time in my life I know where he is on Father’s Day. He is not homeless, alcoholic, absent or violent. He is no longer wandering the streets. He's not cold or hungry. He isn’t drunk and baking in the heat on a sidewalk. He's not in pain. He’s not causing pain. He can't break hearts or bones or promises. He is not a question mark, a threat or a worry. I have always hated Father’s Day. Having a homeless father is hard. Having a dead one is much easier.

Public schoolchildren in Michigan are now required to learn about the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide as part of their social studies curriculum, according to a law Governor Rick Snyder signed on Tuesday. While most students in Michigan no doubt learn about the Holocaust already, the new law would require teachers in public schools to spend a certain amount of time on these topics. Between eighth and 12th grades, schools must spend a combined six hours on genocide education, specifically...

Qais Munhazim woke up early on Sunday at his home in Minneapolis for Suhoor—the prayer and pre-dawn meal that sustains fasting Muslims until sundown during the holy month of Ramadan. Before heading back to bed, the 31-year-old Ph.D student checked his phone, and read that while he had been asleep, the worst shooting in U.S. history had occurred. As he read the details of how a U.S. citizen of Afghan descent named Omar Mateen opened fire at a gay club in Orlando, ultimately killing 49 and...

Ask conservatives what the poor need to do to get out of poverty, and the answer usually involves something like, “Get a job.” That was the crux of the anti-poverty plan Paul Ryan revealed last week to shrugs, and has been the gist of many anti-poverty efforts over the past two decades. But for many people, there is one very specific—and often overlooked—reason why that’s not so easy: They don't have a driver's license. Not all jobs require a driver’s license, particularly those that pay...

This essay was written by Mary Sharrow, a Peace4Tarpon board member. My daughter, Candace, taught 5th then 3rd grade at an inner city Baltimore elementary school through Teach For America. It was trial by fire her first year, as this was a struggling school and many students had a trauma history. It is Teach For America’s mission to place teachers in the most needy schools. Candace was very enthusiastic, but didn’t know much about trauma and its effects, other than what she intuitively felt...

Thirty-one academic experts in children's health argue that absent urgent action by international aid agencies, 200 million children around the world could sustain serious, lifelong cognitive impairment. The National Academy of Medicine Perspective article makes the case that global policy lags behind the science of brain health, and children must be given the opportunity not just to survive, but thrive. Neil Boothby, the Allan Rosenfield Professor at Columbia University's Mailman School of...

New research finds that when teens receive an insufficient amount of sleep they show a heightened variability in sadness, anger, energy, and feelings of sleepiness. Investigators also discovered that a poor night sleep can set up a vicious cycle as nightly fluctuations in sleep among healthy teens predicted a worse mood the next day. Also, a poor mood on any given day predicted unusually bad sleep the next night. Researchers believe promoting healthy sleep among adolescents could potentially...

In the past several decades, advances in brain science have suggested that the learning that occurs in the first few years of a child’s life lays the groundwork for a productive adulthood. The expansion of preschool is one of the few topics where both Republicans and Democrats in Congress find common ground; while lawmakers don’t always agree on how programs should be funded or structured, the belief that good early-childhood education can help prevent later gaps in test scores and...