Blog

It’s long been known that meditation helps children feel calmer, but new research is helping quantify its benefits for elementary school-age children. A 2015 study found that fourth- and fifth-grade students who participated in a four-month meditation program showed improvements in executive functions like cognitive control, working memory, cognitive flexibility — and better math grades. A study published recently in the journal Mindfulness found similar improvements in mathematics in fifth...

“Aging is not safe. Aging out leaves kids with sort of a lifetime of potential dire outcomes and loneliness," says Susan Grundberg, executive director and CEO of You Gotta Believe (YGB), a New York City nonprofit organization that focuses on finding permanent families for young adults, teens and preteens in foster care. The organization understands the important role permanent relationships can play when these young adults age out of care and face issues like homelessness and unemployment.

"What is to give light must endure burning." Viktor Frankl -- For trauma-focused education and treatment to be effective for the long haul, our teachers and other caring professionals will need to practice not only self-care but also to have regular access to supportive structures of peer support and reflective supervision within their organizations.

Accountability Starts Here, a program in Sebastian County that takes a holistic family therapy approach to juvenile mental health, is being recognized as a breakthrough in an "overwhelming" social problem. Lisa Albuja, the local therapist who created the program for Juvenile Judge Leigh Zuerker last year, says the multifaceted team-oriented program she calls "ASH" was born out of simple frustration. Albuja said she kept seeing juveniles "recycling" within various mental health and juvenile...

Editor's note: This is the first part of a four-part examination of the clergy sex abuse scandal in the Catholic church. Read more about the series here: "Hell, hope and healing." The past two decades have witnessed an interdisciplinary explosion of new information about the prevalence and aftermath of child abuse and neglect. From 1995 to 1997, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Kaiser Permanente conducted a study of more than 17,000 Americans to determine how many had been...

Racial differences (white versus black and Hispanic) dominate whether looking at average or median net worth, and the gap grows as the head of the family ages. Median figures are especially sobering, showing the limited wealth generation of representative black and Hispanic heads of families regardless of age. So, do these advantages and disadvantages transfer to the next generation? Yes, and not just laterally. This second chart looks at the relationship between inheritance and wealth...

Much has been made recently of Detroit’s resurgence and growth. In January, President Obama made a swing through the Motor City, touting “ something special happening in Detroit. ” Yet the comeback has not been evenly felt across the city. The Michigan League for Public Policy’s 2016 Kids Count Data Profile revealed a major fault line earlier this year. From 2006 to 2014, child poverty in Detroit increased by 29 percent, to about 94,000 children or well more than half (57 percent) of the...

Exactly 150 years ago this month, three days of riots in Memphis, Tennessee, left nearly 50 dead, scores more injured, over 90 buildings wrecked, and black residents scattered and terrified. The unrest started with a rumor of black-on-white crime: Black soldiers stationed at Fort Pickering on the city’s south bluffs had allegedly killed white policemen attempting to arrest an African American soldier. Less than a month earlier, the United States Congress had passed the Civil Rights Act of...

Khaled Kelkal, a small but solidly built young man with a shock of dense black curls, entered prison at 19, evincing the sort of defiant frivolity that remains the mark of so many young men of his circumstance, the unwanted Arabs of the French banlieues. His robberies, the police chases, had all seemed to him a “game,” he told a sociologist in 1992. His incarceration chastened him. “You know, in prison you can’t help but mull things over. And I really mulled a lot of things over,” he told...

I did it. I finally did it. I went and took a Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) class. Why did I do it? (Why does everyone around these parts keep asking me that?!) Well, honestly, I just wanted to be able to critique it better. I mean, I had already conjured it up in my mind to be big, bad and terrible based on what I understood to be its basic premise, the affiliated website, and all I’ve ever heard about it from anyone else. However, the truth is that many of those anyones also hadn’t taken...

At night, many of Los Angeles’s parking lots sit empty, while the estimated 9,500 homeless people who live out of their vehicles rove city streets looking for a place where they can legally park and get some sleep. What they generally find, however, are various restrictions on overnight parking or on oversized vehicles. But relief may finally be coming as the city considers a “safe parking” initiative as part of its $2 billion plan to end homelessness in L.A. The initiative would open up...

Last Friday, after a false start earlier in the week , Arizona restored its State Children’s Health Insurance Program, a jointly funded program that serves the working poor (those who earn too much to qualify for Medicaid). Arizona froze enrollment in the program in 2010, citing recessionary budget concerns. Arizona’s decision is a smart one, both for economic reasons — though SCHIP is state-administered, it receives substantial levels of federal funding — and because the evidence clearly...