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My co-teacher is stirring sugar into a pitcher of hot water. Our students, ages 4 and 5, stand around the table, watching the sugar intently. “It’s dissolving!” one student cries out. “What does that mean—dissolving?” my co-teacher probes. Another child raises his hand. “It means, like, disappearing, or disintegrating.” My students are the children of doctors, lawyers, teachers, and other professionals, and have been hearing words like “dissolve” and “disintegrate” since they were babies.

or children, the wounds of a traumatic experience can run deep, and the scars can linger for years. This has long been intuitive to people who work with traumatized kids. Now there's a growing body of research that shows how these experiences can derail a child's normal brain development, increasing the chance of mental health problems like depression, anxiety, eating disorders and substance abuse. There's even a study that suggests a link between childhood trauma and adult health and...

The words “My mom said ‘I ain’t gonna teach you nothing, because I want you to go through what I went through” were displayed on a PowerPoint slide in the Italian Community Center ballroom. This quote was stated by someone who took part in a study that explored how childhood stressors lead to poor health outcomes, according to Dr. Roy Wade. SaintA hosted Childhood Adversity & Poverty: Developing a Collaborative Response on April 12 from 3pm to 6 pm, featuring Dr. Wade as the keynote...

Understanding teens, and sorting myth from reality, is a challenge for both adults and teens themselves. So check out this quiz and update your knowledge on the latest findings. 1. Which of the following is not true: The adolescent brain leads teens to: Explore Seek out the good in life Feel things passionately Seek novelty Process information rapidly Need their parents less and be less affected by parents’ disapproval All of the above Though teens have gotten a bad rap, the adolescent brain...

A new study has found that interventions designed to increase connections to non-drug-using family and friends, the faith community, education and employment are the best ways to reduce substance abuse among African-Americans and other minorities in low-income, resource-poor communities. The study focused on locations within the Arkansas Mississippi Delta, a region characterized by strained race relations, a stagnant economy, high unemployment, low incomes, and high emigration, and where the...

What happened in Murfreesboro about a week ago shouldn't stay in Murfreesboro. Police arrested 10 children at an elementary school and led them away in handcuffs. The children didn't have weapons. They weren't fighting or hurting others. They weren't destroying property. Basically, they were arrested and taken to juvenile court for acting like children. Police said the kids, ages 6-12, were arrested on suspicion of failing to stop other kids from fighting off campus several days earlier. The...

For the last two years, nearly all students referred for mental health services in seven school-based health centers in Deschutes County, OR, have taken the 10-question adverse childhood experiences (ACE) survey. It didn’t take long to realize why this was good idea. “The average ACE score for a student being seen by a Deschutes County clinician was 5 out of 10,” says Elizabeth Fitzgerald, supervisor of school-based health centers at Deschutes County Health Services.

I am reporting, with mixed feelings, what I heard about the fate of HCR 21, the Alaska ACE Resolution introduced by Representative Geran Tarr. The Resolution is sitting in the House Finance Committee, and I am told that it is, to use the words of veterans in the legislative process, "dead." It will apparently not surface this year, although stranger things have happened. So I am disappointed (and prepared to be elated if it does resurface). However it ends, Representative Tarr was able to...

I became extremely interested in suicide prevention after two of my young cousins committed suicide within six months of each other. I began to study the current state of suicide prevention in 2008 and began to envision what I refer to as a future state in about 2009. I wrote a very quick paper summarizing my research because two of my dear friends were deeply engaged in suicide prevention, one as chair of a prevention task force and the other as a teacher, coach and mentor. I gave three...

The bold black lettering stood out emphatically on freshly pressed white T-shirts. One read, “Only 28 percent of youth had their parents present while being questioned by police.” “Only 42 percent of the youth had their parents notified immediately after arrest,” read another. The T-shirts were a concrete way to dramatize a survey about some of the most pressing juvenile justice issues in the Bronx. Unusually, young adults from the community had been trained in participatory action research...

How do you help someone who is at risk of suicide? That's a question that haunts the people of Greenland, the country with the highest known rate of suicide in the world and the subject of a special NPR report this week. The rate is about 80 per 100,000, and the group at highest risk is young Inuit men. But it's a question that anyone, anywhere, might ask. Every year, about 1 million people kill themselves worldwide; preventing suicides is an issue every culture deals with. MORE ON...

In the '80s and '90s, America's suicide trend was headed in the right direction: down. "It had been decreasing almost steadily since 1986, and then what happened is there was a turnaround," says Sally Curtin , a statistician with the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The suicide rate has risen by a quarter, to 13 per 100,000 people in 2014 from 10.5 in 1999, according to an analysis by Curtin and her colleagues that was released...