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By Emma Ockerman, Vice, June 23, 2021 After a Florida teacher mistook a third grader’s drawing of a person hugging a rocket for male genitalia, police seized the child for an involuntary psychiatric examination and threw her into the back of a squad car, according to a new federal lawsuit. A group of parents and advocates filed the complaint against the School Board of Palm Beach County and local officials Tuesday. What happened to the third-grader, who was 8 years old at the time of the...

By Anne Brice, Greater Good Magazine, June 18, 2021 Emiliana Simon-Thomas is the science director of the Greater Good Science Center, where she co-teaches The Science of Happiness , a free, eight-week online course that “explores the roots of a happy, meaningful life.” She earned her Ph.D. in psychology from UC Berkeley in 2004, studying how emotional and cognitive processes interact to shape behavior and brain activity. In the interview below, Simon-Thomas talks about how humans are a...

By Jim Rendon, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, July 1, 2021 A wide array of grant makers have signed an open letter calling for foundations and wealthy donors who do not already have relationships with grassroots groups to direct more of their racial-justice giving to funds with close ties to communities of color rather than only trying to support grassroots racial-justice groups themselves. The past year has brought vast attention to organizations led by people from marginalized groups, and...

By Brandon Tensley, CNN Politics, July 1, 2021 "They're shooting at us. They're supposed to shoot BLM, but they're shooting the patriots." That was one of the Trump-supporting insurrectionists who laid siege to the US Capitol on January 6 in a deadly attempt to overturn the election that secured the White House for Joe Biden. She was expressing a sentiment that many Trumpists share: that the US belongs to Donald Trump (who at the time of the Capitol riot was still in the White House) and his...

By Dwayne Curry, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, June 16, 2021 My wife and I have been married since 2019, but we’ve known each other since we were 14-year-olds. We are raising a blended family. She has a daughter who is 9 and a 7-year-old son. I have a son who is 8, and together we have a 2-year-old son. The pandemic has profoundly shaped my parenting experience in numerous ways. I had to transform my house into a combined virtual school, daycare, and work setting. The last year has...

By Jim Krajewski, Reno Gazette Journal, June 24, 2021 Ku Stevens will not let history be forgotten. Stevens’ determination is already known. He was the lone runner on the Yerington cross country team this spring . In track, he posted the second fastest time in the state in the 1600-meter (4:23.16) and in the 3200 (9:47.26). Later this summer, Stevens, who will be a senior at Yerington, will retrace his great-grandfather's journey in escaping from the Stewart Indian School outside of Carson...

By Sandee LaMotte, CNN, June 28, 2021 Physical punishment does not appear to improve a child's positive behavior or social competence over time, according to a review of 69 studies from the US, Canada, China, Colombia, Greece, Japan, Switzerland, Turkey and the United Kingdom. The review, published Monday in the journal Lancet , found physical punishment such as spanking is "harmful to children's development and well-being," said senior author Elizabeth Gershoff, a professor in human...

By Guest Author, 7/1/2021, positiveexperience.org/blog Please introduce yourself and your work to our blog readers. I am a health policy researcher whose work examines health disparities among rural and other vulnerable populations, with a primary focus on children. I am an assistant professor in the Arnold School of Public Health’s Department of Health Services Policy and Management at the University of South Carolina and deputy director of the Rural and Minority Health Research Center . My...

To help our community better understand anxiety, learn three things to remember when it comes to what’s going on inside an anxious mind.

Here are two excerpts from a powerful blog post on the KevindMd site which is written by an anonymous medical student. I recommend the entire blog post which can be found here . Cissy's note: If doctors to be, while in medical school are not treated well by the medical model they are being trained to perform in, how can we expect them to then treat patients with compassion and understanding? I think of this now not only as a trauma survivor, and a patient advocate, but as a mother to a...

By Faith Karimi, CNN US, June 27, 2021 Linda Johnson-Thomas' grandfather worked at the Virginia Theological Seminary for more than a decade, first as a farm laborer before moving up to head janitor. Her grandparents lived in a little white house on campus with their four children, including her mother. But until two years ago, she had no idea that her grandfather, John Samuel Thomas Jr., had been forced to work at the school in Alexandria, just outside of Washington, D.C. "All I knew was...

By Kelli María Korducki, The Guardian, June 24, 2021 I can pinpoint the exact moment that I realized my brain was still broken from the pandemic. A few weeks ago, while riding the train, I decided to send off a few overdue email replies. Fast forward 45 minutes, and there I was: sitting cross-legged on my destination platform, email forgotten, frantically toggling between tabs. It was, by now, a grimly familiar experience of my pandemic-era cognitive performance. Beginning in the spring of...