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What did you think about when you first learned about ACEs? If you have completed the 10-question ACE survey, you will know your score and might have some idea as to the score of your parents or your children. What is your perspective? Where do you stand? By placing yourself in one or more of the following categories, which I will call ACE PLACES, you will be taking the first step toward the healing and prevention of ACEs.

By Wei Cheng, Edmund Rolls, Weikang Gong, et al., ScienceDaily, February 4, 2020 Sleep states are active processes that support reorganisation of brain circuitry. This makes sleep especially important for children, whose brains are developing and reorganizing rapidly. In the paper 'Sleep duration, brain structure, and psychiatric and cognitive problems in children,' published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, 11,000 children aged 9-11 from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development...

By Shaili Jain, Scope, February 5, 2020 Growing up, when I would hear about my family's experience in 1947 -- the tumultuous year that British India was divided into India and Pakistan -- it usually came to me as bits of information at inopportune moments, often accompanied by my dad's anger, bitterness and sadness. But on a road trip, when he talked about it in 2007, his narration was totally different. It was smooth. It was cohesive. It was stripped of all those negative emotions. I'm a...

By Linda Mintle, Beliefnet, February 5, 2020 If you want to give your child the best chance of preventing mental illness and a host of medical problems, this is the single most important factor to consider. It affects 1 in 4 children. I am talking about child maltreatment. Child abuse comes in the form of physical, sexual and emotional abuse and neglect and leads to problems later in life. This is a stronger predictor for psychiatric and physical problems, more so than any gene or other...

Babies are obviously very different from older children developmentally, including their ability to understand and process trauma. Indeed, a baby may be completely unaware of an actual ACE— say, the incarceration of their father— which a middle schooler would be painfully aware of. Yet at the same time, the baby could be much-more-acutely impacted by the secondary effect of this same ACE: a sad, stressed, and distracted mother. Similarly, if a parent dies in a car accident when a child is in...

By Teresa Watanabe, Los Angeles Times, February 4, 2020 Kameron Pryor, a senior at Firebaugh High School in Lynwood, wanted to go to college but figured his grades wouldn’t get him very far, at least in California. His 2.47 GPA is below the average at the University of California and California State University. But Wiley College, a four-year, historically black liberal arts institution in Texas, showered him with assurances during a visit to his high school last week. All you need is a 2.0...

By Chalkbeat (News Partner), Patch, February 5, 2020 With an infusion of new resources, Newark schools are taking steps to help students deal with trauma — offering them services ranging from counseling support to "grief baskets" to a school-based relaxation room. Almost half of New Jersey's children have experienced trauma. These experiences, such as abuse, violence, and neglect, can negatively affect classroom performance, physical and behavioral health, and can increase the likelihood of...

By Liam Knox, NBC News, February 5, 2020 African Americans who reported more experiences with racial discrimination are likely to age faster, adding to evidence that racism is not only a “social and moral dilemma” but also a “public health issue,” according to an Auburn University study published last month. According to the study, encountering racism can lead to higher levels of stress, which in turn causes cells to age more rapidly. The adverse health effects of racism on African Americans...

By Susannah Stein, Arin Swerlick, and Binny Chokshi, Pediatrics, January 2020 Providers of pediatric health care have been motivated and inspired by the research on childhood adversity, which has shown that in the early stages of life, critical neurodevelopmental pathways can be disrupted through exposure to adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and resultant toxic stress.1,2 Early detection of ACEs and subsequent intervention has the potential to decrease the development of associated poor...

By Rita Rubin, JAMA Network, February 5, 2020 Withers, medical director of Pittsburgh Mercy’s Operation Safety Net, coined the term street medicine more than a quarter-century ago to describe his team’s work. Street medicine practitioners care for the unsheltered homeless, or “rough sleepers,” where they live—not only on the street but beneath overpasses and bridges, along riverbanks, and behind supermarkets. Research has linked living unsheltered to a greater risk of infectious and chronic...

By the Public Broadcasting System, February 2020 BROKEN PLACES Monday, April 6, 2020, 10:00-11:00 p.m. ET Explore why some children are severely damaged by early adversity while others are able to thrive. Revisit children profiled decades ago to see how early trauma shaped their lives as adults. A presentation of Public Policy Productions in association with WNET's CHASING THE DREAM. [ Please click here to read more .]

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