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Parenting Through the Storm: Find Help, Hope, and Strength When Your Child Has Psychological Problems , is written by Ann Douglas. The author, a member of this group and network , has a warm, open and honest tone. She's a parent and gets that parents and kids are sometimes or even often scared, struggling and in crisis. She knows. She writes about the time she almost lost her daughter, thirteen at the time, to death by suicide. Her daughter was vomiting and sleeping, restlessly, all night...

Hello! I am writing to share a wonderful new resource from the Vital Village Network’s friend and partner, Charles C. Daniels, Jr. Charles is the Founder and CEO of Fathers’ Uplift, which works to assist fathers in overcoming barriers (financial barriers, addiction barriers, oppressive barriers, emotional barriers and traumatic barriers) that prevent them from remaining engaged in their children’s lives. Charles’s book “Pre-Father Care: Prenatal Care for Fathers” is now available for...

Many family courts across the nation routinely fail the most vulnerable in our society: mothers and their children in crisis seeking a life free from abuse. In 2012, the U.S. Department of Justice released the Saunders Report , a study that found the standard and required domestic violence training received by judges, lawyers, and custody evaluators, does not adequately prepare them to handle abuse cases. Inadequately trained professionals tend to believe the myth that mothers frequently...

It's been a long time since I was in school but I still remember the free breakfast, lunch, snack and milk I got for many years. It made school a place I loved going. Kids can't focus or succeed as well when hungry, which I think most of us know even without a study. But, here's an excerpt from a recent study on how early hunger impacts early education. The new study, published in the latest issue of the journal Child Development , suggests that such early experience of hunger in the family...

Last week I posted an article about the Harvard study on happiness, which found that strong social connections are the primary driver of happiness. No surprise there. What struck me, however, is how these findings relate to ACEs. I had just finished reading Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship , which addresses this very issue. From the back cover: “Although it may seem that people suffer from an endless number...

It was during my second pregnancy when the changes really hit me. I had recently moved to the East Los Angeles neighborhood of Boyle Heights. This is where I now work as a perinatal case manager for Maternal and Child Health Access and where most of my clients live, but at the time I was unemployed. During the pregnancy, I noticed my anxiety and depression growing so strong they almost knocked me over. I was training to be a mental health specialist and had been looking for a job for two...

Note: Many parents who are parenting with ACEs could use some extra support. Some, have little or none. A woman posted a link to this article on Facebook and I share it because she noted, as a survivor (of ACEs), there aren't always in-laws and grandparents or extended family to step in and help out. This is hard. She didn't want pity. I don't feel pity. But I feel empathy. She can't get sick and if she does it's miserable, emotionally, physically and often financially. Some of us who are...

Girls from lower-income backgrounds are missing days of school because they can’t afford sanitary products. A campaigner with Freedom4Girls, a organisation that provides women and girls in Kenya with sanitary products, told BuzzFeed News they were contacted by a concerned police officer working in a school in Leeds who had noticed a pattern in some girls’ truancy. “There is a problem, but we just don’t know how big,” campaigner Tina Leslie told BuzzFeed News. She was told by the officer,...

These are great. There are some things I'd not heard of and I'm guessing they would be pretty great for anxious adults, as well. Imagine you are driving in the car. You look in the rearview mirror and see your child trying to shrink into her seat. “What’s wrong?” you ask. “I don’t want to go to the birthday party.” “But you’ve been excited all week. There will be cake and games and a bounce house. You love all of those things,” you try to reason. “But I can’t go. There will be lots of people...

The Hechinger Report filmed the school at the juvenile detention center in New Orleans after a new group of educators, with a different approach, took over. JJIE and Youth Today have partnered with the Hechinger Report in the past on education projects. [For more of this story go to http://jjie.org/2017/03/15/school-for-new-orleans-juveniles-evolves/]

Preschoolers who get too little sleep may be more likely to have trouble paying attention, controlling their emotions and processing information later in childhood, a new study suggests. By age 7, these sleepless kids had markedly decreased mental and emotional functioning, said study lead researcher Dr. Elsie Taveras. The children exhibited "poorer ability to pay attention, poorer emotional control, poorer executive function in general, and more behavioral problems," said Taveras, chief of...

Please share any stories, insights, experiences or opinions you have about neurofeedback. Have you tried it? Do you know anyone who has? Have you tried to get it covered by insurance for yourself or a child? Many of us are curious about this for treating our own symptoms or for better supporting our kids but it sounds serious, complicated and expensive. What's your experience been? What have you heard or felt or tried? What do you think? Sebern Fisher believes a “well-regulated brain” is a...