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This headline is by a blog writer, Charles Pulliam-Moore, that summarizes a research study demonstrating this dreadful statistic.

One of my best friends, Heidi Aylward, is a high ACE scoring mother of two. She's also a feisty, funny and has a full life balancing work, parenting, friends and all the responsibilities of tending to home and loved ones. And she is a woman who used WIC . WIC defines itself as "The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) provides Federal grants to States for supplemental foods, health care referrals, and nutrition education for low-income pregnant,...

Morgan Gliedman’s 3-year-old daughter keeps a few pictures of her visits with her dad taped to the wall by her bed, and the rest in a little pink suitcase along with his letters. She’s full of ideas for what she’ll do with him when his “time out” is over: camping, baking bread, reading bedtime stories. The earliest that can happen will be when she is in first grade, and he is eligible for parole from his seven-year-minimum prison sentence on criminal weapons charges. Full article by Kj ...

One of my favorite organizations is the Mama Bear Effect . It's a few years old and is basically a bunch of grown-ups dedicated to keeping children safe - particularly from sexual abuse. Today, they posted something important on Facebook about not putting so much emphasis on teaching children to say "no" and rather expecting adults to keep children safe. I have to say that given the reality that most abusers are known to children, it's not likely that a child simply saying "no" to an abuser...

I wonder how we can better support all parents so they (we) get enough support to be the reliable rocks our children require? And where can we get assistance when that's not possible?

People sometimes feel bad for adoptive parents. They think maybe our kids say, "You're not my real parents" on a daily basis and that we go to bed crying each night because we can't have kids of our "own." Do they think we had to "settle" for adoption or fostering? Do they worry we feel less than as parents? We don't. It's true that some of us have fertility issues. And maybe have grief about that. It's true that our children may love us and their birth parents, foster family members. It's...

We don't hear enough from men who have been abused as children. Byron Hamel is helping to change that. This is an interview done with Hamel by the Trigger Points Anthology website . It's the first in a series they are running about fathering as a survivor of childhood abuse. If you can't read the entire thing, and you should, please read this: I honestly think most people believe an abused boy is inherently going to become an abusive or neglectful dad. I gotta call bullshit on that one,...

A program in New York City’s high-poverty areas is training parents to be more sensitive to their children. “When families are living in poverty, the infants need extra-sensitive parents and it’s harder for the parents to give that extra-sensitive parenting,” said Anne Heller, founder of Power of Two, which opened in Brownsville, Brooklyn, last fall and has worked to help nearly 100 families become more sensitive to their children’s needs. The idea is that forming strong attachments in the...

"My experience with violence is very brutal...I grew up with violence as if it were my sibling." - LC participant (youth) "We know we can't run the city- it's too complex- but our experience and our voices should count, especially because we're the most effected ." - LC participant (youth) "Our city's problems are shared by us all; we are all part of the problem AND the solution. Listening is a key component to healing." - LC Share Out partici pant (adult) Three years ago, RYSE Center in...

One of my favorite books Neurofeedback in the Treatment of Developmental Trauma. Few write about development trauma as beautifully as this author. Sebern Fisher describes how and developmental trauma has such deep and lasting impact on children and adults. And how neurofeedback helps. She's even tried it herself as well. I recommend her book just to better understand complex PTSD. But if you are interested in learning more about neurofeedback, in general, this article by Winston Ross is...

CHICAGO — The agitated mom had three kids in foster care and she wanted them back. But she didn’t understand how to parent. She’d never worked. She had a short fuse. She was slow and didn’t seem to learn from experience. Dr. Carl Bell studied the young woman. Flat cheeks. Thin upper lip. Folds at the corner of her eyes. It hit him like a thunderbolt: She had subtle features of fetal alcohol syndrome. Bell had seen thousands of patients like this over the past 40 years and been baffled by...

Rachel Yehuda was interviewed by Krista Tippett last year and that entire On Being show was fabulous and worth listening to. This part below talks about the way we might talk about depression with our children. DR. YEHUDA: Exactly, and I think if we know what's going on in our bodies, then it just takes a lot of the confusion and the panic away from it, especially if we have this idea that this is a step on the way to having an equilibration of some sort. MS. TIPPETT: Does what you're...