Tagged With "good enough mother"
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10 Books About Race To Read Instead Of Asking A Person Of Color To Explain Things To You [bustle.com]
In today's current political and cultural climate, it's crucial that everyday Americans are engaging in important conversations about race, bias, discrimination, and privilege. For people of color, these conversations are nothing new; they are a requirement in communities where experiences of racism, bias, and bigotry are a part of everyday life. But for many white people who have never been burdened by a system built specifically to keep us down, these conversations can seem confusing,...
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Two Decades Later, A Mother Writes Back to the WIC Program She Used
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,...
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25 Things You Do as an Adult When You've Experienced Childhood Emotional Abuse (www.themighty.com)
Excerpt from article by Juliette Virzi. It has been said that “no one escapes childhood unscathed.” But sayings like these can have an especially significant meaning for a person who has experienced emotional abuse as a child . The effects of emotional abuse can be both debilitating and far-reaching, often extending out of childhood and into adolescence and adulthood. For many, experiencing emotional abuse at a young age can affect their self-worth and relationships. For some, emotional...
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3 Concepts to Help Trauma Survivors Move Forward Into Healthier Relationships
It’s good, healthy and human to want love and seek it out. We live longer, healthier lives when we feel close to someone safe. Some people feel painfully disconnected, and long to open up to others. But then they stop themselves from reaching out. As therapists, we want to empower people to build more meaningful connections. For all of us, healthy relationships matter . In fact, deep relationships are essential to life as a healthy human being. For trauma survivors, the act of deepening...
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3 Ways Emotional Neglect From Childhood Robs Your Joy [blogs.psychcentral.com]
Morgan's note: This is an important article about Childhood Emotional Neglect, how deeply it damages, and how it can be healed. Read full article . Morgan Vien Co-Manager, Practicing Resilience for Self-Care & Healing
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5 Surprising Ways the Father Wound Harms Women [goodmenproject.com]
I’ve been dealing with the father wound for most of my life. When I was five years old my mid-life father became increasingly depressed because he couldn’t make a living supporting me and my mother. He took an overdose of sleeping pills and was committed to Camarillo State Mental Hospital. Many of us grow up without the presence of a loving, engaged, father in our lives. Some of us lose our fathers through illness, others through divorce, death, distance, or dysfunction. Like most losses,...
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6 Warning Signs That It’s More Than The Baby Blues [Scary Mommy]
With the baby blues occurring in nearly 80% of postpartum mothers, it can be hard to tell whether or not they are a cause for worry. The term “baby blues” is used to describe the flood of feelings a mother experiences shortly after giving birth. Between the sudden change in hormone levels, the extreme lack of sleep, trauma of childbirth and everything else that happens in the first few weeks postpartum, it’s understandable for a new mother to feel overwhelmed. The trouble with the baby blues...
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7 Ways to Help a Child Deal with Traumatic Stress
Traumatic stress feels awful. Thankfully, there are small things we can all do to help relax a hyperaroused nervous system.
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7 Ways to Help a Child Deal with Traumatic Stress (www.attachmenttraumanetwork.org)
Excerpt from article by Hllary Jacobs Hendel: To read this full article by Hilary Jacobs Hendel, go here.
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9 Signs You Need Better Self-Care and May Be a Trauma Survivor
Self-care is the sum of things you do for your emotional and physical wellbeing. Getting enough sleep, brushing your teeth, and eating well are classic examples of good physical self-care. How to take good care of yourself emotionally may be harder to see from the outside. Your ability to view your inner world with compassion and curiosity is one sign. Noticing your emotions and thoughts with gentle awareness is another inward sign of emotional self-care. Knowing how to find and turn to...
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A Brief Overview of Post-Partum Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (mathewsopenaccess.com)
Note: Parenting with ACEs can present us with extra challenges. Being pregnant, giving birth and breastfeeding can all be difficult for many of us. The stresses all parents experience can be compounded depending on our own emotional and physical well-being and the support we have (emotional, financial, family, community). In addition, we might have to consider thing such as going on, staying on or going off of drugs for some period of time during and following pregnancy. We don't talk a lot...
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A community-based approach to supporting substance exposed newborns and their families
This information brief highlights a community-based approach to supporting families and newborns affected by substance use. MA EfC developed this brief to address the profound intersection between the Massachusetts opioid crisis, Federal mandates for the development of Plans of Safe Care for substance exposed newborns, and, the MA EfC focus on increasing social connectedness as a means to reduce child maltreatment.
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A Daughter's Letter to Her Alcoholic Father - I Love You and I Hate You
"Why don’t you love me? Why don’t you care enough to care?," writes the high school girl who wrote a letter to her alcoholic father but never mailed it. She asked me to share it on my blogs, instead. It’s the rawness of her hurt, so many years into her life, that drew me to share her letter. Helping children and adults understand the secondhand drinking (SHD) impacts a child experiences when growing up with a parent’s alcoholism* is essential to helping a child (or an adult child) heal from...
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A Few Quotes I Love from The Silenced Child by Claudia M. Gold, MD
This book is so good. I am loving reading it and I have already underlined so many parts that I can't wait to read the whole thing to write a book review. I'm going to start sharing some quotes. First, what I love most is the warm and non-clinical tone. It sounds like it is written by a human being and that's appealing. The author writes about parents (and is one) with kindness and care and as a human being. O.k., at only 50 pages in, here are some of the gems so far : "Listening to parents...
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A good New Year's Resolution: Moms need to remember themselves.
From Anna Sutton via ACEs in Maternal Health group ... Love this table top conversation between Jada Pinkett Smith, her daughter and mother. Take home message... If you're a mom, don't forget who YOU are to yourself. You weren't always a mom. Your kids need to see this part of you so that they will remember to value themselves when they become parents. If you have a mom, remind her she's also a beautiful woman. If you're a partner, help her to find a safe, stress free...
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A Gun to His Head as a Child. In Prison as an Adult [NYTimes.com]
LEBANON, Conn. — Rob Sullivan still remembers the gun and the sound of his mother’s high-pitched pleas. Two thieves had burst into his parents’ Hartford home. Demanding his father’s dope stash, one of the men placed a gun to Rob’s right temple. “Just give it to them,” his mother begged his father. He was 6 years old. The incident, charred in his memory, was an early trauma among many he recalls from his childhood. He watched his father beat his mother for not having dinner ready on time or...
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A Lament That Remains (www.psychologytoday.com)
While this article by Kristin Meekhof is geared towards children grieving the loss of a parent who had died, it has a lot of insightful ACE-related advice for parenting with ACEs This leads to the next point- death is very painful. However, resilient people aren't pain free, but they know how to handle it. You can expect there will be painful moments, such as holidays, the deceased parent's birthday, a school graduation. And pretending that pain will not exist during these or other occasions...
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A letter to … My birth mother, who left me in a hedge as a baby, www.guardian.com
Abandonment is the ACE described in this beautifully written letter. You might be my mom. Only you will know. I think about you often. I have visited the place where you left me, in that hedge in a beautiful straw basket with hand-knitted clothes, swathed in a blanket. This is where my identity was forged as a foundling. From that little bundle you left behind in 1965, a great big me was formed. A dog sniffed me out. That day not only changed your life for ever, it changed the dog’s owners’...
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A Letter to My Daughter from Your Trauma-Recovering Momma (www.parentingwithptsd.com)
Another beautiful offering from one of our members, @Dawn Daum I worry that my presence and behaviors blindly feed you confusion. How can your mother be so tender at times and yet so distant and cold other times? Why is she ok with snuggling one minute and then the next time you wrap your arms around her, she refuses you and walks away? Your requests for me to just sit with you can be the most challenging moments for me. To sit still and simply embrace unconditional love...
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A New Wave of Caregivers: Men [nytimes.com]
By Courtney E. Martin, The New York Times, September 24, 2019 When you hear the word “caregiver,” what image comes to mind? Most likely it is a woman in her 40s — someone tucking her children in with a phone call to her aging mother before bed. And in fact, this isn’t inaccurate. But did you know that of the 40 million family caregivers in America, nearly half of them are men? According to Jean Accius of AARP, these once invisible men are starting to “come out” publicly. Dr. Accius has...
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A Post in Honor of World Mental Health Day: ACEs - Childhood Traumas - Are the Mother of Almost All Addiction and Disease.
Community is the anti-trauma. Children who grow up in trauma are wired for trauma -- it is the lens through which they see the world -- unless that trauma is disrupted by a love of peace. That peace comes from quiet moments reading, time in nature, time when there is no fear or expectation. It takes a lot for a parent with high ACEs to learn how to calm the mind and body enough to provide that calm space for children. ACEs are crafty. Their impact pops up across the lifespan, and for women,...
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A Reflection of Real Life and the Amazing Influence of People: The Saga of C-PTSD Continues
Cissy Note on Leisa's Amazing Post: This post isn't about parenting, specifically, but it is about C-PTSD which many parents are living with, sorting through and recovering from. I felt so much compassion for and admiration of Leisa reading this. I even felt some compassion for myself. I wonder how many others, while facing our ACEs feel the compassion of others or ourselves? I wonder if anyone, while battling symptoms, feels respected or admired? There can be so much shame. I hope that if...
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A Second Wound: A Survivor's Decision to Cut Ties with Family (www.triggerpointsanthology.com)
This is a beautiful and painful essay to read. Many with one or some ACEs struggle with if, when and how to take space or keep contact with one or more family members. There's no pain-free scenario that I've heard of. Sometimes there's more pain with contact and sometimes, more pain with distance. It's often a journey but not one written much about. Excerpt: I have come a long way. From the fractured child who was silenced when I tried to speak up about my abuse to the whole and healthy...
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A Shared Sentence The Devastating Toll of Parental Incarceration on Kids, Families and Communities (www.acef.org) & Commentary
Here's a link to the policy report put out earlier this year by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Here's a summary of what's in it in case you want to explore it more. More than 5 million U.S. children have had a parent in jail or prison at some point in their lives. The incarceration of a parent can have as much impact on a child’s well-being as abuse or domestic violence. But while states spend heavily on corrections, few resources exist to support those left behind. A Shared Sentence offers...
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A Sherpa Helping Us Scale Mountains of Loss & Fear: The Impact of Sebern Fisher's Work
“You can recover from all that happened to you.” That was the dose of hope I received from Sebern Fisher during a short telephone interview. She is the author of Neurofeedback in the Treatment of Developmental Trauma: Calming the Fear-Driven Brain. Her book is excellent even if you never plan on using neurofeedback. She helps explain why and how developmental trauma devastates and how it is different than single-incident trauma or traditional post-traumatic stress. Honestly – if you read her...
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A single Denver mom learns to manage toxic stress and tighten family bonds [CPR.org]
Katrina Haselgren sits outside with her 3-year-old son Giovanni having "mommy and me" time. Her older sons are at school. “What’s that noise?” she asks him gently. “A grasshopper,” Giovanni says softly. The...
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Effects of Preterm Birth
A baby born prematurely often spends that crucial time for attachment and development of neural pathways in the NICU
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Engaging Parents, Developing Leaders A Self-Assessment and Planning Tool for Nonprofits and Schools & Commentary from a Parent (aecf.org)
I finally had a chance to read this 34-page document. It's great to see parental engagement being addressed in such an in-depth way. While it might seem common-sense obvious that parental engagement efforts are crucial - they aren't always done well or at all. This toolkit is wonderful but it's not perfect. It asks a lot of important questions which help an organization think about what it does or doesn't do already. It offers a lot of resources for further research as well as some real-life...
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Even Science Agrees, You Literally Can’t Spoil A Baby (www.scarymommy.com) & Commentary
Note: Personal experience and research combined are pretty dang persuasive and compelling. There are lots of people who are still very resistant to attachment parenting and sometimes consider it extreme. I know because when my daughter was first home from China I practiced this style of parenting. Being responsive to her wants and needs and cues was priority number one because she'd been in an environment where her needs weren't always met. However, had I not adopted and learned about...
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Facing Postpartum Depression: The Honesty, Courage and Support It Takes to Seek Help for PPD
“Nobody would believe what an effort it is to do what little I am able” – Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the Yellow Wallpaper, 1892 It is wonderful to see the birth of a child greeted with warm enthusiasm and support. We celebrate the joy of a growing family, and the excitement of a new life. Relatives and friends often provide gifts and extra help. But for some new moms, motherhood brings on many complex emotions besides the happy ones. While we may greet a new baby with happiness and delight –...
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Families in Limbo: Coronavirus Hobbles Reunifications from Foster Care [chronicleofsocialchange.org]
By Jeremy Loudenback and John Kelly, The Chronicle of Social Change, April 16, 2020 This week was supposed to be a triumphant one for a Northern California mother of two, a 39-year-old home health aide. Soon after a long-scheduled court date at the Sonoma County Hall of Justice this week, she imagined she would soon be able to gather her 1-year-old daughter in her arms at last and end what has been the most terrifying experience of her life: the seven months her toddler has spent in foster...
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Family First Scholarships for 21st Annual Families and Fathers Conference
21st Annual Families and Fathers National Conference February 24-27, 2020 Hilton Los Angeles Airport 5711 West Century Boulevard Los Angeles, California 90045 I am honored to announce The Family First Scholarship supported by the Annie E. Casey Foundation as a Title Sponsor and State of California First 5 as a Co-Sponsor for the 21 st Annual Families and Fathers Conference, Next Level 2020! the terms "putting family first" and "it takes a village to raise a child" parallels with why we have...
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Father's Day for the Rest of Us
How do you manage Father's Day as an adult? How did everyone do on Father's Day? It's one of those holidays that can be so complicated for many of us. Maybe there's angst, anger or ambivalence? Maybe there's appreciation too. I wrote about how it has shifted for me since I found that my father died. I didn't expect to feel so much relief. I love having a dead dad. For the first time in my life I know where he is on Father’s Day. He is not homeless, alcoholic, absent or violent. He is no...
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Fathering as a Survivor (www.triggerpointsanthology.com)
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,...
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Fed Up With Deaths, Native Americans Want to Run Their Own Health Care [nytimes.com]
By Mark Walker, The New York Times, October 15, 2019 When 6-month-old James Ladeaux got his second upper respiratory infection in a month, the doctor at the Sioux San Indian Health Service Hospital reassured his mother, Robyn Black Lance, that it was only a cold. But 12 hours later James was struggling to breathe. Ms. Black Lance rushed her son back to the hospital in western South Dakota, where the doctors said they did not have the capacity to treat him and transferred him to a private...
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#Female Adversity: Growing Up With Female Adversity: The Female Body and Brain on Toxic Stress Series
One thing readers know about the work I do and the books I write, including Childhood Disrupted , The Autoimmune Epidemic , and The Last Best Cure , is that I focus on the intersection of neuroscience, immunology and emotion – while shining a spotlight on WOMEN’s experiences. Connecting these dots is always an underlying theme in my work. Women, girls, toxic stress, the female brain and immune system, autoimmune disease and chronic physical and mental illness — if you care about any of...
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FLYERS: Understanding ACEs & Parenting to Prevent & Heal ACEs
We are excited to share two flyers which can be downloaded, distributed, or used freely. One is brand new and the other is a revision. They are titled as follows (and attached below): Parenting to prevent and heal ACEs Understanding ACEs 1. Parenting to prevent and heal ACEs This brand new flyer us based on the work of Donna Jackson Nakazawa who worked with us and generously allowed us to paraphrase content from her book, Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology & How...
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For girls with moms in prison, growing up is hard to do [WashingtonPost.com]
I met Jane in 2013 at a women’s prison in Washington state. She was 6, and while other girls her age may have been camping in the woods with their Girl Scout troops, Jane was camping overnight at the prison where her mother was incarcerated. On the day we met, Jane was participating in Girls Scouts Beyond Bars, a program begun in Baltimore in 1992 as a pilot project between the Girl Scouts and the Institute of Justice. The idea was for girls to have formal visits with their incarcerated...
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For low-income children, relationship with parent key to health (scienceblog.com)
Educators, health care providers and researchers have known for some time that low socioeconomic status is connected to poor health, including in children, but a new study led by a San Francisco State University psychologist has shed light on what can be done to protect young people from negative outcomes. The keys? A more positive parent-child relationship as well as the child’s own ability to manage his or her response to stressful situations, according to research published last month in...
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Forgiveness?
I saw the funniest meme today by Sue Fitzmaurice. I don't know her writing but this made me laugh so hard that I will certainly be reading more about her. Forgiveness is tough. As I age I find myself feeling more and more forgiving - and much more often than I did when younger. When I was younger, it felt like forgiveness was a way of saying what was done (when it came to abuse) or not done (when it come to neglect) was o.k. It wasn't o.k. as in ideal or healthy or good for me. I didn't even...
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Foster Parents Have Become Professionals In Some States [witnessla.com]
Foster parents, tasked with the 24-7 care of often-traumatized children, show up for parent-teacher meetings, ferry their charges to doctor’s appointments, supervise homework and serve up cuddles. Many work closely with struggling biological parents in hopes of an eventual reunion. These days, many foster parents are being asked to do even more, as an increasing number of children enter the foster care system with serious behavioral and mental health issues — issues that require a deft hand...
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Girls From Low-Income Backgrounds Are Truanting Because They Can’t Afford Sanitary Products (www.buzzfeed.com) & Commentary
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,...
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Going beyond asking what happened: building beloved community
“Our goal is to create a beloved community and this will require a qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative change in our lives.”- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “beloved community is formed not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world.” –bell hooks One of the most notable descriptors of trauma-informed care is shifting the question of what is wrong...
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Grateful in a Grand Way
Children don’t come to live with their grandparents or relatives because everything is going great. The transition can be tough for the new family. As a grand“Parent” guardian of my grandson, I’ve written previously about the sad stuff, the tough stuff, and there’s a lot of it. It’s easy to get sucked into the negative, rehashing the entire past, the guilt, the anger, and projecting into an ugly future. Today is the last day of National Adoption Month. It is a month I celebrate, not as a...
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Great Basic Parenting Tips & Why I Have Such a Hard Time Sharing Them
At least once a week I struggle about what to share here. This is my most recent example. It's a series of tips on the U.S. Department of Education . These are great hand-outs with comprehensive information about child development that's not too long, abstract or hard to read. Here's the list (also attached below). I especially like the flyer for talking about feelings which has the tag line "Talking is teaching." And the short summary of milestones at different ages and stages from birth to...
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Greatest Mother’s Day Gift
Tomorrow is Mother’s Day. I have been given the greatest gift a mother could ask, my daughter- back. Last year a month before Mother’s Day I began a heart wrenching journey. My oldest daughter was in a serious car accident. She suffered a traumatic brain injury, broken neck, broken back, broken foot, but she was alive. She was a single mom. I became the guardian of my toddler grandson. I wasn’t prepared to become a mother in that way again. I was prepared to be a doting, spoiling...
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Growth through Trauma-Informed Strategies: Coaching and Consultation with Rick Griffin
There is a Chinese proverb that states, “If you want 1 year of prosperity, grow grain. If you want 10 years of prosperity, grow trees. If you want 100 years of prosperity, grow people." The benefits are evident, yet the real question becomes, “how do you grow people?” This Big Idea Session, CRI’s Trauma Coaching and Trauma Consultation Training, answers this question. Schools, organizations, and parents are discovering that the traditional “command and control” style of working with...
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Happy Halloween
Goblins and ghosts don’t scare me. What scares me is what scares many grandparents across the U.S., a grandchild at risk. Recently I was talking with a friend about my situation as guardian of my grandson, and she confided in me. She told me she’s scared every time her grandson goes back home with his mom. My friend “helps out” when her daughter finds herself in a tough spot. My friend worries there’s enough for her grandson to eat when he’s home with his mom. She worries he’s safe from the...
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Listening to Ebony Stewart's Voice: The Complexity of ACEs (www.youtube.com)
Ebony Stewart doing spoken word about her father and her mother and childhood from an adult perspective. Ebony Stewart doing spoken word about adverse childhood experiences and adverse community experiences as lived. Ebony Stewart speaking about speaking up and silence and using her voice and the experience of being threatened and silenced. Too often, when we talk about ACEs we aren't speaking in first person or about the complexity of real-life experiences. Often, we're speaking in general...
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Happy Mother's Day! Remembering The Greatest Generation of Moms...
“I waited.
And waited…
And then…I waited some more.”