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From Alliance for Strong Families and Communities, March 2021 This brief offers guidance on positioning and explaining the issue of childhood adversity, as well as the need for promoting upstream approaches. The guidance has implications for a wide variety of communications goals and contexts, but it is most relevant for efforts designed to educate the public about strategies that work at the community and policy levels. These framing recommendations were developed for advocates,...

When I power up the Zoom room for my bi-weekly school nurse support groups, I am never sure who will join me and what we will discuss. The conversations are confidential, no names or school districts are collected. We come together to decompress from the impact of COVID. Through the months and months of conversations, I have learned that our colleagues, me included, are experiencing moments of extremes. One school nurse shared that she can feel simultaneously empowered and disempowered. That...

Head Start and Early Head Start continue to lead the way in promoting school readiness and family engagement for vulnerable young children. It’s no surprise, then, that Head Start is increasingly focused on implementing trauma-informed care (TIC). A recent study adds timely relevance to the advancement of trauma-informed care in Head Start preschool settings. The study, published in School Mental Health , “examines the relationship between trauma-informed training content, trauma-informed...

We have some very exciting news! As of today, ACEs Connection is now PACEs Connection. PACEs stands for Positive and Adverse Childhood Experiences.

In this webinar from Miss Kendra Programs, we will discuss the research on stress hormones and the immune response, and what to expect from our students and ourselves as the pressure from the pandemic is released.

Widespread reporting has revealed that the COVID-19 pandemic has devastated many poor communities of color. Less widely known is how the pandemic has affected young people in those communities. “COVID-19 has had a particularly harsh impact on youth of color,” further traumatizing [juvenile-justice] system-impacted youth and their families already struggling with disproportionately high rates of disease, death, job loss and housing insecurity,” said Jim Keddy of Youth Forward . Keddy was...

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), such as child abuse and neglect, can lead to negative psychological, social and physical outcomes later in life – and can even affect future generations. New and exacerbated stressors during the pandemic underscore concern for the risks and long-term health effects of ACEs, particularly for groups already disproportionately affected by COVID-19. Certain interventions can help mitigate negative outcomes from ACEs and prevent them from occurring in the...

Please join us for an interactive, virtual session to learn about the Five Protective Factors Framework and how to leverage a healing approach in the context of screening for Adverse Childhood Events (ACEs). REGISTER TODAY! *CME Credit Available SUMMARY This session will build the capacity of providers serving families with young children (physicians, behavioral health clinicians, social workers, case managers) to approach family interactions with a protective factors framework. As...

By Margarita Alegría, STAT, February 9, 2021 Gonzales is a small city in central California populated mostly by Latino immigrant families and farmworkers. Like other places, it has felt the weight of the coronavirus pandemic. When Covid-19 hit, the city’s youth council conducted an online mental health survey of middle and high schoolers. The students received an overwhelming response that revealed high levels of anxiety symptoms and stress among their peers. The findings were a wake-up call...

By Lindsay Braman, February 15, 2021 By now, most counselors, pediatricians, teachers, and other people who work with children know about ACES: The “Adverse Childhood Experiences” scale. ACE’s predict , based on measuring the number of traumatic or adverse events experienced, which kids are likely to struggle developmentally and emotionally as they mature. (You can take the ACES quiz here ). New results from a survey based on a study of 6188 adults at Johns Hopkins shows that there are 7...

By Taylor Walker, WitnessLA, February 22, 2021 On Tuesday, June 4, 2019, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted in favor of legislation to shutter the local juvenile hall by December 2021. The ordinance, which SF supes authored in partnership with the Young Women’s Freedom Center (YWFC), made SF the first major urban jurisdiction to choose to abolish juvenile incarceration. The city-county’s lone 150-bed youth lockup is already so close to empty — on August 15, 2020, there were 13...

By Kristen Taketa, The San Diego Union-Tribune, February 7, 2021 Pediatricians across San Diego County say they are deeply troubled by what they see school closures doing to children. Dr. Janet Crow, a pediatrician at UC San Diego, talks every day with middle and high school kids who are heading toward depression or are flat-out depressed, she said. One of her high school patients can’t bring himself to do Zoom school, she said. His mom isn’t there to help him because she is an essential...