As a college student, Rob Bonta had a summer job working as a counselor for troubled kids.
Now, two decades later he is bringing legislation to address some of the needs he saw then.
“I worked with some of these kids as a counselor out of college, and I’d walk them home and hear some of these stories,” Assembly member Bonta (D-Oakland) said. “Shootings they heard. Or shootings they witnessed the night before.”
It was the summer of his junior year at Yale, when he worked in the Leadership Education and Athletics Partnership program in Connecticut. That took him to a side of idyllic New Haven most people don’t see — the economically depressed inner city. He said kids there endured trauma sometimes on a daily basis.
Those traumatic events add up in children’s lives, Bonta said, and have been shown to result in higher risk of chronic health conditions and risky health behaviors later in life.
The medical community uses a scale of ACE indicators — for adverse childhood experiences — to measure that higher risk category. People with four or more childhood traumas, such as physical abuse or having a family member with a drinking problem, have a much higher prevalence later in life for a host of health issues — chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, asthma, kidney disease, stroke, depression, dementia and other maladies.
To continue reading this article by David Gorn, go to: http://californiahealthline.or...f-trauma-indicators/
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