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Ryan McDaniel’s first experience in Big Brothers Big Sisters was with an 11-year-old boy from south Dallas named Sherman. “He was poor. His father was incarcerated. His mother was in and out of different issues relative to drugs,” McDaniel said. “He couldn’t read, and he was getting pushed through the public school system down there. On top of that, he had been shot, supposedly on accident, when he was 4 years old.” On their first outing, McDaniel took Sherman bowling. Sherman bowled one...

The kids at Plaza Towers Elementary School in Moore changed Kristin Atchley as an education professional. Tragedy there changed her as a person. Today, Atchley uses what she learned and lived through to teach others about the impact of chronic stressors on growing kids and how trauma rewires our brains. “I had a fully-developed brain as a 30-year-old. I knew I could get help and get through. Kids don’t always understand that,” she said. Atchley didn’t have the personal or professional...

WASHINGTON (CN) – During its first-ever hearing on the subject, the House Oversight Committee met Thursday with experts and survivors of childhood trauma, a day after an immigrant mother gave emotional testimony about the death of her baby daughter following their stay at a detention center. Thursday’s hearing comes on the heels of testimony delivered by Yazmin Juarez, the mother of a 19-month-old girl who died after 20 days in detention at a facility in Texas. Her story detailed the...

It was Christmas Eve, and 13-year-old Tara Peterson had a house full of uncles and aunts and cousins. The adults started drinking, and once they started, they usually didn’t stop until they were falling down drunk. “It was normal behavior,” Peterson remembers. “It’s just what people did.” Feeling grown up, she joined them. And that’s how her drinking problem began. Not sneaking around and hiding it but right in front of her closest relatives. With them. Marijuana came next, then harder...

BETHANY (June 2019) – School security has a new face in Bethany – a full-time school resource officer the kids affectionately call Officer Z. Zack Zamudio left his beat with the Bethany Police Department to walk the halls of Bethany Public Schools at the beginning of the last school year as part of several new measures designed to increase safety at the school. “We’re not policing the school; we’re securing the school,” Zamudio said. “Shutting off the police mode and switching to security...

Patients would carry soda into Dr. Gerard Clancy’s office, with cigarettes tucked away for after therapy. Often victims of abuse or violent crime, they would seek soothing but risky behaviors to cope. Overweight. Chronic pain. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Type II diabetes. His former patients will die younger than they should, he said. Clancy conducted therapy sessions until he became president of the University of Tulsa in 2016. At his psychiatry clinic, he saw firsthand how a...

T he science is well established and should come as no surprise: children who suffer rough childhoods have a greater likelihood of being adversely affected later in life. Studies have shown that children who incur adverse experiences are more likely to develop mental health issues, suffer chronic health problems and/or take part in risky behaviors such as smoking or drug abuse. Oklahoma children are not immune from this phenomena. In fact we are No. 1, according to various nationwide...

In Oklahoma, we call it the Family Positive Workplace but the basics and premise are the same. Employers who implement even a few of these practices are contributing to reducing the stress on and improving the work - family life balance of their employees. In 2018, the Potts Family Foundation introduced the Oklahoma Certified Family Positive Workplace initiative and recognized 12 businesses across the state with the Certification. This year we will recognize 32 more businesses. The...

Most parents would never look at their child and say, ‘I can’t wait to mess you up.’ Instead, it’s often ‘I want better for you than I ever had,’ said Ardmore Behavioral Health Collaborative Director Ashely Godwin. However, within the last couple of years, Oklahoma has ranked in the bottom 10 states in the nation for child well-being and has been among the states with the highest recorded juvenile drug-related arrests. A report conducted by Greenhouse Treatment, a rehabilitation facility,...

By Jenny Anderson, Quartz, June 22, 2019. For nearly 30 years, Javier Aceves worked as a pediatrician in Albuquerque, New Mexico, focusing primarily on disadvantaged families. His approach was holistic: along with treating children, he did outreach with teens, and helped children’s parents with everything from addiction to learning how to be a supportive caregiver. For all the programs he helped develop, the patterns he kept seeing haunted him. He could treat young kids’ medical problems,...

Superintendent Sean McDaniel on Friday announced a plan to dedicate $600,000 toward additional administrative, leadership and mental health staff for Oklahoma City Public Schools. McDaniel said the reorganization plan included three more administrative positions and an unspecified number of new leadership directors, school counselors and nurses. “As I spent this year listening and learning about the many challenges faced by our students, families and staff, it was apparent that there were a...

We are born to connect. As human beings we are relational and we need biological, emotional and psychological connection with others . Attachment is the relational dance that parents and babies share together. You can think of this when you see a baby look at their parent and they catch each other’s eyes in a wonderful gaze: the parent smiles and the baby smiles and then the parent kisses and the baby coos. Or, when an infant cries to tell their parent they are hungry, and the parent picks...