September 2017

Below, please find excerpts from the fabulous Fathers & ACEs chat we had a few weeks ago. Resources and healing approaches mentioned during the chat are listed as well. For the complete transcript , go here and for more about the featured guests, go here. We will have more for/by fathers in Parenting with ACEs going forward. ACEs as Assessment Discussion Parenting Forgiveness Resources Mentioned Organization: Guardians of the Children Canada TedTalk: Nadine Burke Harris, How Childhood...

Psychological distress can take a toll on more than just health. It can also significantly damage nest eggs, according to a new study by a Cornell financial economist and her co-author. Mental health problems can have a large negative effect on retirement savings, the study found. Three factors make the research even more meaningful, the authors say: People increasingly are living longer, dealing with more psychological distress, and shouldering the burden of saving for retirement without...

As urban areas across the nation experience renewal and transformation, Camden, N.J., is at the beginning of its renaissance. The city — once known as America’s most dangerous — has been experiencing dramatic decreases in gun crime and violence, namely an 80 percent reduction in homicides during the first three months of 2017. That’s good news for Camden, which has also become a testing ground for tech nonprofits that want to help beleaguered youth find their way out of neighborhoods riddled...

You yearn to be productive, to blast through your to-do list every single day. You experiment with all sorts of hacks to attain the ultimate efficiency. If you have kids, you take advantage of their nap time, folding, preparing, putting things back, emailing, writing, working, running. There’s so much running. No wonder you often end your day feeling out of breath (and out of it). You yearn to have a tidy house, where every item has a home, and there aren’t piles of unpaid bills on the...

Early in the 2016-17 school year, DeMarcus*—a fifth-grader in Montgomery, Alabama—had his first encounter with bullying. His grandmother, Erma Freeman, knew DeMarcus as a strong-willed kid and initially did not worry much about the incident. She told DeMarcus to either brush it off or to stand up to the bullies. But within a matter of weeks, Freeman found herself bribing DeMarcus to go to school, scheduling counseling appointments for him and making frequent trips to the school and the...

Excerpts from an article by Hillary Savoie . After a totally uneventful pregnancy, Oscar was born with a rare genetic mutation neither Smith nor her husband carry. He spent the first two months of his life in the NICU due to uncontrolled epilepsy and feeding difficulties before testing revealed his genetic mutation and doctors found medication to manage his seizures. When Oscar was discharged at 2-and-a-half months old, Smith, 33, suddenly found herself staring down life as a millennial...

Note: I usually despise parenting advice and how-to-anything for parents. Often, it's "tap the brakes" advice as though all parents have double digit stress they need to dial back a bit to be more effective. As though tapping the brakes when going 25 m.p.h. is anything like tapping the brakes when going 100 m.p.h. When it's not. Many parents have stress that started at 100 m.p.h. in childhood and arrived to parenting having gone through life at high speeds, and not by choice. So, parenting...

Cissy's note: B eautiful essay written by Regan Long and published in the Huffington Post . It was written in 2016 but is new to me. I saw it on my mother's Facebook page this morning. Change and growth happen at all ages and stages, for all of us! Today my patience has run thin and all I could think about was having a few minutes to myself, but as you fell fast asleep on my chest, it was an easy choice despite a list of things needing to be done. Because instead ... I held you. I was going...

I believe in self-care, truly I do, but (you know what they say about "but," ignore everything before it) it's like offering a candy bar to someone suffering from malnourishment. It will taste great and give a momentary pause to the pangs that rumble nonstop, but it will do nothing to correct the underlying void. A malnourished person needs not a treat, not a single meal, but access to long-term sustenance. What is needed, truly needed, by parents, especially the primary parent of complex...

Cissy's note: Jezebel is working with Rise on a series sharing stories such as this one!!! There are already 100's of comments on this one piece. The tragic death of Zymere Perkins, a child who died at the hands of abusive parents even though the city's child welfare agency had repeatedly investigated his family, made headlines in New York City publications for months this past fall. In their coverage, many outlets focused on a familiar narrative of monstrous parents and failing caseworkers,...

Vincent “Vinnie” Pompei is director of the Youth Well-Being Project of the Human Rights Campaign, a national civil rights organization, and the chair of Time to Thrive, an annual national conference about LGBT student inclusion. He spent more than 10 years as a middle school teacher and high school counselor in the Paramount and Val Verde unified school districts in Southern California. Pompei is also a past president of the California Association of School Counselors. On Oct. 5 at the...

Congratulations to ACN Member Tiffany Sudela-Junker of Port Angeles in receiving one of the 2017 Angels in Adoption awards honoring individuals whose work in adoption or foster care has made a national impact. From the subject line, the email appeared to be soliciting donations. Then, Tiffany Sudela-Junker of Port Angeles received another with the same heading and thought, “I should probably open this.” One click revealed a message from the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute in...