How Much Do You Know About Toxic Stress? What Is Stress? People normally experience stress. Usually they tolerate it, have the coping skills to endure it, and adapt. Usually, no damage results from normal, short-term stress when people have support and coping skills, and some stress can be a good thing. According to researchers and the University of California, Berkeley, the body’s stress response sometimes pushes us to be more alert, perform our best physically and mentally, and adapt...

By Rachel Kidman, Rachel Margolis, Emily Smith-Greenway, et al., JAMA Pediatrics, April 5, 2021 T he scale of COVID-19 mortality in the United States, including among prime-age adults, merits efforts to continuously track how many children are affected by parental death. Children who lose a parent are at elevated risk of traumatic grief, depression, poor educational outcomes, and unintentional death or suicide, and these consequences can persist into adulthood. 1 Sudden parental death, such...

FREE! REGISTER NOW Take a Guided Tour of Our New 🔧 Toolbox for Whole-Child Design Educators across the nation are navigating the return to in-person instruction and making a commitment to rebuild in new ways. Teachers, staff, leaders, parents, and caregivers are asking important questions: What will it take to address the unevenness of learning opportunities, which has only been exacerbated over the past year? How can we use this moment to redesign schools for equity? In this webinar ,...

Today we are bombarded with messages telling us that dieting, and exercise, are good for us and will make us live longer. While there is no denying that this is true when done in moderation to improve health, what happens when something goes wrong and the drive to be healthy becomes something else altogether?

Hi folks, April is National Child Abuse, Sexual Assault Awareness and Childhood Sexual Abuse Prevention Month. This is a song of mine I wrote many years ago to all the survivors of childhood abuse-past and present. You deserve healing and support. Take care, Michael. "Brush Away Your Tears" - YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SpYYc6tl4s&t=4s The song was also used in the film documentary - Boys & Men Healing Healing From Child Sexual Abuse -...

One secret to achieving more: Finding time to do nothing. In our efforts to squeeze every second from the day, it seems counterintuitive to watch a pot of coffee boil or gaze out the window. But your brain uses those free periods for important cleanup work, neuroscience research indicates. And during the pandemic, as the boundaries between work and home have blurred , it has become harder to create mental breaks. Even brief timeouts help the brain reinforce long-term learning and...

By Dana Goldstein, The New York Times, April 8, 2021 Over the past year, Deprece Bonilla, a mother of five in Oakland, Calif., has gotten creative about helping her children thrive in a world largely mediated by screens. She signed them up for online phonics tutoring and virtual martial arts lessons. If they are distracted inside the family’s duplex, she grabs snacks and goes with the children into the car, saying they cannot come out until their homework is done. She has sometimes spent...