October 2018

The highest proportion of juveniles since data collection began in 1997 are being held for status offenses or technical violations, according to the Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention . The Pew Charitable Trusts has created a data visualization that lets you search these statistics by state. The numbers come from a single day in 2015. They include all youth who were in juvenile residential facilities, such as group...

As the federal government increases immigrant detention and attempts to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, many California colleges are finding new ways to help undocumented students succeed and get assistance to their families as well. The latest effort is the California Campus Catalyst Fund , established by a group of educators, funders and advocates, and administered by the nonprofit organization Immigrants Rising, which announced last week that it has awarded...

Failure to Launch describes young adults who are struggling with the transition to adulthood. They have an inability to leave home and support themselves. This trend is reaching epidemic proportions. For example, a recent study cited in Psychology Today reported that 45 percent of young adults in the state of New Jersey between the ages 18 and 34 still live with their parents—even though they are employed. While some of this trend can be attributed to economic factors (i.e., costly housing),...

Ten minutes of mild, almost languorous exercise can immediately alter how certain parts of the brain communicate and coordinate with one another and improve memory function, according to an encouraging new neurological study. The findings suggest that exercise does not need to be prolonged or intense to benefit the brain and that the effects can begin far more quickly than many of us might expect. We already know that exercise can change our brains and minds. The evidence is extensive and...

The good news is that deaths from drug overdoses in America have been falling slightly for the past six months, granting a reprieve from what seemed like an opioid epidemic with no end in sight. The bad news is that no one knows why, or if this trend will continue. Preliminary figures reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week show that compared with the 12 months ending September 2017, opioid deaths are down 2.8 percent in the 12 months that ended March 2018,...

"Never ran, never will!" is the gangster-bravado motto that people use to explain Brownsville, Brooklyn, with its blocks and blocks of low-income housing projects. Even the grungiest hipster artisans, who've pretty much invaded Brooklyn in recent years, still stay away from Brownsville. Growing up there in the crack era of the 1980s, Joseph Wilson was surrounded by crack dealers and addicts. His mother was an addict, so his grandmother wound up raising him—and teaching him to love music. She...

There’s a lot that’s indisputable about childhood trauma. Emotional or physical abuse early in life impacts health outcomes as children grow up. Community- and family-based approaches to dealing with trauma are better than institutional settings. And children of color are more likely to face traumatizing childhood experiences. Those events can include something as common as divorce, but also encompass circumstances such as having an incarcerated parent, living with someone with a substance...

Adults in their 40s and 50s with higher levels of cortisol -- a hormone linked to stress -- performed worse on memory and other cognitive tasks than peers of the same age with average cortisol levels, research found. Higher cortisol in the blood also was associated with smaller brain volumes, according to the study, published Oct. 24 in Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. "In our quest to understand cognitive aging, one of the factors attracting significant...

All youth require the support and acceptance of their family, peers, and communities to thrive. Transgender and gender-nonconforming youth are no exception; their health and well-being is heavily influenced by the institutions and communities that surround them. Although youth who identify as a gender other than the one assigned to them at birth have among the highest rates of suicide, depression, and self-harm , a supportive and safe environment can significantly reduce these risk s.

The plague of mass incarceration in the United States has captured national attention, with substantial bipartisan support to resolve this crisis. Even as we recognize the problem, however, it is important to think critically about proposed alternatives. There is a growing consensus among developmental researchers and juvenile justice decision-makers that incarceration is particularly damaging to youth. Thankfully many jurisdictions are moving away from their historic reliance on secure,...

Anxiety is normal and healthy. When we’re presented with something dangerous in the world, our anxiety response protects us from danger. It makes us hyperaware and primed for action — the “fight or flight” response. Anxiety disorders arise when we develop out-of-proportion anxiety responses to things most of us cope with easily and that happen every day. The core symptoms of anxiety are worry, difficulty tolerating uncertainty, an overactive response to perceived threats (including freezing)...