March 2018

As pediatricians, we see the toll of too many firearms: children who are killed and injured, children who are exposed to violence, and children who live in fear, every day, of being shot. We say enough. It’s not just the shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Sandy Hook Elementary School, or any number of mass school shootings in recent years. It’s also shootings that happen in and outside the home, whether murder, suicide, or unintentional. Every year over two thousand children...

Access to financial services in the United States, like most everything else in this country, is highly unequal. According to a 2015 survey by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, approximately 7 percent of American households are unbanked (meaning they have no checking or savings account), and an additional 19.9 percent are "underbanked." The percentages are higher—approximately 50 percent—among both low-income and minority households. While some of this is driven by consumer...

We know that, statistically speaking, kids who spend time in Los Angeles County’s foster care system — or any foster care system, for that matter — have worse outcomes when they reach adulthood than youth who’ve never wound up in the child dependency system at all. Over the past few years, new California state laws that are sensitive to this problem, along with community-based programs and dedicated child advocates, have helped to ameliorate those bad stats to some degree. Yet there is...

Given the extent to which fear and resentment of other races is driving our politics , it’s an excellent time to revisit a key question: Are such attitudes inherent, or learned? A 2017 study from China suggested the former, finding infants as young as nine months show preferences for people with skin tones that resemble their own. A new, much larger study offers more hope for humanity. It reports that American five- and six-year-olds largely reject the belief that an individual’s personality...

At the age of 50, the federal law that seeks to protect older American workers from age bias has been enfeebled by court decisions that have widened loopholes for employers and narrowed the ways employees can seek redress. When Congress enacted the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) in 1967, the law was treated as something of an addendum to the Civil Rights Act, which had been passed three years earlier and banned bias on the basis of race, gender, religion and, later on, sexual...

Carlos Flores was 17 when he and three accomplices tried to rob a bar in Queens, N.Y., in 1981. An off-duty police officer named Robert Walsh intervened, and he was shot and killed. Mr. Flores was convicted of second-degree murder, a conviction that carried a maximum sentence of 25 years to life in prison. But because he was not the shooter, the judge gave him 21 years to life. Mr. Flores is now 54. He has served 37 years behind bars. The last time he got written up for a disciplinary...

Hundreds of thousands of people rallied in Washington, D.C. on Saturday to express outrage at recent mass shootings in American schools, and to push Congress to enact stricter gun laws. But for many students in the U.S.—and especially students of color—gun violence at school isn’t the only problem. Rather, it’s the violence they face regularly in their homes and yards, in their neighborhoods and communities. There hasn’t yet been a worldwide march focused on that kind of violence—so they...

Nearly a sixth of LGBTQ adults have experienced discrimination at the doctor’s office or in another health care setting, while a fifth say they have avoided seeking medical care out of fear of discrimination, according to a recent poll. That combination, in a population that commonly experiences discrimination and even violence in their day-to-day lives, can lead to a cascade of health ills, experts say. People who experience discrimination, for example, have been shown to have an increased...

When educators learn about the devastating impact of ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences), childhood trauma, and toxic stress on a child’s developing body, brain, and behavior, they often remark, “Well...what do I do now?” The Regulated Classroom answers that question. In this three-day intensive camp experience, educators will deepen self-awareness and capacity for self-regulation through a new approach to trauma-informed teaching. The Regulated Classroom: Bottom-Up Trauma-Informed Teaching...

2018 Funding Opportunity Release Date: March 7, 2018 | Application Deadline: April 11, 2018, 3:00 p.m. ET Purpose The Integrative Action for Resilience initiative is a two-phase opportunity for local community leaders—who are interested in designing and implementing rigorous resilience research to generate evidence that can inform their own decision-making about policies and projects needed to build resilience in their community, and for researchers—who are interested in partnering in new...

I'm done! I've just finished a seven-year trek to publish my book, first in paperback, and now as a Kindle eBook. Go to my Kindle link for a free sample which Amazon has selected to show the whole public in Kindle: "Don't Try This Alone: The Silent Epidemic of Attachment Disorder" - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07BN2J4TN With both published, the saga of discovering how sick with attachment disorder I was, digging deeper and deeper into it -- then climbing back to be healed from the inside out...

Is loneliness our modern malaise? Former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy says the most common pathology he saw during his years of service “was not heart disease or diabetes; it was loneliness.” Chronic loneliness, some say, is like “smoking 15 cigarettes a day.” It “kills more people than obesity.” [For more on this story by Amelia S. Worsley, go to http://www.yesmagazine.org/happiness/what-everyone-gets-wrong-about-lonely-people-20180322 ]