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One of my children is spinning in a circle, creating a narrative about a princess as she twirls. The other is building a rocket ship out of a discarded box, attaching propellers made of cardboard and jumping in and out of her makeshift launcher. It is a snow day, and I’ve decided to let them design their own activities as I clean up and prepare a meal. My toddler becomes the spinning princess, imagining her character’s feelings and reactions. What seems like a simple story involves...

Protests focused on entrenched racism rocked campuses around the country this year. Many top colleges enroll small numbers of black students, and the four-year college graduation rate for black students is half that of whites. In response, many admissions officers have been scouring the country—and the globe—to attract “qualified” black and brown students, striving to meet diversity targets while avoiding students they consider “at risk” of dropping out. But a growing group of colleges and...

A national poll commissioned by the Youth First Initiative and conducted by GBA Strategies in January 2016 shows that a majority of Americans, especially young people, believe that youth prisons should be closed and replaced with rehabilitation and prevention programs. The poll, which also shows support for reform across the political spectrum, was conducted January 19-24, 2016 among 1000 adults in 50 states. You can review the poll memo here . The poll results show: The vast majority of...

Antidepressants don’t work for everyone, and having a history of abuse during childhood may signal a low likelihood that the drugs will improve an adult’s symptoms of major depression, a recent study suggests. While there are few reliable predictors of which people will respond to specific antidepressants, lots of previous research links a history of trauma early in life with how well people tend to do on these drugs, researchers note in the journal Translational Psychiatry. "The presence of...

The first part of Tennessee Jane Watson's audio story, Silent Evidence, was posted today. From her website, SilentEvidenceProject.com : Sometimes silence protects us. Sometimes silence does us harm. The story of one young woman as she faces her abuser, the criminal justice system and most of all, herself. Three other episodes will be available via podcast, one a week for the next three weeks. It's worth a listen.

From the CDC’s Injury Prevention & Control, Division of Violence Prevention: "Safe, stable, nurturing relationships and environments are essential to prevent child abuse and neglect and to assure all children reach their full potential. The Essentials for Childhood Framework proposes strategies communities can consider to promote relationships and environments that help children grow up to be healthy and productive citizens so that they, in turn, can build stronger and safer families and...

Anyone who still needs motivation to move more may find it in a new study showing that, in addition to its other health benefits, exercise appears to substantially reduce the risk of developing 13 different varieties of cancer. That is far more types than scientists previously thought might be impacted by exercise. The comprehensive study also suggests that the potential cancer-fighting benefits of exercise seem to hold true even if someone is overweight. The idea that exercise might change...

When it comes to sexual assault of students, some say private secondary schools are still being a little too private about how they handle misconduct. A recent Boston Globe investigation found hundreds of students were allegedly abused by teachers and staff at scores of New England prep schools since the 1950s. Many of the perpetrators were quietly let go, and then moved on to re-offend at other schools. To many who've been through private boarding schools, the stories of sexual abuse comes...

Single mothers, untenured professors, young reporters and on-call doctors might have a thin silver lining for their hurried days and response for the people who insist on slowing down: All that hustling may translate into superior brain power as you get older, as a study finds that the busiest people perform best on cognitive tests. Sara Festini, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas, Dallas, and her adviser, Denise Park, published the study in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience...

One of the biggest public health discoveries of all time has led us to understand the impact that early childhood experiences have on lifelong health. This research is called the Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACE, study, and it confirms with certainty that our experiences as children have a profound impact on our physical, mental and social health. In the 1990s, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention partnered with the Kaiser Permanente Health System to look at health data...

A consensus is building around the need to seriously rethink the role of the prosecutor in the administration of justice. Power dynamics are unbalanced, sentencing guidelines are outdated, and old-fashioned human biases persist. And prosecutors—singularly independent agents in a justice system roiling in turmoil —have been facing growing criticism and public distrust for some time, and that disapproval is about to hit a tipping point. It’s time to curtail the power long held by these...

Sixty-two years ago Tuesday, the Supreme Court passed down its decision in Brown v. Board of Education, finding that “segregation is a denial of the equal protection of the laws.” That decision, pertaining to de jure segregation in public schools, became the groundwork for dismantling many of the formal systems of racial segregation that pervaded both the South and the North in the century following the Civil War. Brown v. Board was a key milestone in the civil-rights movement, and a key...