April 2018

In last week’s cover story for the magazine, Linda Villarosa wrote masterfully about how the intertwined crisis of black infant and maternal mortality is related not to the genetics of race but to the lived experience of being a black woman in this country. We asked readers to share their stories of struggling to receive proper prenatal and postnatal care, and hundreds of people responded. Below is a selection of some of the stories. ‘We Often Feel Lonely on This Birth Path’ As soon as I...

Thank you to ACEs Connection member @Emily Read Daniels for sharing this essay written by Chris Prange-Morgan . It's a great read even if you are not a parent, have never adopted, or worked with families formed through adoption who deal with the complications of trauma and loss. I love this piece for so many reasons. I t's beautiful and heart-opening personal memoir. It's honest about parenting, still a rare thing. It speaks about the difference between studying trauma and living...

Children learn more from what you do than what you say, so your resilience - the way they watch you approach adversity - affects theirs. Explore these mindful strategies for building awareness around challenging experiences. Resilience relies on how we perceive our lives. So maybe we get queasy watching our child on stage for the first time; anxious and concerned, we start ruminating. Within those thoughts exist layers of assumptions, perspectives, and mental filters— I didn’t prepare her...

When was the last time you beat yourself up for a parenting failure? Perhaps your daughter got a D+ on the math test—and you regret some harsh words. Maybe you’re telling yourself that you bungled advice to your fifth-grader about how to handle an annoying classmate. You couldn’t keep your promise to attend your son’s music recital—and there’s a voice in your head telling you that you’re a terrible parent. But there’s an alternative to that harsh self-talk: self-compassion. According to...

This is Part Two of my Female Adversity: The Female Body and Brain on Toxic Stress series. (CRUCIAL NOTE HERE BEFORE YOU READ: Boys’ immune systems become dysregulated in response to #toxicstress too, and that leads to disease and changes to the brain that we also need to talk about more openly AND compassionately. Today I’m focusing on girls’ unique immune response to #toxicstress.) So, exactly what happens in a girl’s body, in response to #toxicstress, that leads girls to be more likely to...

Researchers worked with a public school in New Orleans to add mindfulness and yoga to the school's existing empathy-based programming for students needing supplementary support. Third graders who were screened for symptoms of anxiety at the beginning of the school year were randomly assigned to two groups. A control group of 32 students received care as usual, which included counseling and other activities led by a school social worker. The intervention group of 20 students participated in...

Excerpt from the New York Times Magazine. Full article here . "The reasons for the black-white divide in both infant and maternal mortality have been debated by researchers and doctors for more than two decades. But recently there has been growing acceptance of what has largely been, for the medical establishment, a shocking idea: For black women in America, an inescapable atmosphere of societal and systemic racism can create a kind of toxic physiological stress, resulting in conditions —...

This blog is about WHY Adverse Childhood Experiences are a #METOO ISSUE. I want to talk about how and why toxic childhood stress – also as #ACEs — is a #metoo issue of the greatest magnitude. For girls and for the adult women they become. One thing readers know about the work I do and the books I write, including Childhood Disrupted , The Autoimmune Epidemic , and The Last Best Cure , is that I focus on the intersection of neuroscience, immunology and emotion – while shining a spotlight on...

One thing readers know about the work I do and the books I write, including Childhood Disrupted , The Autoimmune Epidemic , and The Last Best Cure , is that I focus on the intersection of neuroscience, immunology and emotion – while shining a spotlight on WOMEN’s experiences. Connecting these dots is always an underlying theme in my work. Women, girls, toxic stress, the female brain and immune system, autoimmune disease and chronic physical and mental illness — if you care about any of...

Growing up in today's world is NOT easy. I have heard hundreds of students tell me this. Despite this fact, many of them have also told me that many of the adults in their lives don't seem to understand this, including parents, teachers, and society. Adults who are disconnected from the reality of the lives of the youth that they are around will not be able to completely understand how to provide the support that might be needed for those youth needing it most. I recently met a young woman...

Writing in the journal Neurobiology of Aging, a research team, led by senior author William S. Kremen, PhD, professor of psychiatry and co-director of the Center for Behavior Genetics of Aging at UC San Diego School of Medicine, found that major adverse events in life, such as divorce, separation, miscarriage or death of a family member or friend, can measurably accelerate aging in the brains of older men, even when controlling for such factors as cardiovascular risk, alcohol consumption,...

Last week I returned to Amherst. It’s been years since I was there, the time we met. I was hoping that you’d show up again; I even looked for you, but you didn’t appear. I remember you proudly repped N.Y.C. during the few minutes we spoke, so I suspect you’d moved back or maybe you were busy or you didn’t know I was in town. I have a distinct memory of you in the signing line, saying nothing to anyone, intense. I assumed you were going to ask me to read a manuscript or help you find an...