child trauma

Consider this scenario, likely to repeat itself across the country. In a month or two or more from now, my client will appear before a juvenile court judge for the first time since the coronavirus crisis forced courts to close their doors.

“Your father is as worthless as your mother.” Those words – said by a caseworker to a 13-year-old child whose parents were addicted to heroin – jumped out at me as I read the case file.

The last calendar year of the ‘10s has come and gone, and the fields of child welfare and juvenile justice move on to a new decade. For the past two weeks, The Imprint has counted down some of our top storylines from 2019.

California advocates and policymakers are guardedly hopeful that the new governor will walk the walk when it comes to responding to child trauma and mental health challenges for children in the state.

In the late 1990s, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Kaiser Permanente published a landmark study showing that adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) can have a long-lasting negative impact on a person’s overall health and well-being as they enter adulthood.

Soon after being appointed California’s first-ever surgeon general, Nadine Burke Harris took off on a barnstorming tour across the state to talk about adverse childhood experiences and toxic stress, an issue she calls “the biggest public health crisis facing California today.”

People talk a lot about how important it is that every foster kid grows up in a loving home. While well intentioned, most of them are approaching that idea from an abstract understanding.