With apologies to Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential slogan, “The economy, stupid!”, the CARE model developed at Cornell University can be summarized: “It’s the adults, stupid!”

The CARE model recognizes that troubled kids have histories of adverse childhood experiences, such as verbal abuse, living with an alcoholic or mentally ill parent, being homeless, etc. The approach shows that when adults change how they work with kids who are having troubles, to meet kids where they are, the kids do better. From The Beat, a great blog on the National Clearinghouse on Families and Youth site, here’s part of a transcript from a four-minute podcast with Bill Martin, executive director of the Waterford Country School, a Connecticut youth shelter, which began using the model three years ago:

And I think that when we brought this in, it just became … it caused us all to look at what we’ve been doing for the last ten or fifteen or twenty years and wonder if that was in the best interest of kids. And it did give permission to do some things that you weren’t really sure was okay historically….

It gave permission to excuse expectations sometimes. You get crazy around rule enforcement in group care. And that this was talking about kids that might not be able to meet the expectations, either in the moment or in general and teaching us to be able to amend those expectations to help the kids be successful, as opposed to kind of sanctioning them for not meeting their expectations.

It also really puts the responsibility for the change much more on the adult than some of the previous thinking had been, is that basically the program model is designed in the fact that kids will do well if they can. And if they’re not doing well, something has derailed them. And it’s really incumbent on us to find out what that is and meet the underlying needs. So that the kids can get back on track for more spontaneous development.

HBO’s CHILD SEX ABUSE DOCUMENTARY, Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God, premiers Monday, Feb. 4. The synopsis:

…..investigates the secret crimes of Father Lawrence Murphy, a charismatic Milwaukee priest who abused more than 200 Deaf children

in a school under his control. The film documents the first known public protest against clerical sex abuse in the U.S., which led to a case that spanned three decades and ultimately resulted in a lawsuit against the pontiff himself. The investigation helped uncover documents from the secret Vatican archives that show the Pope, who must operate within the mysterious rules of the Roman Curia, as both responsible and helpless in the face of evil.

The documentary is timely, given the news that Cardinal Roger Mahoney, former Archbishop of Los Angeles, was stripped of all his public and administrative duties yesterday for concealing priests’ sexual assaults on children. Mahoney’s No. 1 aide during the 1980s, when he moved accused priests out of state to avoid prosecution, was Thomas J. Curry. Curry resigned from his post as a regional bishop in Santa Barbara.

PHILADELPHIA RECEIVES $1.6 MILLION FOR TRAUMA-INFORMED CARE, according to this short news item on Newsworks.org. The article quoted Dr. Arthur Evans, director of the city’s Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual Disability:

“It allows us to better screen and identify children and youth,” said Evans. “It allows us to intervene early, and in cases where children have had a longer trauma history to intervene with evidence-based treatments, and it really helps us to collaborate with a range of child-serving agencies.”