Since August 2016, more than 300 three-year-olds who visit Kaiser Permanente’s pediatric clinics in Hayward and San Leandro have been screened for adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), such as living with a family member who is an alcoholic or losing a parent to separation or divorce. But when the idea to screen toddlers and their families for ACEs was first broached at the Kaiser Permanente Hayward Medical Center, the staff were, in a word, “angsty,” says Dr. Paul Espinas, who led the effort.
Category Archives: Community prevention programs
Giving “Zorgos Awards” to prevent bullying and ACEs
Local leaders were honored for using the power of “Zorgos.” Photo credit: Richard Luibrand
Zorgos is an imaginary superpower that prevents bullying, coined by my co-author, Dr. Louise Hart, and myself for our book, The Bullying Antidote. Zorgos is the collection of learnable skills and/or qualities that calm, interrupt, or upshift bullying dynamics.
Wisconsin aims to be first trauma-informed state; seven state agencies lead the way
Here in California, many people think that it’s only liberal Democrats who have a corner on championing the science of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and putting it into practice. That might be because people who use ACEs science don’t expel or suspend students, even if they’re throwing chairs and hurling expletives at the teacher. They ask “What happened to you?” rather than “What’s wrong with you?” as a frame when they create juvenile detention centers where kids don’t fight, reduce visits to emergency departments and shrink teen pregnancy rates….among many other things.
Because they do all this and more by abandoning the notion of trying to change people’s behavior by punishing, blaming or shaming them, and instead using understanding, nurturing and healing, some people might think this approach belongs to the purview of one political party.
Mmmmmm….Not so fast.
To paraphrase Tonette Walker, the First Lady of Wisconsin, married to Republican Governor Scott Walker, who was a GOP presidential candidate in 2016:
That’s ridiculous.
Her exact words were: “It’s ridiculous that people say this is a Democratic or Republican issue. We all care about issues concerning families and children. We all care about the outcome of people’s lives, no matter who you are.”
Zorgos: A superpower we can teach kids
This article contains two excerpts from the beginning and end of The Bullying Antidote: Superpower Your Kids for Life, by Dr. Louise Hart and Kristen Caven. The book explores how ACEs are created by stress, change, beliefs, and tradition, and provides a guide to positive parenting so that parents can prevent them in their children and communities.
The Bullying Antidote: Zorgos
Bullying is a power dynamic where one person exerts control over another physically, emotionally, or socially. Bullying can be persistent—a focused and repeated pattern—or it can be a single, traumatic event. In the bullying dynamic, one person always loses.
There is no pill, no quick fix for the enormous problem of bullying. But there are thousands of solutions…and we’d like you to have access to them all.
There is a superpower with which we’d like to endow your child, and all children. This power enables them to repel bullies and transform their relationships; it allows them to get what they need without resorting to bullying.
The Hague Protocol: Identifying kids at risk by interviewing parents in the ER
In the summer of 2007, a woman was brought by ambulance to the emergency department of the Medical Center Haaglanden, a hospital that serves an inner city area of The Hague. The woman was drunk and had a severe head injury. Her 8-year-old son was with her.
Hester Diderich, an emergency nurse, and other hospital staff members looked after the boy while they attended to his mother. “We were very nice to him,” Diderich remembers.
After treating the woman’s injuries, they were ready to release her and her son. What happened next led Diderich and her colleagues to realize they needed a better way to protect children and evaluate the risks they face. They created a new process, known as The Hague Protocol, and started a study to evaluate it. The protocol is now in use throughout the Netherlands and is being adopted by other European countries as well.
Visionary Atlantan grows community model for trauma-informed housing that benefits schools
Marjy Stagmeier
*Author’s note: This story was co-authored by Jennifer Hossler and Carey Sipp.
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Real estate developer Marjy Stagmeier was sifting through tenant applications for an apartment complex she had purchased in Atlanta and noticed something disturbing: Many of the applicants were single mothers making $8/hour.
“I wondered how these women could afford to live on so little, with the cost of housing, childcare and the daily needs of life being so high. Seeing how little they made moved me to decide, then and there, not to ever raise the rent,” says Marjy. “I wanted to keep rent affordable.”
Curiosity and reciprocity: Engaging community in the ACE & resilience movement
In an all-day workshop that Laura Porter was leading with community organizers and parents, she told the story of a woman from the Congo who had to leave her homeland. Before the woman left, she had a dream about living in the United States.
The woman said she imagined opening her door, letting her children run free, hearing them laugh and play. She envisioned people asking one another, “How are you?” without any compulsion to evade by answering, “Fine. I’m fine.” And, she added, “I could go with my children to the store and not have to be afraid that they would be arrested for being black.”
Porter was struck by the woman’s words—a vision of safety and belonging that is rarely voiced out loud. “As we’re engaging people, that dream is just under the surface,” says Porter. “When we touch on that, we touch on something very powerful: the core values…that go beyond political strife or individual experience. We can touch an aspirational world.”
