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The results from my scan yesterday show NO CANCER! NONE NONE NONE! No words for how wonderful that is – so just sharing this video from Sweden – it’s a HAPPY ONE!
ENJOY!
And this one from India – TO TOUCH THE HEART
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Part of what I learned yesterday is that my dissociational difficulties with verbal language happen not only when my stress response system is accelerated when I am in the presence of other people and THEIR words disappear. It also happens within my own body as it did yesterday so that MY OWN access to words disappears.
This discovery just serves to answer some of my own questions about HOW I experienced my 18 years of severe abuse and trauma as an infant-child. Mostly I had no ability to assign words to my experience, which served to bar me from being able to THINK in words about anything I went through. This reality also means that ‘returning to my childhood’ to remember myself as I went through that hell doesn’t happen in words, either.
Sum of the matter: For those of us who were deprived of protection in a safe and secure early caregiver-infant attachment environment our ability to USE words, including our ability to THINK in words was altered. Because all the PREVERBAL interactions that are supposed to happen between infants and their caregivers didn’t happen correctly, our communication platforms built into our developing body-brain regions, circuits, and pathways were changed.
These changes affected how we process and store memory. They also affected how we remember our own SELF in relationship to/with our ongoing experiences. Even though developmental neuroscientists (and others) can now describe what infant-child abuse looks like in the ‘changed brain’, nobody describes what the experience of living with a trauma-altered body-brain FEELS like and IS like from the inside out.
It seems to me that only survivors of early neglect, deprivation, trauma and severe malevolent abuse actually KNOW this insider information. It is our important job, then, to describe and document our own experience of living in a trauma-changed body. Sometimes as I do this in my writing I feel like I am in effect writing messages to put into bottles to toss into the vast internet sea.
Will anyone find them? Are all survivors waiting for some future time, long past most of our lifetimes, for ‘science’ to catch up with the living reality of what the longterm consequences especially of malevolence 0-3 actually MEANS to the people who survive it?
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That gives me the image of some far-distant-future internet archaeologists who have skills to dig around in the invisible world of then-ancient internet archives for bits of information those of us alive today are sending out into internet ‘space and time’ right now.
These archaeologist web-hackers in the future will probably accomplish their work via programming computer systems that act as ‘crawlers’ and ‘probes’, sent into our invisible past to find out who we were – ‘we’ being the then ancient ancestors of the still-surviving members of our species. I think about what it would be like now if we had a verbal record of the experience of OUR ancestors. Spoken stories, stories carved in symbols on stone, words written and printed on paper, and then there’s NOW where our history is transferring itself into digital formats that exist as long as the computers of our planet continue to hold them.
And in the digital world OUR words, our lay words, our ‘common folk’ words, our survivor words are really as equal as the ‘educated’ people’s words, as the ‘wealthy’ people’s words, as the words of those who hold the power.
So in the future when our internet world of words is ‘dug up’ what we are saying now as survivors of severe early trauma will be equally as TRUE as what everyone else is saying. But in our words will be reflected a reality about being super-tough and super-strong and super-resilient because we endured from infancy what humans are NOT meant to ever experience in the first place.
Nature did not design infants to be abused, hated and traumatized by their caregivers. That our stories tell the story in words about what enduring the unendurable is like means that whatever it is that WE HAVE and that WE KNOW will be directly connected to whatever it will be that carries our specie’s survival into the distant future.
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While sitting around alone drinking 450 ml of barium in water with your loved ones 1700 plus miles away so you can go get scanned to see if cancer is back or not might not be fun for anyone, for me I DO believe that this is ‘worse’. Worse than WHAT? Worse than for WHOM? Worse WHY? Worse HOW?
I believe it’s worse for me as a severe early trauma and abuse survivor BECAUSE there really is no clear assembled self-within to help me through this. Mostly that means that FEAR rules at the same time WORDS disappear. It’s very hard to THINK without words, I don’t care what anybody else says. Thinking without words makes any struggle harder as far as I am concerned — this “I” who has to work very hard to be a form out of this puddle of FEELINGS that swirl and swallow the ME that has to be here moving forward in time and space – waiting waiting waiting through the moments of this life in this body.
This ME says, “Just DO something. Anything.”
This ME says, “Doing things is how you know you are alive. It’s how you know you exist. If you DIDN’T exist, you could DO anything, could you?”
Do something. Put my fingers on this keyboard, watch the screen in front of my eyes. Words appear. “I” put them there. So there! That means I AM HERE!
When I stop putting the words up here the words disappear again inside of me. All gone, like the last crumb on a plate my word-thoughts disappear.
Again. I don’t care what anybody else says. Being a self and having a self is really really hard when words go away. Thoughts go away when the words go away. Nothing is left but the feelings. Nobody is here then to be IN CHARGE of the feelings. Runaway locomotive. How does a locomotive run away anyway? Either it’s on its track — or it’s not! Seems to me.
Oh, well. I know enough to know that time passes. Time passes. Time passes. Time passes with or without thoughts! With or without a self in the middle. Time passes.
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I really believe that one of the repeating experiences any survivor of early severe trauma and abuse has – because our earliest experiences built us and built themselves into us – in the BODY memory (of course processed and translated through our trauma-built brain) of what THREAT TO LIFE feels like. I am mere moments away from being picked up by medical transport to go have a CT scan done as a follow-up for the breast cancer treatments I received and completed three years ago. I am in the midst of having what I know today as ‘a life hanging in the balance’ moment. Or should I say, an entire sequence of those moments?
Oddly enough – yet logically enough – my entire experience this morning as I wait now without food intake for the magic moment I begin to drink that very weird barium mix in my refrigerator – is ALSO connected to something my daughter shared with me last night regarding my 10-month-old grandson, C.
C’s mommy has been establishing an evening bedtime routine which includes bath time to remove the food from his body and hair as he is learning to feed himself – a fun and very messy process! Then comes the hair brushing. Then comes the tooth brushing. Mommy has the cutest little baby toothbrush – a little soft rubber thing with soft bristles on it that she sticks on the end of her pointer finger and puts into his mouth. Brush! Brush!
Last night after brushing C’s hair mommy was in full movement to hand C the hairbrush so he could practice brushing his own hair (which he does). In mid-movement mommy noticed with surprise that after his hair had been brushed he immediately opened his mouth for the toothbrush.
He KNEW what was SUPPOSED to happen next.
Rather than disturb this amazing rhythm of sequenced happenings-events, mommy DID then brush his teeth before she handed her little one his hairbrush.
NO BIG DEAL?
HUGE DEAL!
Among the many sticky notes that I have attached to this ‘ordinary’ infant-toddler growth and development chart I have propped here by my computer is this one, labeled “15 months.”
“Emotional activities and mechanisms of memory operating at this specific time.”
Unfortunately when I was doing my developmental neuroscience research a few years ago and spotted this milestone, I neglected to write the citation for this tidbit of critical information!
Today when I Google search “brain development mechanisms of memory” a host of webpages appear on my screen. If the page doesn’t come up when you click on this link, just pop these words into your own Google search and you will see what I mean.
At the moment I will just connect my thoughts together into a pattern with something else I know from this morning.
Having cancer is a distressing, traumatic experience. For me, as a severely abused and traumatized infant-child, my ‘routine’ of experience with my earliest caregivers did very very little to establish ‘reason-able’ routine into my growing body-brain. What I got was CHAOS.
I am used to thinking about my resulting DISSOCIATION in terms of its ‘opposite’ – ASSOCIATION. I know we have ‘a prefrontal associational complex in our cerebral cortex’.
“The cerebral cortex is a sheet of neural tissue that is outermost to the cerebrum of the mammalian brain. It plays a key role in memory, attention, perceptual awareness, thought, language, and consciousness.”
Without swimming around in the neuroscience soup at the moment, it’s enough for me to note here that development of our cortex speeds up in its rapid growth in the second year of life. When this happens for a little one within a traumatic, malevolent, chaotic and terrifying early caregiving environment – lots of changes can happen in the growing brain.
These changes are happening on top of the changes that happened to a severely abused infant prior to the age of one in abusive, neglectful – dot dot dot – early malevolent unsafe and insecure caregiver-infant lack-of-attachment experiences.
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So here I am this morning getting ready to go have my CT scan. Of course my entire body-brain is on high anxiety alert, even if I THINK myself into feeling calm. I am not calm.
So there I was applying my makeup when I realized (as I did many many times while I was going through chemotherapy treatment) that I had FORGOTTEN how to apply my makeup.
I forgot the sequence so that I had to CONSCIOUSLY and carefully recall the proper steps, the proper sequence, the proper ORDER, the proper pattern, rhythm, routine of accomplishing this ‘simple’ task.
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Enter changes to the development of the hippocampus through early severe trauma – along with changes to memory. Google search “infant abuse brain development hippocampus memory” and you will get an idea of what I am talking about.
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So today for the first time I am noticing that along with my thinking about ‘association’ in terms of ‘dissociation’ I am also connecting these thoughts to ‘sequencing’ and ‘dissociation’.
It seems very likely to me that the lack of order, routine, established patterns – dot dot dot – that happen within a traumatic-chaotic early environment MUST create changes in how an infant-toddler’s brain is building itself to REMEMBER.
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Again, Google search “left brain sequencing” and then add into your search “left brain sequencing language” keeping in mind we are talking about developmental brain changes that happen when an infant-toddler is being raised in a malevolent environment.
According to developmental neuroscientist Dr. Allan Schore, after the right limbic-emotional-social brain develops during the first year of life, the left brain’s development kicks in. Not supposed to be a big deal, is supposed to happen CORRECTLY under continued optimal early safe and secure attachment conditions.
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Now I feel like Mr. Monk (Yup, I’m in the throes of watching his entire series via Netflix streaming). “Here’s what happened.”
Google search “left brain sequential language foxp2” and take a look at what appears on your screen. Our human brain built its language-in-words abilities into our experience around 140,000 years ago BY USING THE SAME REGIONS of our left brain that we had already well developed by that time. (Also interesting that some language experts connect the activation of our FOXP2 gene with earlier grooming behavior so that TALKING to people IS a more highly evolved experience of ‘group social grooming’.)
When I, for example, am experiencing ‘threat to ongoing life’ and my stress response system (certainly NOT the other end of this continuum, the calm connection safe and secure attachment arm) kicks in – like it is today – I experience DISORGANIZED and DISORIENTED attachment IN MY BODY-BRAIN that is directly connected to my dissociation.
Great big gaps appear in my verbal thinking AND in my motor action. My grandson is building a boy-brain the right optimal way. In the center of all of his experiences his SELF is forming. I had no opportunity to recognize my SELF in the middle of my insanely abusive and traumatic early environment. I had no opportunity to PRACTICE being a self having a life.
I plan to take piano (keyboard) lessons soon. I anticipate that I will be learning how to play one step at a time – so that eventually everything will fit together in an ordered, organized way.
I expect that I will practice measures of a song, in order, and eventually I will learn entire songs. I will not get triggered (I hope) into backtracking out of nowhere and repeating ‘past measures’ that have nothing IN CORRECT TIME to do with where the song is going!
I will not skip measures and leave big blank gaps in the order of the music. I will not skip around, either, playing measures out-of-order! Etc. Etc. Etc.
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What my experience of having cancer and going through chemotherapy treatment did to me was make me FORGET the sequencing that I had managed to build up all by myself growing up (and all the way into my adulthood).
I had ‘learned’ how to ‘pretend’ to be an organized, oriented SELF.
When chemotherapy and trauma of cancer affected my brain’s ability to REMEMBER these super-imposed patterns I had built, my ‘fake’ was exposed.
My grandson is BUILDING his body-brain-self correctly so – to use this image – he will be the BUILDING itself. I didn’t do that. I couldn’t. I built a ‘secondary’ self like building a scaffolding around where my building-of-self was SUPPOSED to be. Under stress, my scaffolded self fell apart and collapsed.
That, to me, is what dissociation is and does. We can on a ‘secondary’ level put two and two together and build a ‘fake’ self that appears to function OK. It is NOT the same thing as getting a SELF from the inside out like my grandson is doing. He will never forget the sequencing patterns he experiences in his ordered, safe, secure earliest caregiving environment because they are building themselves into him at the same time they are BUILDING HIM.
Not so for those of us who suffered terrible early trauma and abuse.
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I am certainly not going to jump into the fray concerning the merits or lack thereof of the film this post is about — Waiting for “Superman”. Frankly, at the moment I am just too dang tired. However, this year-old film has generated plenty of its own Controversy – and hopefully some helpful conversations if not some action. But Oscar material? Not.
Failure to Thrive — this should be the most obvious diagnostic evaluation of our nation’s educational disaster — but where lies ‘the cure’?
ABC News — Schools at the Breaking Point – Watch interview with David Guggenheim, Director/Producer of WAITING FOR SUPERMAN — film released September 24, 2010 (available on Netflix February 15, 2011, it’s in my queue) — exposes public school (and teacher?) failures – “How can I make people care about other people’s children?” – “We are not going to fix the schools until the adults change them.”
Film’s website info:
waitingforsuperman.com
| What You Can Do Take Action |
Write Your School Board Educate Yourself and Others |
– How to Demand Great Schools
Waiting for “Superman” movie trailer – and HERE
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Published:
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
The documentary film explores the overstressed public school system and how it fails its students, and promotes the charter system.
By Meg Boberg / Special to The Malibu Times
Education reform was the topic of the evening at Sunday’s screening of “Waiting for Superman” hosted by the Malibu Film Society. A crowd of supporters comprised of parents of Point Dume Marine Science Elementary School (PDMSS) students filled the room, along with other filmgoers, to catch the award-winning documentary that was followed by a screening of Oscar-nominated “The Fighter.”
The film, “Waiting for Superman,” addresses the shortcomings of the public school system and the benefits of charter schools, such as providing support for the low-achieving students who often slip through the cracks of an overstressed public school. However, charter critics say that PDMSS cannot be compared to the schools depicted in the film. READ MORE HERE
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SUNDANCE Film Festival 2010
Davis Guggenheim 2009
AUDIENCE AWARD: U.S. DOCUMENTARY, Presented by Honda
“For a nation that proudly declared it would leave no child behind, America continues to do so at alarming rates. Despite increased spending and politicians’ promises, our buckling public-education system, once the best in the world, routinely forsakes the education of millions of children.
Filmmaker Davis Guggenheim reminds us that education “statistics” have names: Anthony, Francisco, Bianca, Daisy, and Emily, whose stories make up the engrossing foundation of WAITING FOR SUPERMAN. As he follows a handful of promising kids through a system that inhibits, rather than encourages, academic growth, Guggenheim undertakes an exhaustive review of public education, surveying “drop-out factories” and “academic sinkholes,” methodically dissecting the system and its seemingly intractable problems.
However, embracing the belief that good teachers make good schools, and ultimately questioning the role of unions in maintaining the status quo, Guggenheim offers hope by exploring innovative approaches taken by education reformers and charter schools that have—in reshaping the culture—refused to leave their students behind.”
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The Washington Post – The Answer Sheet – Posted at 10:30 AM ET, 01/25/2011
By Valerie Strauss
“The documentarians who select the films for Academy Award nominations in the feature documentary category got it right: “Waiting for Superman” was not good/accurate enough to be selected.
The snub to Davis Guggenheim’s tendentious film was well-deserved, given that classic documentaries are factual and straightforward, and don’t, as did “Superman,” fake scenes for emotional impact.
Academy Award nominations are heavily political, yet this film didn’t make the cut even though President Obama called it “powerful” and welcomed to the White House the five charming students who starred in the film.
Advertising campaigns have been known to vault films into Academy contention, but not even a $2 million grant provided by the Gates Foundation to market “Superman” worked.
Though “Superman” was on the shortlist for an Academy Award in the feature documentary category, apparently the people who vote on the nominations — people who actually make documentaries — saw too many problems with “Waiting for Superman.”
And there are many, large and small.
Guggenheim edited the film to make it seem as if charter schools are a systemic answer to the ills afflicting many traditional public schools, even though they can’t be, by their very design. He unfairly demonized Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, and gave undeserved hero status to reformer and former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee. Guggenheim compared schools in Finland and the United States without mentioning that Finland has a 3 percent child poverty rate and the United States has a 22 percent rate.
One scene showed a mother touring a charter school — and saying things such as, “I don’t care if we have to wake up at 5 o’clock in the morning in order to get there at 7:45, then that’s what we will do” — that turned out to be staged; she already knew her son didn’t get in, according to The New York Times.
Then there was the case of one of the five students featured in the film, Emily Jones, who lives on the suburban San Francisco Peninsula and who, according to “Superman,” was desperate to escape her traditional public high school, Woodside High, where she would be doomed to mediocrity.
Except that it wasn’t true. In an interview with John Fensterwald of the Silicon Valley Education Foundation, she said that Woodside “is a great school” that she really liked; she just liked Summit Prep Charter School better.
Late last year, in a piece on Movie Line’s Web site, editor S.T. VanAirsdale asked whether education historian Diane Ravitch’s scathing review of Superman in The New York Review of Books would derail the movie’s chances of nabbing an Oscar.
Just maybe it did.
And maybe this will help persuade those who believed that “Superman” unflinchingly showed reality that, in fact, it didn’t, and that it is time to take a new look at public education that doesn’t demonize teachers and traditional public schools.
(For the record, the films that did get nominations in the feature documentary category are: Exit through the Gift Shop,Gasland, Inside Job, Restrepo and Waste Land.)”
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January 25, 2011 – 11:06 AM
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“Teachers – STOP Waiting for “Superman” – he’s been found.” (Friday January 21, 2011)
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When I began writing this blog April 2009 I never anticipated where my journey would take me. Yet as I examine how I am feeling and thinking at THIS moment in time, and as I look back at my thinking process that has led me directly to this point, I realize that all the signposts were there along the way that I would get HERE sooner or later.
When I began to write in 2009 I did not in any way align myself with the ‘guilty’. Having been a victim of pervasive and horrible abuse without reprieve from the moment I was born until I left home at age 18 had certainly contributed to my blind-sightedness about how my own experience fit into the grand continuum of degrees of benevolent-malevolent treatment of infants and children. My layers of blindness have been peeling away until at this moment I believe I am very nearly at the core of what concerns me most.
When looking at the range of harm done by the intra- and intergenerational transmission of unresolved trauma (the overall topic of this blog) I now very clearly understand that suffering is suffering, trauma is trauma, overwhelming experiences of malevolent treatment all happen within the context of the society we live in. Infant-child suffering is happening all over the place around me, and I am left asking the same two questions of myself that I would have asked of anyone outside of my family who did absolutely nothing to help me when I was an infant-child: “Why are you not SEEING my suffering and why are you doing NOTHING to help me?”
There are days when I come very close to giving up ‘my work’ completely. The big picture is – well – exactly that – A VERY BIG PICTURE!
The undercurrent of this blog is a discussion of how early deprivation, neglect, trauma and malevolent treatment of ALL KINDS can and usually does alter human physiological development on all levels so that infant-children ESPECIALLY between ages 0-3 (the span of the most critical developmental body-brain windows of growth) has to CHANGE itself in degrees according to experiences in the environment that are NOT OPTIMAL. ALL experiences 0-3 profoundly determine directions of body-brain development FOR EVERYONE in accordance with degrees of safety and security of attachment or their absence with primary caregivers.
I understand now that no matter how horrible any individual early trauma survivor’s stories may be, the essence of what matters is how that person’s PHYSIOLOGICAL development was forced to change in response to their traumas. This process is happening to some degree for every single infant-child who is NOT optimally safe and secure during their most critical periods of body-brain development. Any lack of well-being experienced at the start of life will create ‘channels’ of lack of well-being PHYSIOLOGICALLY that will determine an adult’s life course.
It was inevitable that I would recognize myself (along with other adult severe early trauma survivors) in the river along with all the CURRENTLY SUFFERING little people within our nation. (I can’t begin to talk about lack of child well-being outside of our nation’s boundaries – the conditions for our own children are bad enough).
I have selected this one of our 50 states to focus on in this post concerning some of the lack of child well-being issues within our nation: Massachusetts.
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This report, available through searching the KIDS COUNT pages for ‘violence’ – “A State Call to Action: Working to End Child Abuse and Neglect in Massachusetts” – is reporting on information collected in the 1990s. Considering how damaging this ‘past’ information is I cannot begin to imagine what a similar report might contain that covers the current state of affairs in our recession.
According to KIDS COUNT data — KIDS COUNT overall rank – Massachusetts now rates #5 in the nation on overall indicators of child well-being. When this report was created In April 2001 the state ranked in the top 10%, yet, according to this 216 page report the problems in the state fall exactly along the lines the United Nations reported in their 2010 report card on child well-being among the globe’s 24 richest nations with the United States having very nearly the widest gap between rich and poor (Credit for all citations below to: Massachusetts Citizens for Children – Kids Count):
“However, contrast between the state’s overall progress and the incidence of child maltreatment is stark and confounding. In the decade from 1987 to 1997, Massachusetts saw an 98% increase in the number of children reported for abuse or neglect, compared to a national increase of 54% during the same period. Based on the latest data, roughly 46 of every 1,000 children in our state is involved each year in a child abuse or neglect report. Each year, thousands of newborn children in Massachusetts go home from hospital only to return later with unthinkable injuries – injuries that for most will be life-changing and for some will be life-ending.
“Although Massachusetts ranks consistently in the top three to four states in per capital income, we have been unable to translate this extraordinary wealth into reductions in childhood poverty, family violence or child maltreatment. States with fewer resources but clear vision are leading a national reform of child protection that is innovative, pro-active and effective.
“Since May 1999, over 200 Massachusetts policymakers and advocates have participated with Massachusetts Citizens for Children in the “Summit Initiative on Child Protection and Family Support.” Motivated by a shared belief that overall current systems do not reflect our state’s deep and longstanding commitment to improving children’s lives, they collaborated to achieve a consensus for change. This State Call To Action [full report also available at this link] reflects their collective vision on how Massachusetts can successfully deal with child maltreatment and reclaim its historic role of leadership in meeting the essential needs of all its children. (page 9)”
Access full report here: A State Call to Action: Working to End Child Abuse and Neglect in Massachusetts
This report, which represents the combined hard work and dedication of a LOT of people, was generated in response to
“…the National Call To Action to End Child Maltreatment, initiated by Children’s Hospital and Health Center-San Diego at its January 1999 “Conference on Responding to Child Maltreatment.” This effort to end child abuse and neglect has now brought together over 30 of this country’s leading organizations in a coalition to address this national crisis.”
I want to know what the results of the intentions and the efforts this report represents are NOW a decade later. As far as I can tell, the most accessible current information is available HERE.
There is a link on this page to “Who’s For Kids and Who’s Just Kidding?” – This is a November 2010 citizen’s guide to candidates’ stands on these issues:
– Reducing Child Poverty
– Supporting Low-Income Working Families
– Providing Early Education and Care
– Improving Children’s Health
– Preventing Child Sexual Abuse
– Protecting Children In Foster Care
– Improving Juvenile Justice
These are among the questions posed to the candidates – good ones to be posed to ANY candidate for any position in America!
“Massachusetts boasts the third highest per capita income in the nation, yet 12%, or nearly 170,000 of our state’s children are living in poverty; 6% or 88,000 live in extreme poverty in households with annual earnings of only $11,000 for a family of four. What will you do to bridge this persistent economic divide and to ensure greater economic security to lift these children out of poverty?”
“What will you do to address the harmful impact of the growing gap between low and high income earners in Massachusetts?”
“What will you do to tangibly improve the conditions of poor children and their families in the Commonwealth’s poorest cities, such as Holyoke, Lawrence, Springfield and New Bedford?”
Taking a look at some of the issues presented in this Massachusetts ‘flyer’ makes me wonder what’s happening in the very poor and middle income states within our nation. Interspersed with this information being reported here are questions for the candidates:
PROVIDING EARLY EDUCATION AND CARE
– 43% of 3rd graders in the Bay State do not read at grade level, and two-thirds of these children are from low-income families. The impact of reading failure on these children and our state is enormous, with many likely to become our lowest income and least skilled citizens tomorrow.
– Science has never been clearer about the long-term effects of early environment and experience on a child’s brain architecture. Research confirms that providing high quality early education and care to children from low-income homes yields a 10% to 16% return on investment to the economy through better reading skills, greater high school graduation rates, college attendance, and healthier lives.
[me: not to mention the power of a little one 0-3 growing an optimal body-brain IN EVERY WAY in a safe and secure attachment within a VERY low stressor environment, which also includes its effects on preverbal-verbal development]
– Organizations and schools have worked tirelessly over the past decade to press the state to build a system of universal access to affordable, accessible, and high quality services with well-trained teachers. They have supported parents in playing a critical role in their child’s educational success. To meet those goals, Massachusetts formed the nation’s first Department of Early Education and Care in 2005.
FACTS ABOUT OUR KIDS:
– 61% of Massachusetts’ 480,422 children ages birth through 5 years old have parents who are in the labor force, and most of these parents have child care needs. 92%of children under age seven are cared for regularly by someone other than a parent. However, the quality of these arrangements varies enormously.
– Children from low-income families entering kindergarten are typically 12 to 14 months below national norms in language and pre-reading skills. [bolding mine] By 4th grade, many of these children will not be able to read or understand up to half of what is taught to them in the 4th grade curriculum, and most will continue to be poor readers even through high school.
– Only 32% of kindergarten and preschool teachers in Massachusetts hold a Bachelor’s degree versus 50% nationwide. And only 16% of child care workers have graduated from a four-year school.
– By the end of fiscal year 2009, state funding for Universal Pre-K declined from $12 million to $7.5 million while funding for full-day kindergarten programs declined from $33.8 million to $22.9 million.
IMPROVING CHILDREN’S HEALTH
– Thanks to the expansion of health care coverage under Massachusetts law, the state has some of the best child health outcomes in the country. In fact, Massachusetts ranks among the top three best states on key indicators of child health, including infant mortality, the death rate for children and the rate of births to teen moms, according to the latest KIDS COUNT data.
– Currently, only 2% of children are officially uninsured in the state. Furthermore, 80% of children on Medicaid receive an annual health screening and 91% of our two-tear-olds are immunized. Massachusetts is one of only six states where at-risk children are eligible for early intervention, special education and preventive health and mental health services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).
– Despite these accomplishments, Massachusetts is still a tale of two states with regard to physical, dental and mental health outcomes for children living in the poorest communities.
FACTS ABOUT OUR KIDS
[lists double or more increases in percentages between low-income and the state percentages for child problems with infant mortality, teen births, environmental poisoning such as lead]
– Dental decay is the most common chronic childhood disease and is at epidemic levels among many low-income Black and Hispanic children. It often leads to speech, nutrition and learning difficulties. [low-income counties affected are listed]
– Mental health care needs in children are more prevalent than leukemia, diabetes, and AIDS combined. However, parents of children with mental illness report serious issues ranging from long waits for services and inadequate training of school personnel to high out-of-pocket expenses. [also states that state Medicaid only covers an inadequate amount of only $250 a year for child prescriptions – also lists questions for candidates]
– Nearly 37,000 Massachusetts children were confirmed abused or neglected in 2008. Cases of child sexual abuse rose 16% from the previous year, physical abuse rose 12% and neglect 10%.
– Child sexual abuse is “a silent epidemic,” according to the American Medical Association. Surveys of adults indicate that one in four women and one in six men have experienced some for of sexual abuse before the age of 18. Many victims suffer into adulthood with depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress, eating disorders, relationship problems and further sexual or physical victimization. Among sexual abuse survivors, 70% to 80% report excessive drug and alcohol use and are more likely than their non-abused peers to develop psychiatric disorders and to attempt suicide. Girls who report childhood sexual abuse are three times more likely to become pregnant before age 18.
– An estimated $23 billion dollars are spent each year as law enforcement agencies, courts, child protection, health and mental health systems, and social service programs struggle to deal with the aftermath of this epidemic. Prevention and early identification of victims and abusers hold the best promise of reducing the human and economic costs. Despite this, most communities have not been mobilized for prevention, most adults are not protecting children from people who might abuse them, and most parents are not communicating to their children about a major health and safety risk.
– 50% of 650 Massachusetts citizens polled ranked “safety from abuse” as most important to a child’s well-being with quality education, medical care, economic security and child care compromising the remainder 50%
– 90% of Massachusetts residents polled believe that child sexual abuse is a serious problem in the Commonwealth, 85% believe child sexual abuse can be prevented, and 67% said they were interested in local trainings to learn how – up from 48% in a previous survey.
– Since 2002, a coalition of over 20 Massachusetts organizations has been working through the Enough Abuse Campaign to develop and test innovative programs to prevent child sexual abuse. Hailed as a “trailblazing effort” by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) the Campaign operates in a dozen communities across the state.
[Information included here about foster care placements and kinship care needs]
On Juvenile Criminal Issues:
– Black youth are more than nine times as likely to be held in secure confinement as white youth – yet there is no evidence that black youth commit more crimes, or more serious crimes, than white youth.
– Massachusetts is one of only 12 states that consider 17-year-olds adults under the criminal law.
– Massachusetts has the 11th highest rate of juveniles sentenced to life without the possibility of parole in the country.
– The stark racial disparities in the Massachusetts juvenile justice system call into question the fundamental fairness of the system and represents one of the foremost civil rights challenges of our time.
– Massachusetts does not collect basic juvenile justice system data, e.g. what types of crimes youth are being prosecuted for. This lack of data makes it impossible to evaluate the effectiveness of prevention and intervention efforts. [questions for the candidates here includes those on probation and rehabilitation issues]
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Are you one in the caring compassionate category who likes to keep your finger on the pulse of quality-of-life for our nation’s infants and children? Did you know that there’s a project sponsored by The Annie E. Casey Foundation dedicated to “Helping vulnerable kids and families succeed?” Below you will find links to the most up-to-date and accurate information about the ‘state of the union’ of our nation’s most at-risk offspring.
Click here to reach KIDS COUNT DATA CENTER where anyone can “access hundreds of measures of child well-being.” I ‘friended’ KIDS COUNT on Facebook so that I receive all kinds of valuable information on the state of our nation’s vulnerable little ones ASAP! This is the link to KIDS COUNT main page.
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On KIDS COUNT main data bank website you can access DATA BY STATE
As well as DATA ACROSS STATES
There is even a KIDS COUNT DATA CENTER HELP PAGE
Some of the information you can access on this site (well, the full report pdf file didn’t open on my computer but might on yours!) –
This is the list of key indicators the KIDS COUNT collects national data on about child well-being for The 2010 KIDS COUNT DATA BOOK:
Congressional District data are now available for over 20 indicators including many of the poverty and employment indicators obtained from the 2009 American Community Survey.
Access the profile for your congressional district in Data By State and/or watch this short video to see how you can get started.
The Economic Well-Being section in Data Across States has been updated. Data includes estimates from the 2009 American Community Survey. Updated data for the U.S., states, and cities:
§ Children below 250% poverty
§ Children in low-income working families by age group
§ Children living in low-income households where no adults work
§ Children living in families where no parent has full-time, year round employment
§ Children living in families where no parent has full-time, year round employment, by race (US and states only)
§ Children age 6 to 12 with all available parents in the labor force
§ Median family (with child) income
§ Low-income working families with children
POPULAR TOPICS — Updated on 1/26/2011
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This is an example of other information that KIDS COUNT disseminates. This information appeared on my Facebook page yesterday:
The Nation’s Report Card – Kids Scores in Science
“Students throughout the nation in grades 4, 8, and 12 participated in the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in science. The assessment was updated in 2009 to keep the content current with key developments in science, curriculum standards, and research. To establish the baseline for future science assessments, the overall average score for each grade was set at 150 on a 0 to 300 scale.
Explore more national and state results.
For more information, browse the report online or download a copy of the report.
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This information also appeared on my Facebook page yesterday from KIDS COUNT on data they have collected:
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Taking a look at JUST ONE component of the suffering of millions of our children I see this:
–More than one in five children (22.5 percent) live in families who are food insecure – meaning they struggle against hunger and report not having enough to eat
Do you personally know any of these most-hungry infants and children? Do you have them in your household? In your neighborhood? In your city or county?
YES you have them in your nation – and not a ‘handful’ of them, either?
THIS IS THE WEBSITE FOR FEEDING AMERICA
There is an interactive national MAP for FEEDING AMERICA ACROSS THE NATION here
This website is presenting undeniable FACTS about ONLY one measure of our nation’s offspring’s’ lack of well-being. PLEASE take a look – and then TAKE ACTION.
Take a look at the 2010 report about Hunger in America.
Register with Feeding America.
CARE AND CAREGIVE!!
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While we cannot argue about the United Nation’s facts about the suffering of a large percentage of America’s infants and children, or their facts regarding the appalling gap in our nation between the rich infant-children who ‘have’ and the poor ones who ‘have not’, we can PRETEND that everyone in our nation is created equal because we choose to IGNORE these facts.
Trauma, deprivation, abuse, neglect, exposure to violence to self and to others, affect the way an infant-child’s body-brain develops. This blog is packed with posts containing information about this fact. Infants and children ESPECIALLY FROM AGE 0-3 will suffer from the greatest physiological changes to their development due to the malevolence in their earliest caregiving environments.
When Trauma Altered Development happens, those who survive it will NOT BE CREATED EQUAL – in their body-brain – to those who had a more benevolent early beginning. THIS IS A FACT!
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The growing GAP in our nation between those who HAVE and those who DO NOT HAVE is becoming easier to ignore because of this GAP. Many Americans live in their RICHER neighborhoods while the POOR live in theirs. “Out of sight, out of mind?”
In this post I want to highlight something that EVERYONE in our nation can do to help. In people who were raised within a ‘good enough’ early environment if not an optimal safe and secure attachment home, our EMPATHY AND COMPASSION caregiving system was SUPPOSED to be developed within our physiology RIGHT. This means that we are able to DETECT the suffering of others of our species so that we can RESPOND WITH APPROPRIATE CAREGIVING.
It is a very real physiological fact that trauma and malevolence we are exposed to in our earliest 0-3 developmental stages alters the development of our attachment systems which causes our EMPATHY and COMPASSION and ABILITY TO RESPOND WITH APPROPRIATE CAREGIVING do NOT develop optimally. I would say ‘normally’ but it seems to be that what our species is OPTIMALLY capable of offering individuals who are raised 0-3 in the BEST conditions is NOT HAPPENING.
Looking at the end result, that we as a nation are content to allow growing and LARGE numbers of our offspring to suffer – and hence suffer in their physiological development so that their entire lifespan will lack the basics of well-being – means to me simply that THE MAJORITY OF AMERICANS somehow MISSED out on optimal development as members of their species. “The proof is in the pudding!”
OPTIMAL growth and development in safe and secure attachment caregiving environments ESPECIALLY 0-3 means that these too-rare gifts of our species – empathy, compassion and abilities to respond with appropriate caregiving to others – has evidently NOT HAPPENED for the majority of Americans – no matter how MATERIALLY well-off they may have been in the beginning of their lives or how well-off they are now.
Evidently even though America still remains among the globe’s 24 richest countries, our wealth with its increasingly uneven distribution has NOTHING to do with the condition of our nation’s PEOPLE as human beings.
How are we as individuals and as members of a (once great?) nation able to ignore facts such as I presented in this recent post?
+PLEASE CHECK OUT THIS REPORT ON AMERICA’S CHILDREN IN RECESSION TIMES
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We must not lose sight of the facts about the immediate and long-term consequences that malevolent trauma has on growing infant-children. There is nothing about being an American that changes the outcome that severe stress-distress has on physiological development during a little one’s MOST CRITICAL stages of early growth.
As this blog repeats over and over again neglect, abuse, deprivation, exposure to violent conflict including verbal abuse to ANYONE in an infant-child’s environment and other conditions of an early unsafe, insecure, inadequate early attachment environment WILL IMPACT physiology in development, thus changing the body a survivor will live in and with for the rest of their lifespan.
I want to highlight here yet again the important work the Center for Disease Control has been accomplishing to PROVE the link between Early Adverse Childhood experiences and lifelong adult suffering of all kinds. As states within our nation deliberate about how to meet their budgets IN THE RED it will MOST OFTEN happen that assistance to the most desperate infant-children, their families, along with assistance to poor and sick who are MOST LIKELY adult survivors of infant-child malevolent environments will be cut.
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CHILD ABUSE SURVIVORSHIP IN THE NEWS:
Childhood Trauma May Shorten Life By 20 Years
CDC Research Finds Problems in Childhood Can Be Lifelong
By JOSEPH BROWNSTEIN
ABC News Medical Unit
Oct. 6, 2009
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The Center for Disease Control’s Adverse Childhood Experience (CDC-ACE) study is not without limitations. All 17,421 participants were insurance members which means that information from the many other uninsured levels of our society were not included. If they had been (or are in the future) how much more child abuse connected lifelong adult devastation would be seen?
I would like to see the model of this study expanded through the use of the ACE questionnaires in a far wider variety of settings, preferably included in every human well-being study our nation produces. At the moment, I want to simply highlight the important work the CDC has been doing over the past 14 years with its studies of the consequences of child abuse for survivors for your thought and consideration by presenting some information from their website on Adverse Childhood Experiences as follows:
The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study is one of the largest investigations ever conducted on the links between childhood maltreatment and later-life health and well-being. As a collaboration between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Kaiser Permanente’s Health Appraisal Clinic in San Diego, Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) members undergoing a comprehensive physical examination provided detailed information about their childhood experience of abuse, neglect, and family dysfunction. Over 17,000 members chose to participate. To date, over 50 scientific articles have been published and over 100 conference and workshop presentations have been made.
The ACE Study findings suggest that these experiences are major risk factors for the leading causes of illness and death as well as poor quality of life in the United States. Progress in preventing and recovering from the nation’s worst health and social problems is likely to benefit from the understanding that many of these problems arise as a consequence of adverse childhood experiences.
Here is one website about the study:
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About the study:
The ACE Study was initiated at Kaiser Permanente from 1995 to 1997, and its participants are over 17,000 members who were undergoing a standardized physical examination. No further participants will be enrolled, but we are tracking the medical status of the baseline participants.
Each study participant completed a confidential survey that contained questions about childhood maltreatment and family dysfunction, as well as items detailing their current health status and behaviors. This information was combined with the results of their physical examination to form the baseline data for the study.
The prospective phase of the ACE Study is currently underway, and will assess the relationship between adverse childhood experiences, health care use, and causes of death.
More detailed scientific information about the study design can be found in “The relationship of adult health status to childhood abuse and household dysfunction,”* published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine in 1998, Volume 14, pages 245-258.
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The ACE Pyramid represents the conceptual framework for the Study. During the time period of the 1980s and early 1990s information about risk factors for disease had been widely researched and merged into public education and prevention programs. However, it was also clear that risk factors, such as smoking, alcohol abuse, and sexual behaviors for many common diseases were not randomly distributed in the population. In fact, it was known that risk factors for many chronic diseases tended to cluster, that is, persons who had one risk factor tended to have one or more others.
Because of this knowledge, the ACE Study was designed to assess what we considered to be “scientific gaps” about the origins of risk factors. These gaps are depicted as the two arrows linking Adverse Childhood Experiences to risk factors that lead to the health and social consequences higher up the pyramid. Specifically, the study was designed to provide data that would help answer the question: “If risk factors for disease, disability, and early mortality are not randomly distributed, what influences precede the adoption or development of them?” By providing information to answer this question, we hoped to provide scientific information that would be useful for the development of new and more effective prevention programs.
The ACE Study takes a whole life perspective, as indicated on the orange arrow leading from conception to death. By working within this framework, the ACE Study began to progressively uncover how childhood stressors (ACE) are strongly related to development and prevalence of risk factors for disease and health and social well-being throughout the lifespan.
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Major Findings
Childhood abuse, neglect, and exposure to other traumatic stressors which we term adverse childhood experiences (ACE) are common. Almost two-thirds of our study participants reported at least one ACE, and more than one in five reported three or more ACE. The short- and long-term outcomes of these childhood exposures include a multitude of health and social problems. The ACE Study uses the ACE Score, which is a count of the total number of ACE respondents reported. The ACE Score is used to assess the total amount of stress during childhood and has demonstrated that as the number of ACE increase, the risk for the following health problems increases in a strong and graded fashion:
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In addition, the ACE Study has also demonstrated that the ACE Score has a strong and graded relationship to health-related behaviors and outcomes during childhood and adolescence including early initiation of smoking, sexual activity, and illicit drug use, adolescent pregnancies, and suicide attempts. Finally, as the number of ACE increases the number of co-occurring or “co-morbid” conditions increases.
Content source: Division of Adult and Community Health, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion
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Adverse Childhood Experiences Study Questionnaires – AVAILABLE TO EVERYONE
This is the simplest version of the ACE questionnaire I have seen that consists of ten questions: What’s YOUR ACE Score? Help me calculate my ACE Score.
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This report appears with a link included in my previous post, down near the bottom. It is TOO IMPORTANT to overlook. The information included at this link is critical to ALL OF OUR WELL-BEING!
Effect of State Budget Cuts: America’s Kids Pay the Price
This is a report NACCRRA released In January 2010 with Every Child Matters and Voices for America’s Children. To read a copy of the report, click on the title above.
“At least 42 states have cut public health, programs for children with disabilities, K-12 and early education, and higher education.”
Children During the Recession
“American children will be required to pay a substantial price in lost opportunities to address a problem they did nothing to create.”
—About one in four children under
18 is living in poverty; 21.3
percent of children under 6 live
in poverty
—Over half (53.3 percent) of
children growing up alone with
their mother are living in poverty
—More than one in five children
(22.5 percent) live in families
who are food insecure – meaning
they struggle against hunger and
report not having enough to eat
—Nearly 10 percent of children
lack health insurance—over
7 million children
—Only one out of every seven
eligible children receives child
care assistance and the care
that children have access to is of
dubious quality
Read what this report recommends to help improve conditions within our nation that are so negatively impacting our children.
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Stop the Storm 
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