Ethan’s story follows one boy taken from his parents into foster care, abused in placement, struggling with guilt and suicidality, and now facing adulthood alone. His journey exposes how often our foster care system fails traumatized children—and why changing life for foster youth will take all of us.
Trauma breathing is a simple, trauma-informed “belly breathing” practice that helps calm a child’s amygdala and nervous system. This toolkit offers step-by-step instructions and ready-to-use scripts for teachers, caregivers, law enforcement, health workers, and other adults who support traumatized children.
Principals and district leaders are on the front lines of childhood trauma. This guide shows how to create trauma informed school climates, rethink discipline, strengthen mental health systems, engage families, use data, and advocate for policy change so vulnerable students are safer and more able to learn.
Children carrying high Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) live in constant survival mode. Stable homes, consistent caregiving, and trauma-informed schools can lower toxic stress, repair trust, and rebuild hope. This article explains why stability is a core intervention—and how adults and communities can help at-risk youth heal and thrive.
“157 staff injuries and 142 cleared classrooms in a single year raise a hard question: Why are Minnesota’s youngest students turning violent? This piece traces those outbursts back to unhealed childhood trauma—and outlines what K–3 schools, families, and policymakers must do differently if we want safer classrooms instead of more suspensions.”
Children are growing up with war in their faces, in real time, on every screen. This is what it does to them—and what adults can do in response.
Hungry Like a Wolf, a powerful new play about sexual predators, mirrors what I saw as a CASA guardian ad litem: very young children raped in their own homes, perpetrators never held accountable, and trauma that reshapes every part of a child’s life. In the U.S., 7.8 million children are reported abused each year—many sexually abused—and countless others are never seen. Until adults are willing to talk honestly about child sexual abuse and its lifelong impact, there will be no real push to change systems or protect children.
Therapists—whether working in schools, clinics, community settings, private practices, or as part of multidisciplinary teams—are often the first, sometimes the only, professionals capable of translating the science of trauma into lasting recovery.
Research across foster care, ACEs, and maltreatment shows that abused and systems‑involved children face dramatically higher risks of self‑harm and suicide. This post walks through key studies and calls for concrete changes in child welfare policy and practice to prevent avoidable deaths.
Many children with high ACE scores cope through “bad” habits—aggression, shutdown, substance use, or even self‑harm. These are survival strategies, not moral failures. This post explains the behaviors trauma creates and what kids actually need to feel safe and change.
Listen to KARA’s child welfare podcast on child death and public non-disclosure. Learn how secrecy laws and closed child protection records hide patterns of failure when children die—and what real transparency and accountability should look like.
School boards wield profound power over the safety, healing, and long-term success of children. What they choose to fund, prioritize, debate, and champion can dramatically shape school culture and community expectations around trauma, mental health, equity, and student outcomes. Yet too often, boards are
Listen to KARA’s child welfare podcast on child death and public non-disclosure. Learn how secrecy laws and closed child protection records hide patterns of failure when children die—and what real transparency and accountability should look like.
What is it like to do social work, child protection, or nonprofit work with at‑risk children and families in this climate? How do you avoid being worn down by the steady drip of misinformation, negative media, and viral “anti‑CPS” narratives that are hitting workers and agencies hard?
Below are KARA’s researched useful videos and podcasts on
child abuse and neglect mental health
ACEs, trauma, healing, and skill‑building cluster into a few groups: big‑picture science, practical trauma‑informed care, and survivor‑oriented healing content.
Mental Health RESOURCE BOX listing in your favorites for PTSD Coach, PTSD Family Coach, and 988/Crisis Text Line as always‑available supports for abused and neglected children, youth, and adults.
Crisis lines (U.S.)
Ethan was removed from his parents at a young age. I have only come to know him briefly through the course of my work with him at an inpatient facility.
Finally removed from the home forever, but not healed. The invisible scars we carry remain.
Life with our painful childhood memories, triggered behaviors and habits in this world is terribly difficult to manage.
Healing from a broken past is difficult.
No more punishment please.
how over decades, Northern European voters vote for child and family friendly initiatives compared to American voters. Following posts in this series dive deeper into programs and policies that are making life either better or more difficult for U.S. children and families. Sharing these posts with your State Representative will have some impact on the policies and programs necessary to improve the lives of at-risk children and families where you live.
The U.S. system relies primarily on counts of investigations, confirmed maltreatment, foster care placement rates, and basic duration measures. There is very little standardized measurement of child well-being, stability, or parent feedback, and fewer independent audits of outcomes
When child welfare agencies focus only on the outcomes that are easiest to measure—such as placement counts and case closure rates—they risk reinforcing and improving those specific metrics while neglecting critical aspects of child well-being, stability, and long-term success that remain unmeasured
Kids at Risk Action, Katie and Jenna explore the deep, lasting effects of childhood trauma through the lens of a survivor’s 77-year journey. They discuss how childhood abuse, often unrecognized, rewires the brain and shapes a lifetime of emotional struggles, relationships, and self-worth issues.
Finally removed from the home forever, but not healed. The invisible scars we carry remain.
Life with our painful childhood memories, triggered behaviors and habits in this world is terribly difficult to manage.
Healing from a broken past is difficult.
No more punishment please.
Ethan was removed from his parents at a young age. I have only come to know him briefly through the course of my work with him at an inpatient facility.
For emergency room doctors, they are a sad and familiar sight: Children returning again and again in the grip of mental health crises
Expecting Different Results From Prison for Kids
Repeated childhood trauma does cruel things to children. Things that never go away. Those things (behaviors/thoughts/self-harm/suicide) can be managed with help. Without help, depression, pain and sadness often become overwhelming.
This is a book about childhood trauma, its impact on children and the impact traumatized youth are having on our communities and society. It is a guide to seeing and dealing with the most critical issues and causes of abuse, and solutions.
Repeated childhood trauma does cruel things to children. Things that never go away. Those things (behaviors/thoughts/self-harm/suicide) can be managed with help. Without help, depression, pain and sadness often become overwhelming.
Social media, political and community outrage
and COVID Lockdown stress are overwhelming mental health caregivers and institutions in every community – Child suicide/self-harm are rising dramatically Speak out, Share this widely
Hundreds of MN children are being abandoned by their caregivers in MN hospitals. Many are children raised in toxic homes then shuttled off into State/County foster and group homes
COVID’s impact on children’s mental health will be felt for a very long time. Especially vulnerable are children suffering from extended exposure to violence and deprivation that lived in toxic homes without access to help during the pandemic lockdowns – Read the MedPage article here…
“Mental Health Crisis + Emergency Rooms” is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s a strong piece demonstrating the huge increase in chemical restraints and ER mental health visits by children, but it misses the heart of the story.
Terrible trauma (like generations of slavery) and the behaviors and conflicts it creates need to be identified and discussed if they are to be fixed. Do we want higher graduation rates and lower crime and recidivism rates for our at risk youth and families?
Charlamagne Tha God has Launched a Mental Wealth Alliance Foundation to establish fundamental and far-reaching generational support for Black Mental Health.
Share this widely.
Kendrea (6) and Gabriel (7) successfully hung themselves a few years ago. They came from different states but suffered the same afflictions. Kendrea lived not far from me.
As a CASA guardian ad Litem, the commonality of self hate by the children I worked with in child protection – being so different, so unlovable that even your mother abandoned you, is devastating.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the Children’s Hospital Association have declared a national emergency in children’s mental health, largely due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Human Rights and the Psychotropic Medicating of Children is common in foster care and juvenile justice in the U.S. Self-harm and suicidal ideation play a roll in the early death and physical harm these children suffer.
Medicine is changing – and it needs to.
Read about KARA’s pilot Portages program to provide 100 youth
with a powerful new mental health resource (share this widely)
COVID is Hammering Children’s Mental Health
These charts show steadily rising trends over the ten year period before COVID. The data pointing to youth planning suicide in the past year is very serious (2019).
Suicide is now the 2nd leading cause of death among 10 to 24 year olds. Over 1 million children under 6 are prescribed psychiatric drugs in America today.
Recent Child Self-Harm & Suicide (state reporting summer 2021)
Disabled children are 3 to 10 times more likely to be abused than children without disabilities.
Today, the chronic high stress of the COVID lockdown is growing anxiety, depression and behavioral problems everywhere, but especially in the homes of at risk children.
These articles reflect current trends in child suicide & self-harm in America today. Only a fraction of child/youth suicides are successful. The vast majority of self-inflicted harm remains invisible. Mental health services are badly needed by young people today as the COVID pandemic is locking children into toxic homes with little or no access to the adults that could help them.
This JAMA article indicates that we continue to underestimate the prevalence of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders by a factor as high as 10. If this is true, 5% of American children are born with a wide range of permanent and lifelong physical & mental health deficits that will result in school & life failure and premature death.
Most people in the fields of education, law enforcement or social work know the explosive growth of mental health issues of children in their in schools, homes and squad cars. We are all becoming mental health workers.
The greater and sadder truth reflected in these studies is the continued minimizing, euphemizing and obfuscation of how America treats its children and troubled young families.
The ground truth is that children can’t speak for themselves, the media sees this as a negative story and the institutions involved benefit through non-transparency and under-reporting.
These sad truths insure generation after generation of child abuse and children born of drug and fetal alcohol abuse. The cost to society and taxpayers is horrendous. We would all benefit by understanding these grim truths.
What would you say to the 12 year old boy who told you how he plans to suicide by cop? Or to the mother of the young girl you speak for in court that told her child “I wish you’d never been born”?
Words don’t come easy.
This survey of 12,000 LGBTQ youth identifies the extreme stress, anxiety, rejection and overwhelming feeling of danger these children grow up with.
The National Poison Data System, researchers found more than 1.6 million cases of 10- to 24-year-olds attempting to kill themselves by poisoning from 2000 to 2018. More than 70% of the suicide attempts by poisoning were in young women.
U.S. youth emergency psychiatric hospitalizations and suicide attempts are escalating at alarming rates.
Among children between the ages of 5 and 17, annual emergency department encounters for suicidal ideations and attempts have more than doubled from 2008 (0.66%) to 2015 (1.82%)7. That equates to an increase of 35,266 encounters for SI or SA during the period of 2008-11 to 80,590 encounters from 2012-2015.
This reporting over the last 45 days is a fraction of
the child self-harm & suicide in our communities today
Most child suicide is underreported & obfuscated
self-harming behaviors remain almost unknown except to those involved. Resources & your state here;
Most child suicide is under reported & obfuscated
Find your state, reporting & resources here…