sense of political responsibility calling Catholics to be informed and active citizens

Another danger is potential partisanship, the temptation to try to use the parish for inappropriate political objectives.

Does the Catholic church provide half of social services in the U.S.?

Connecticut’s Office of Early Childhood announced changes in program eligibility rules starting Dec. 31, when the Care 4 Kids program will stop taking applications from people who have received benefits from Temporary Assistance for Needy Families within the last five years, and 18- to 19-year-old parents who attend high school or an equivalent program. The Care 4 Kids program is now unable to serve as many families as it has supported in the past due to new federal policy requirements that increased caseload numbers and longer periods of enrollment for each family, according to CRT.

But, let me be direct here: if we immediately dismiss the possibility of mental illness and automatically assume spiritual deficiency, our actions amount to spiritual abuse. I know those are powerful and pointed words, but I believe them to be true. Please, don’t miss them.

Those who revel in the leisure luxuries – in the pursuit of a hobby, for instance, or time at gaming – do not need to spend much time on the job each week before the income gain from another hour at work starts to look a poor trade-off for an additional hour away from it.

Not all luxuries are tangible. In the autumn of 2016, Hurst released a paper, co-authored with Mark Aguiar, Mark Bils and Kerwin Charles. They define a class of activities they call “leisure luxuries”. Economists typically (and reasonably) assume that people tend to buy more things as they earn more money. But as they grow richer, they buy proportionately more of some things and less of others. Spending on necessities, as a share of all consumption, declines as incomes rise. Economists label “luxuries” the things that account for an increased share of spending as income goes up. There is a similar logic to leisure luxuries. As the amount of time people spend at leisure (as opposed to work) rises, some activities (like bathing or sleep) account for a shrinking share of total leisure time. Others – the leisure luxuries – account for more.

I’ve come to thinkthat the primary value of [the intervention] was thatit improved the children’s readiness for school so thatwhen they entered school, they performed better; and,because they had more success, they got more commit-ted to school; and because they got more committed toschool, they had even greater success.

So if you can prevent antisocialbehavior in the preschool years, then you could set in motion a reduction in crime that takes placethroughout life.

These interventions provided positive learning experi-ences and supportive, growth-promoting environmentsat a time when the children’s brain circuits were beingbuilt.

toxic stress

tolerable stress

brain architecture.

Healthy children are raised by people and communi-ties, not by government and professional ser-vices—but public policies and evidence-based interventions can make a significant difference when caregivers and neighborhoods need assis-tance

supports for families and appropriate training for providers of early care and educa-tion

The goal is to catalyze informed investments and creative innovations that build on a shared scientific base to achieve significantly improved outcomes for children and society above and beyond the impacts of existing efforts.

aframework for reconceptualizing

significant progress in lifelong health promotion and disease prevention could be achieved by reducing the burden of significant adversity on young children—and this progress could be accelerated through science-based enhancements in a wide range of policy domains, including child care and early education, child welfare, public assistance and employment programs for low-income parents, housing policies, and community development initiatives, to name just a few.

whether Tulsa’s CAPHead Start program produced significant impacts in middle schoolfor outcomes associated with academic success and school prog-ress.

It is important to note that similar to Head Start, theseprograms exclusively served low-income children, many of themchildren of color. But this evidence comes from children whoattended these programs in the 1960s and 1970s and cannot beassumed to reflect the Head Start of today. They were also small-scale model programs with questionable applicability to the at-scale Head Start program both then and now. The data reportedhere follow a 2005–2006 cohort of Tulsa CAP Head Start partic-ipants into 8th grade, thus providing a more contemporary portraitof Head Start’s longer-term impacts on children’s schooling out-comes.

Precocial” species such a s ch icke n s rely on h ig h ly sp e c i fi c i n n at e c apac i-ties adapted to one particular environmental niche, and so they mature quickly. “Altricial” species (those whose offspring need care and feeding by parents) rely on learning instead.

. We h ave a much lon-ger childhood than any other species. Why make babies so helpless for so long and thus require adults to put so much work and care into keep-ing their babies alive?

Children from the first group played with the toy much less than those from the second group. They already knew how it worked and were less interested in explor-ing it. The second group faced a mystery, and t h e y s p o nt a n e ou s ly pl aye d w it h t h e toy, s o o n u n-covering which lever did what

For example, “bi” might follow “ro” only one third of the time, whereas “da” might always follow “bi.” Then they played the babies new strings of sounds that either followed these patterns or broke them. Babies listened longer to the statistically unusual strings.

Babies can even understand the relation be-tween a statistical sample and a population.

So even at this very young age, children are not completely egocentric—they can take the per-spective of another person, at least in a simple way.

studies suggest that children learn about the world in much the same way that sci-entists do—by conducting experiments, analyz-ing statistics, and forming intuitive theories of the physical, biological and psychological realms.

If  reliable  biomarkers  for  language  learning  can  be  identified,  they  should  help  determine  whether  children  are  developing  normally  or  at  risk  for  early-­‐life,  language-­‐related  disabilities,  including  autism  spectrum  disorder,  dyslexia,  fragile  X  syndrome  and  other  disorder

 the  degree  to  which  a  particular  pattern  of  brain  waves  was  present  in  response  to  known  words  predicted  the  child's  future  language  and  cognitive  abilities,  at  ages  four  and

 I  call  "so

Exactly  how  social  context  contributes  to  the  learning  of  a  language  in  humans  is  still  an  open  question.  I  have  suggested,  though,that  parents  and  other  adults  provide  both  motivation  and  necessary  information  to  help  babies  learn.  The  motivational  component  is  driven  by  the  brain's  reward  systems  -­‐-­‐and,  in  particular,  brain  areas  that  use  the  neurotransmitter  dopamine  during  social  interaction.  Work  in  my  lab  has  already  shown  that  babies  learn  better  in  the  presence  of  other  babies  -­‐-­‐we  are  currently  engaged  in  studies  that  explain  why

 phonemes.  Only  the  group  exposed  to  Chinese  from  live  speakers  learned  to  pick  up  the  foreign  phonemes.  Their  performance,  in  fact,  was  equivalent  to  infants  in  Taipei  who  had  been  listening  to  their  parents  for  their  first  11

veat  to  this  story:  the  statistical-­‐learning  process  does  not  require  passive  listening  

lm,  we  monitored  their  perception  of  vowel  sounds  at  six  months  and  demonstrated  that  each  group  had  already  begun  to  focus  in  on  the  vowels  spoken  in  their  native  language.

 one  that  recognizes  sound  through  mental  computation  and  another  that  requires  intense  social  immersio

 whether  a  child's  language  abilities  are  developing  normally  or  whether  an  infant  may  be  at  risk  for  autism,  attention  deficit  or  other

At  birth,  the  infant  brain  can  perceive  the  full  set  of  800  or  so  sounds,  called  phonemes,  that  can  be  strung  together  to  form  all  the  words  in  everylanguage  of  the  world.  During  the  second  half  of  the  first  year,  our  research  shows,  a  mysterious  door  opens  in  the  child's  brain.  He  or  she  enters  a  "sensitive  period,"  as  neuroscientists  call  it,  during  which  the  infant  brain  is  ready  to  receive  the  first  basic  lessons  in  the  magic  of  lang

They tended to believe that individuals are the captains of their own destiny and should be able to overcome their problems by force of personal will

ower relapse rates

higher relapse rates for people who have a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

With schizophrenia, however, symptoms are inevitably entangled in a person’s complex interactions with those around him or her.

esides keeping the sick individual in the social group, the religious beliefs in Zanzibar also allowed for a type of calmness and acquiescence in the face of the illness that she had rarely witnessed in the West.

The problem, it appears, is that the biomedical narrative about an illness like schizophrenia carries with it the subtle assumption that a brain made ill through biomedical or genetic abnormalities is more thoroughly broken and permanently abnormal than one made ill though life events

Those who believed that their partner suffered a biochemical “disease like any other” increased the severity of the shocks at a faster rate than those who believed they were paired with someone who had a mental disorder caused by an event in the past.

But does the “brain disease” belief actually reduce stigma?

There is now good evidence to suggest that in the process of teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we’ve been exporting our Western “symptom repertoire” as well. That is, we’ve been changing not only the treatments but also the expression of mental illness in other cultures.

It means that a mental illness is an illness of the mind and cannot be understood without understanding the ideas, habits and predispositions — the idiosyncratic cultural trappings — of the mind that is its host

what cross-cultural psychiatrists and anthropologists have to tell us is that all mental illnesses, including depression, P.T.S.D. and even schizophrenia, can be every bit as influenced by cultural beliefs and expectations today as hysterical-leg paralysis or the vapors or zar or any other mental illness ever experienced in the history of human madness.

Western mental-health practitioners often prefer to believe that the 844 pages of the DSM-IV prior to the inclusion of culture-bound syndromes describe real disorders of the mind, illnesses with symptomatology and outcomes relatively unaffected by shifting cultural beliefs.

Many modern mental-health practitioners and researchers believe that the scientific standing of our drugs, our illness categories and our theories of the mind have put the field beyond the influence of endlessly shifting cultural trends and beliefs.

Would anorexia have so quickly become part of Hong Kong’s symptom repertoire without the importation of the Western template for the disease? It seems unlikely.

What is being missed, Lee and others have suggested, is a deep understanding of how the expectations and beliefs of the sufferer shape their suffering.

Because the troubled mind has been influenced by healers of diverse religious and scientific persuasions, the forms of madness from one place and time often look remarkably different from the forms of madness in another.That is until recently.

attitudes toward balancing their job and their family life are highly correlated with their experiences as parents.

Men have, of course, become much more involved parents over the past couple of decades,

relationship between family-friendly policies and economic performance.

Her willingness to speak out now is a strong step in the right direction.

71.

Many people in positions of power seem to place a low value on child care in comparison with other outside activities.

Long hours are one thing, and realistically, they are often unavoidable. But do they really need to be spent at the office?

If more women could strike this balance, more women would reach leadership positions. And if more women were in leadership positions, they could make it easier for more women to stay in the workforce.

how long they can “stay out” before they lose the competitive edge they worked so hard to acquire.

Ultimately, it is society that must change, coming to value choices to put family ahead of work just as much as those to put work ahead of family.

a price worth paying.

Such a standard sets up most women for a sense of failure.

Only when women wield power in sufficient numbers will we create a society that genuinely works for all women. That will be a society that works for everyone.

“new gender gap”—measured by well-being rather than wages

Many of these women are worrying not about having it all, but rather about holding on to what they do have.

although we are still blazing trails and breaking ceilings, many of us are also reinforcing a falsehood: that “having it all” is, more than anything, a function of personal determination.

But it cannot change unless top women speak out.

How could anyone voluntarily leave the circles of power for the responsibilities of parenthood?

is suspect

don’t talk about: the necessity of a primary caregiver spouse.”

Lead parenting is being on the front lines of everyday life.

First, being a lead dad can be good for your marriage.

The result is that, except around organized sports, most fathers have difficulty finding buddies from whom to seek support

Put hot triggers in the path of motivated people.

shewasmerelybringingtoanendmyintrusiononaconversationEricawashavingwithChris

Althoughsome had argued that self-financing colleges were elitist and would exclude thepoor, he disagreed and stated that those who could afford to pay should have theopportunity to do so and this would lead to healthy competition and higher quality.

The “civic” is increasingly tied to discourses of con-sumption and a free market

it would create the kind of public that theywanted to be a part of, a civic public full of opportunity and growth

it has been destroyed

the student–citizen does not destroy but builds

The masculinity of wandering about freely in an undisciplined way is the conditionof possibility for producing a masculinity in which movement is disciplined

parallel institution

It’s only when there is a strike that it’s worth it to come tocollege. That’s when you must come to college

women are expected to go home

emptiness of the classrooms

19

with young militantsons dragging their elders into a new Kerala