While waiting for Yelena at her therapist's office today I found a really interesting article on international adoption. The article is in the February 2011 issue of Good Housekeeping and it is titled "Love Medicine" by Melissa Fay Greene . It is reprinted here by Theraplay:
http://www.theraplay.org/downloads/Good_Housekeeping_Article.pdf
In looking on the web for the article, I came across an interesting blog about Guatemalan adoption which had an interesting analysis of the article. It looks like an interesting blog and worth looking at: http://www.mamalitathebook.com/2011/02/melissa-fay-greene-article-in-february-2011-good-housekeeping/
There is also an article titled "The Poverty Clinic" by Paul Tough in the March 21, 2011 issue of The New Yorker. It is about Nadine Burke, a physician who started a clinic in an inner-city neighborhood in San Francisco who noticed a high correlation between traumatic events in childhood and serious illness later in life.
"The traumatic events that (Nadine Burke's patient) experienced in childhood had likely caused significant and long-lasting chemical changes in both her brain and her body, and these changes could well be making her sick, and also increasing her chances of serious medical problems in adulthood." Tough talks about the ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) Study which deals with bridging the gap between childhood trauma and negative consequences later in life. See: http://www.acestudy.org/
He ends the article by quoting Burke as saying, "It's not that if we poured all of our money into treating ACEs the jails would empty out and we would no longer have any kids in special ed. But this is a huge, huge issue, and as a society I don't think we've even come close to grasping its significance."
It makes so much sense. A damaged child can grow into a damaged adult. We have so many hurt, abused, neglected children in this world. It's a long hard road...
