Category: Awareness Building

Best Practices For Grief: Parental Incarceration

Building onto our current series, this post looks at grief and loss experiences of children and teens impacted by parental incarceration.  Previously, this series explored the grief and loss experiences of children and teens touched by foster care placement,  parental deployment and death and divorce. 2.7 million children in the United States have an incarcerated parent.   …

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Best Practices For Grief: Death and Divorce

Previously, this series explored the grief experiences of children and teens impacted by parental deployment.  This series continues with the focus shifting to the impacts of death and divorce on youth today.   Below is the third video in our video series highlighting best practices for educators, teachers, and other key players in the lives …

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Quiet Health Concern – Iron Deficiency Anemia

I was a junior in high school and 17 years old when I first heard the term anemia. In California, where I live you have to be at least 110 pounds to give blood, I finally got to that weight and was energized to give blood and give back to the community. So the blood …

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Best Practices for Grief – Parental Deployment

This series began with an introduction of multiple grief experiences of youth in foster care placement.  This series continues with a look at parental deployment and its impact on youth. Multiple relocations.  Loss of friendships.  Loss of pets.  Parental deployment.  Death.  These are a few of the many grief experiences military children and teens in …

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Best Practices for Grief: Foster Care

We remove them from their homes with promises of a better life.  We elude them with dreams of safety and a life free from the trauma and pain that often silences the voices of this population of children and teens living in foster care.   Often, key players in the lives of foster care youth …

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November: Veterans, Thanksgiving and Military Families

Have you ever been defined as the problem? You know that feeling when someone says it’s because of the place you lived, the color of your skin, your socio-economic class or earning potential, how long you’ve been with the organization, the school, in your community, or even what gender you are or who you love, …

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It’s Grief To Me – Death, Divorce, Incarceration, Deployment and Foster Care

When I graduated from high school, I never intended on going back. Then 13 years later, I found myself walking the halls of someone else’s high school thinking about that period of my own life that was so fraught with darkness. But this time my role was different. I was different. I was a mental …

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Grief and Loss – Grieving Children in the U.S.

Each of us are impacted by grief and loss.  For some, the words “grief” and “loss,” signify the pain one feels after they’ve lost a loved one to death.  For others, the words “grief” and “loss” have a different meaning. November 19, 2015 is Children’s Grief Awareness Day.  In an effort to help spread the …

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Down Syndrome: A New Perspective

Eleven weeks ago I gave birth to my second daughter, Hope.  As we began to adjust to life as a family of four, it became clear to me that each of our girls is unique.  Not only are they unique from each other, they are unique from their father & me as well.  Harper, my …

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First Day of School Too Common a Phenomena for Youth in Foster Care

Anyone who has ever had to start a new school in the middle of the year probably remembers the barrage of feelings about the situation.  Perhaps anger at having to leave the familiar school and all of your friends behind; the anxiety felt about whether or not you will be accepted by your new peers; …

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