This story was produced as a project for the California Health Journalism Fellowship, a program of the Center for Health Journalism at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.
A look at what happens to children who've lost parents to death, mental illness, addiction and other causes yielded some notable lessons for one reporter.
For a reporting project on food insecurity in Native American communities, finding the data was the easy, writes Lenzy Krehbiel-Burton. But finding families willing to talk candidly about the problem was much harder.
“He just gets mad. He gets really, really angry,” says Kecia Brighthaupt, referring to her 15-year-old son Jamari. “It would be a big difference in his behavior and certain things he does if his dad was more involved and hands on.”
In rural California, the state says the solutions to domestic violence require a cultural shift, that entire communities must take responsibility for ending violence against women. Now, new programs on the ancestral lands of the Yurok Tribe are trying to do that.
How tightly does childhood adversity correlate with later-in-life measures of well-being? A new study looks at public school kids who grew up in some of Chicago's poorest neighborhoods and finds some disheartening patterns.
"It's a common experience among many Asian American families — skillfully avoiding the topic of sex until absolutely necessary, which is often too late," reporter Thy Vo writes in part two of her series on discussions of sexuality in Asian American families.
We know "toxic stress" can have a devastating impact on the longterm health and well-being of children. But how do we counter its effects? It turns out that strengthening relationships and building resilience is key.
As journalist Ada Calhoun "started casting around for potential good news in the child welfare world," she began delving into the country's "baby courts," where judges take a far more active role in bringing families back together.
It has long been known that growing up in impoverished and dangerous neighborhoods such as Ferguson, Missouri dims life prospects. But now a commanding body of medical research presents a disturbing, biological picture of why.
