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[quote=Anonymous][quote]I'm the person who recommended that book a few weeks ago! Thank you for reading it, and thank you for posting this. All these "personal choice and responsibility" posters make me sick. It's pretty hard to know what the right choices are when nobody ever modeled them for you, and your brain never gave you a chance to practice making healthy choices. We all have vices. We all turn to external sources to soothe our emotional states every once in a while.[/quote]

And I thank you for recommending that book.  I work in public health policy for HHS and it's remarkable to me how little we know about, let alone consider, the impact of adverse childhood experiences.  I'm encouraged to read recently that the Kentucky state department of health has named it as a public health priority.  We do spend a lot (though not nearly enough) on post-natal care and early childhood for kids born into poverty, but then care for children and young adults just sort of falls off.  And this book made understand, for the first time, that so much lifelong damage can happen in developing brains just from the stress levels of the mother when she's pregnant. There's also the study of the missed brain development that happens when child and mother are separated even for short periods in the first few months of life.  It puts the issue of maternity leave in a whole new light, and that cuts across socioeconomic status.

Ultimately, we continue to look at poverty and the opioid epidemic as matter of personal choice/responsibility, but we've failed in so many preventable ways as a society and culture.  Again, across SES.

I'm also overwhelmed and appalled by the stories of child abuse in this book.  There have been many times when I've had to put it down and walk away for awhile.  [/quote]

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