For Parents and Care Givers

Child Maltreatment - Facts at a Glance

Child Maltreatment - by the CDC Violence Prevention

In 2007, U.S. state and local child protective services(CPS) investigated 3.2 million reports of children being abused or neglected.

1 • CPS classified 794,000 (10.6 per 1,000) of these children as victims. Approximately three quarters of them had no history of prior victimization.

Fifty-nine percent of the children were classified as victims of child neglect;

4 percent as victims of emotional abuse;

8 percent as victims of sexual abuse;

11 percent as victims of physical abuse.•

A non-CPS study reported that 14 percent of U.S. children experienced some form of child maltreatment:

8 percent were victims of sexual abuse;

22 percent were victims of child neglect;

48 percent were victims of physical abuse; and

75 percent were victims of emotional abuse.

2 Note: A child is counted each time she or he is a subject of a report, which means a child may be counted more than once as a victim of child maltreatment.

Click here to complete article http://mcrcc.typepad.com/parents/text/CM-DataSheet-a.pdf

Teaching Self-Control Skills to Children Reduces Classroom Problems

Teaching Self-Control Skills to Children Reduces Classroom Problems
March 05, 2010

Children taught skills to monitor and control their anger and other emotions improved their classroom behavior and had significantly fewer school disciplinary referrals and suspensions, according to a study by University of Rochester Medical Center researchers.

Children in a school-based mentoring program were about half as likely to have any discipline incident over the three-month period of the study, according to an article published online by the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology. They also had a 43 percent decrease in mean suspensions as compared to the control group, which did not receive mentoring of the self-control skills. In the four-month interval after the intervention began, 1.8 percent of children in the mentored group were suspended compared to 6.1 percent of the control group. Children taught the new skills also had a 46 percent decrease in mean office disciplinary referrals as compared to the children in the study’s control group

CLikc here for the complete article http://www.urmc.rochester.edu/news/story/index.cfm?id=2777

The Teen Brain

The Teen Brain: It's Just Not Grown Up Yet
By Richard KnoxPublished March 1, 2010 12:00 AM

When adolescence hit Frances Jensen's sons, she often found herself wondering, like all parents of teenagers, "What were you thinking?"

"It's a resounding mantra of parents and teachers," says Jensen, who's a pediatric neurologist at Children's Hospital in Boston.

Like when son number one, Andrew, turned 16, dyed his hair black with red stripes and went off to school wearing studded leather and platform shoes. And his grades went south.

"I watched my child morph into another being, and yet I knew deep down inside it was the same Andrew," Jensen says. Suddenly her own children seemed like an alien species.

Jensen is a Harvard expert on epilepsy, not adolescent brain development. As she coped with her boys' sour moods and their exasperating assumption that somebody else will pick up their dirty clothes, she decided to investigate what neuroscientists are discovering about teenagers' brains that makes them behave that way.

Teenage Brains Are Different

Full Story at  http://www.wbur.org/npr/124119468