What would you do if you had to report child abuse?

Do you have a friend who needs to know how to report abuse or neglect?

Sometimes, youth workers just need to know what to do first — what to look for, what to ask about, what to steer clear of in the early hours of a crisis. Right now, this one is free. Crisis HelpSheets | Square One in a Crisis https://buff.ly/2p1201i

in-betweenness | this is who we are

Not fully child, not fully adult....

Adolescents can [glimpse their in-betweenness] by looking in the full-length mirror on back of the bathroom door. The opaque glance and the pimples. The fancy new nakedness they're all dressed up in with no place to go. The eyes full of secrets they have a strong hunch everybody is on to. The shadowed brow. Being not quite a child and not quite a grown-up either is hard work, and they look it. Living in two worlds at once is no picnic.  One of the worlds, of course, is innocence, self-forgetfulness, openness, playing for fun. The other is experience, self-consciousness, guardedness, playing for keeps. Some of us go on straddling them both for years.

.... 

We become fully and undividedly human, I suppose, when we discover that the ultimate prudence is a kind of holy recklessness, and our passion for having finds peace in our passion for giving, and playing for keeps is itself the greatest fun. Once this has happened and our adolescence is behind us at last, the delight of the child and the sagacity of the Supreme Court justice are largely indistinguishable. 

– Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark,  p. 2

Canary in a Coal Mine | Young, Hoping + Coping

     Children are often the first to succumb to toxic cultural conditions. Look around, it’s not hard to see that for some, the song is over before it’s barely begun.
    In this connection, much has been made of adolescent suicide, as should be. Confirmed reporting of data on causes of death lags well behind real time. We know that, in 2014:

425 10-14-year-olds died by suicide

1,837 15-19-year-olds died by suicide

3,253 20-24-year-olds died by suicide

Including 20-24-year-olds is an artifact of the first wave of reporting in which, other than 10-14-year-olds, the numbers are often released in 10-year groupings—15-24-year-olds, 25-34-year-olds, and so on. A lot of us are accustomed to thinking of teen suicide differently than young adult suicide, much as we’re accustomed to think differently about 24-year-olds and 15-year-olds giving birth. But maybe it’s useful to consider the lives of people in the five years after their teens. Most of us don't think typical 24-year-olds have much in common with typical 15-year-olds, but many 24-year-olds are still within reach of help from people they knew and trusted when they were 15 (as well as people they might have trusted at 15, had they known them).
    In any event, in 2014, the rate of suicides spiked from about nine per 100,000 15-19-year-olds to about 14 per 100,000 20-24-year-olds. That spike is typical of recent years. For people endeavoring to raise adults, this is sad news.
    The vulnerability of American children and adolescents is measured in more ways than suicide. For example, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention conducts longterm Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance that does more or less what it sounds like: The YRBS studies risky behavior in America’s student population. These indicators suggest that, in general, things are not as good as we wish, and not bad as we fear.

    Here’s a sampling from the High School Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance 2015 Results:

    If you’ve been told things are getting worse all the time, the data show that is not true. Much of the conduct measured in the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance is trending less risky compared to the peak between 1991 and 2015. Any-is-too-many, yes…but let’s give credit where credit is due. In many ways, the current crop of high schoolers are doing better than, or about as well as, the generation before them at the same age.
    Having said that, we return to the any-is-too-many theme. Kids in trouble are in as much trouble as kids in trouble ever were. Their families suffer the same sort of distress all distressed families always suffer.
    When teenagers take risks in reaction to real life stress—self-medicating against pain, for instance, or non-suicidal self harm to deflect pain—they are trying to do what people have always tried to do. They are trying to cope.

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in the wind | tweets from the week ending 07.13.13

Are retailers flogging Back-to-School early? Some are/some aren't. What's it to you? http://bit.ly/10IMIt1

Scientist finally get around to measuring teenage sleep + the causes + effects of sleepiness http://bit.ly/14XXfjw

what if straight was gay + gay was straight http://jimhancock.blogspot.com 

one more thought about class diagnosis | a small idea from Raising Adults http://jimhancock.blogspot.com

class diagnosis in a nutshell | a small idea from Raising Adults

I’ve long been dismayed at lists of danger signs parents should watch out for in their children—lists that include things like:

• New, different friends  
• Changes in eating or sleeping patterns
• Fatigue
• Weight gain or loss
• Lower achievement in school
• Changes in dress style
• Changes in musical taste
• Belligerence
• Spending large amounts of time alone behind closed doors

Sorry, but with the exception of radical weight gains and losses, or precipitous drops in achievement, these changes are so common among adolescents as to be normal. Can such things signal the first step down a slippery slope to drug abuse or dropping out? Perhaps. But they can also indicate the sudden discovery of snow boarding or basketball or country music.

Look, I’m as concerned about the country music problem as the next guy, but I’m not gonna panic if my kid comes home wearing a retro Hank Williams T-shirt. There could be a perfectly innocent explanation. Like, “The dog ate my Flaming Lips shirt.” I’ll be danged if I’m gonna start World War III over a stupid T-shirt, no matter how stupid the shirt is. And for the record, some of my best friends are dedicated country music fans. [i]