Until recently, health care professionals and educators would look at an unruly or seemingly unteachable child as the problem, said Dr. Heather C. Forkey.
“We would’ve asked the question, ‘what’s wrong with them?’” said Dr. Forkey, chief of the Division of Child Protection at UMass Memorial Medical Center. “It turns out, we were asking the wrong question.”
The right question, which she said has a lead to a “revolution” in pediatric care and education, is not what’s wrong with those kids, but what happened to them that made them that way. Many of them, researchers have discovered over the past two decades, suffered trauma that not only negatively affected their emotional well-being, but also worsened their mental health, their physical health – and even altered their DNA. Read more
