NCTSN Helps Judges’ Journal
Focus on Child Trauma

The National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges invited the NCTSN Judicial Education Workgroup to prepare a special edition of the Juvenile and Family Court Journal.  The issue, to be released this month, focuses on the impact of child trauma in the lives of children and adolescents coming before the juvenile and family courts.

The Journal is sent to over 1,700 juvenile and family court judges, court administrators, probation workers, attorneys, social workers and others around the country who work with courts. The goal of this special issue is to provide members of the judiciary with practical information and tools to improve responses to children and youth who have experienced trauma.

Joy Osofsky and Erna Olafson lead the NCTSN Judicial Education Workgroup. The group plans to create Technical Assistance Briefs for judges as well as develop future papers.

Nine experts from the Network wrote articles for the Journal. A number of these articles were co-authored with juvenile and family court judges. The articles cover child trauma and maltreatment as they affect child development, pathways from maltreatment to delinquency, children’s disclosure patterns, evaluating medical evidence in child sexual abuse cases, making trauma-informed decisions in visitation and custody cases, trauma intervention in rural areas and methods to protect and support children in the child welfare system and the courtroom.

Copies of the Juvenile and Family Court Journal are available here.

Parents of Children with Cancer
Suffer PTS Symptoms

Parents of children with cancer commonly suffer symptoms of posttraumatic stress (PTS), both during treatment and years after their children survive the disease, say researchers at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

"We have found, time and again, that we need to approach and treat these types of traumatic stress from a family perspective," said study leader Anne E. Kazak, director of psychology and co-director of the Center for Pediatric Traumatic Stress at Children's Hospital.

The researchers published two studies of PTS symptoms in mothers and fathers of children with cancer. One, in the October 20, 2005 issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology, focuses on parents' symptoms while their children's cancer treatments are going on. The study team found that among 119 mothers and 52 fathers, all but one parent had some PTS symptoms.

The second study, in the November 2005 issue of the Journal of Family Psychology, describes patterns of stress symptoms in 98 couples who were parents of an adolescent survivor of childhood cancer. The adolescents had completed treatment an average of five years before the study.  In a majority of families studied, at least one of the parents had moderate to severe PTS.

To improve medical providers' awareness of child traumatic stress and their ability to intervene, NCTSN members created the Pediatric Medical Traumatic Stress Tool Kit for Healthcare Providers, available here.