Children are Hungry! In The U.S. Children are Experiencing an Unprecedented Acceleration of Life-Threatening Dangers that Constitutes a Public Health Emergency and an Education Crisis
I asked AI, “What do you call it when the leader of a country denies children food?
AI responded, “When the leader of a country intentionally denies food to children or a civilian population as a deliberate tactic, it is referred to as:
o Using hunger or starvation as a weapon of war.
o A war crime or a crime against humanity.”
Intentionally using starvation of civilians is a war crime under international law.
In certain circumstances, widespread or systematic food deprivation that leads to death or severe suffering may also be prosecuted as a crime against humanity, such as inhumane acts or extermination.
Blocking the free passage or timely delivery of essential humanitarian assistance (including food, water, and medicine) to civilians is a grave violation of international humanitarian law and can also amount to a war crime or crime against humanity.
Most of the literature focuses on food becoming a weapon of war but there is less written about a leader and his government denying food to his own people. There are exceptions. Stalin engineered the starvation of between 3.5 and 7 million people of whom 33% are estimated to have been children. Pol Pot used starvation and malnutrition to cause the death of 1.5 to 3 million people, and the indication again is that one third of those who died were children.
Today the President of the United States, his administration and Congress are withholding food from 16 million children – 42 million people, and 39% are children, 11% of participants are younger than 5, and 28% are school-age children.
Let’s call it what it is – the denial of the food subsidies provided by SNAP to 42 million people, of whom 16 million are children, is an act of moral depravity that will negatively impact the lives of many children for as long as they live. The numbers of children experiencing the consequences of malnutrition will be mitigated by the kindness of the American people stepping up, but many children will still suffer, and some are likely to die.
Even with SNAP multiple JAMA sources report that approximately 45% of deaths among children under 5 years of age are linked to undernutrition – meaning a person is not getting enough nutrients to grow and thrive.
In 2023, 47.4 million people lived in food-insecure households in the US, which included nearly 14 million children. This represented about 13.5% of the population, a statistically significant increase from the previous year. One in five American children may be struggling with access to food. Food insecurity can impact mental health and increase anxiety, Poor nutrition can result in a weaker immune system, increased hospitalization, and death
I Remember Going Without Food When I Was A Small Child
The experience of being hungry, really hungry, sticks with you. Even when you are seventy or eighty years of age you can still be experiencing the consequences of what happened to you.
Both my Welsh grandfathers were coalminers and when my father was fourteen, he too became a coalminer. But he left Wales when he was 20 and spent 4 years in Birmingham working the furnaces in the Dunlop tire factory.
On December 23, 1939, my father married my mother in Wales, and they spent Christmas together. Then my father enlisted in the Royal Engineers and was gone for 6 years. Because of his experiences digging tunnels as well as coal underground he spent the war digging ditches and building bridges in North Africa and Europe. For sixty-six months of service, he received ten shillings a month, which amounted to a “war gratuity” of £33 pounds.
His military conduct was noted as “exemplary,” and his “testimonial” stated, “Before enlisted worked as a Rubber Worker for 4 years and wishes to go back to this job. Has been employed for 6 years as a miner. Proved himself to be an excellent man and good worker.”
My father was working the furnaces at Dunlop’s when I was born so we had a place to live, and we had food. It was brutal work, so when I was two years old my father spent six months in London training to be an RSPCA inspector. My mother and I stayed in Birmingham and every week my father mailed a 10-shilling note to my mother, and she did her best to buy food for the week.
Often there was very little to eat from Thursday to Saturday and even as a very old woman she still talked about it, almost always ending with the story of going to my Aunty Maisy’s hoping she would feed us. As my mother used to tell the story, one Thursday when we had no food until the envelope arrived on Saturday with the ten-shilling note from my father, my mother took me to my Aunty Maisy’s hoping she would give my mother a cup of tea and give me a piece of toast. My mother didn’t ask, and my Aunty Maisy didn’t offer my mother a cup of tea or me a piece of toast, and so we left her house hungry.
On the path leading from the council houses where Aunty Maisy lived my mother found half-a-crown, also called two-and-six pence. My mother quickly put it in her pocket, and she took me to the fish and chip shop, and we sat and ate fish and chips in grease-proof paper wrapped-up in newspaper. Even when my mother could no longer tell her cherished stories the story of going to Aunty Maisy’s and finding the half-a-crown and eating fish and chips still came to her and her eyes sparkled, and her cheeks turned pink.
What is important about this story is although we went hungry my mother and father had hope for the future. They knew in the end we would be alright, and I was cared for in a way that has sustained me throughout my life. For many, perhaps most, children who experience food deprivation there is not always an end to their suffering.
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) was updated July 27, 2015. The CRC is a legally binding international agreement that outlines the civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights of all children. The CRC was ratified by 196 countries. The only country not to ratify the CRC is the United States.
It is the most widely ratified human rights treaty in history in force in virtually every country of the world. It provides a common ethical and legal framework to protect children’s rights. I write “virtually” because the U.S. is the only U.N. member state that has not ratified the CRC and the updates in 2015.
The U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child protects children and family’s rights:
Article 3: In all actions concerning children, whether undertaken by public or private social welfare institutions, courts of law, administrative authorities or legislative bodies, the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration.
Article 19: States Parties shall take all appropriate legislative, administrative, social and educational measures to protect the child from all forms of physical or mental violence, injury or abuse, neglect or negligent treatment, maltreatment or exploitation, including sexual abuse, while in the care of parent(s), legal guardian(s) or any other person who has the care of the child.
The refusal of the U.S, to ratify the CRC adds another layer to government abuse of children.
On November 7, 2025, Supreme Court issued an emergency order that temporarily blocks a lower court ruling requiring the Trump administration to issue full Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) payments for the month of November amid an ongoing government shutdown.
If the U.S. had ratified the CRC the country would be in violation of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child for maltreatment and political exploitation. Decisions reached by the Supreme Court are based on the Constitution, statutes, and existing legal precedents. The decision to temporarily block the lower court ruling and allow the President to withhold $4 billion needed to fully fund the food aid program, reveals a fundamental flaw in the American Constitution which has allowed the Judges’ order not to feed 16 million children.
In the U.S. every aspect of children’s lives is negatively affected by federal and state laws, policies, and mandates that increases their vulnerability. Their best interests are disregarded, their right to an education exploited, their right to read sold to the highest bidder, and their right to clean air and a cool climate sacrificed by the President for Big Oil to make billions.
Children In The U.S. Are Amongst The Most Vulnerable In The World
The “Science of Reading” State Laws Are Makes Their Lives Worse
The September 3, 2020, Innocenti Report Card 16 entitled, Worlds of Influence: Understanding what shapes child well-being in rich countries, reveals children’s experiences against the backdrop of their country’s policies and social, educational, economic and environmental contexts. Regarding children’s health, skills, and happiness the U.S. is at the bottom of the pile. A table of 39 countries places the United States at 36th in overall ranking. American children are ranked 32nd in mental well-being, 38th in physical health, and 32nd in skills.
The Innocenti Report Card’s definition of “skills” differs from the definition of skills common in the U.S., especially as it applies to the “science of reading” which contends children cannot learn to read without direct instruction in phonemic awareness, phonics, and decoding pseudowords.
Innocenti states, “As we push towards improving numeracy and literacy, it’s critically important that we don’t forget that there are other important skills that we want children to develop.” ( Italics added)
In the U.S. extreme stress events are endemic, impacting children’s physical and mental health and their sense of well-being. SoR is exacerbating their vulnerabilities at a time when they are already experiencing the intensification of life-threatening risks. SoR doubles the risk that children will not develop the problem-solving capabilities they will need to respond to the climate and ecological crises that are inevitably going to take place. SoR commercial reading programs which focus on teaching phonemic awareness and explicit phonics misdirect children away from their morphological encounters with written language to meaningless phonological encounters that focus on pronouncing phonemes, associating phonemes with graphemes, and pronouncing isolated pseudowords and isolated words. SoR interrupts children’s emerging ability to meaningfully communicate using written language.
The ethnographic accounts of young children learning to read and write that are included in many Substack posts are based on years of observation and provide scientific evidence that SoR can inhibit the development of children’s problem-solving capabilities and life-coping skills. The descriptions of children’s early reading and writing experiences are derived from 50 years of research on young children learning to read and write, and on longitudinal ethnographic research that calls into question the research on which the SoR is based. This research includes NRP studies in which the “treatments” lasted for as little as 1 hour to 5 hours that were then used to make National recommendations which were not supported by the original studies the NRP included in their meta-analyses.
In “The Big Lie about the “Science of Reading,” published in 2019 by the National Educational Policy Center, Paul Thomas “addressed the use of the “science of reading” as veneer for ideological advocacy.” Thomas writes that the “science of reading” is used to support “very bad forms of reading legislation, notably third grade retention and systematic intensive phonics for all students.”
Thomas deconstructs NAEP and I am on the same page as Thomas on all counts, but I would go further and state that the SoR is causing an existential crisis for children and that the SoR is a perturbing element in the global polycrisis humanity is experiencing. Publishers of SoR reading programs sell them globally. The damage done in the U.S. ricochets around the world, redirecting children’s learning to a fragmented phonological view of language that increases their vulnerability when life becomes precarious.
Nevertheless, we can respond and change the future if we act quickly. Two steps among the many that must be taken are our focus here. First, the U.S. education system must be rapidly called into question so that children can be taught to read and write using developmentally appropriate instructional practices. Second, and concomitant with the first, policy makers and the public must work together to overcome the life-threatening circumstances in which American children live their everyday lives.
THE HAZARDS IGNORED BY THE “SCIENCE OF READING” STATE LAWS
I keep returning to the proposition that every effort must be made to end the harmful societal conditions that place the lives of children at risk. Great transformations must take place in U.S. public schools if children are to survive, now and in the future. It is vitally important that parents, teachers, the public, and especially policymakers are aware of the vast range of hazardous condition that are part of American children’s everyday lives
In the next few pages, you will find data on many of the harmful circumstances in which American children live their everyday lives. It is vitally important that parents, teachers, the public, and especially policymakers are aware of the vast range of hazardous condition that are part of American children’s everyday lives. You might want to scan the list of hazards, delving into some and just taking a quick look at others. The most important thing is that you get through the list and spend some time considering the last section of the post which focuses on the transformations that are urgently needed to make life better for America’s children.
The U.S. Child Mortality Rate Highest in the Industrial World
The Innocenti Report Card 16 states, “Among the richer countries in our list, the United States stands out. It has a higher child mortality rate than countries with similar levels of per capita income.” Many of the societal hazards included below frequently lead to the death of children. It is important to note here that the United States is first among the rich countries included in the Innocenti Report Card to withhold food from 16 million children for political gain and children will die because of it.
Trauma is the leading cause of death for children in the U.S.
The acceleration of life-threatening dangers to children in the U.S. is a public health emergency that is largely ignored. More children and adolescents are killed by firearms than in any other way. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) showed a total of 45,222 firearm-related deaths in the United States in 2020 — a new peak. From 2019 to 2022, the firearm death rate among children and adolescents increased by 46% (from 2.4 to 3.5 per 100,000). This translates to seven children per day dying by firearms in 2022. An upcoming Substack post will focus on school mass shootings.
The harsh reality is that children in public schools are at risk of major trauma and, by association, trauma-related mortality and morbidity. This circumstance requires more than a paragraph in this list. Here the purpose is to share some insights into the weight of guns killing children on members of the medical profession who respond to children with major traumas as they try to save them, and by extension the mothers and fathers, brothers and sister who wait in the hospital traumatized by the life and death situation. When a child is killed by gun fire whole classrooms of children are traumatized.
Jillian K. Gorski, MD, and eight other medical doctors published a paper entitled, “Comparison of Vital Sign Cutoffs to Identify Children With Major Trauma,” in JAMA Network Open, February 16, 2024. Gorski and her colleagues included 70,748 children who had experienced a life threating trauma in 2021. The median (IQR) patient age was 11 (5-15) years, and 63.4% were male and 35.2% female. These researchers analyzed vital sign thresholds within age groups of 0 to 3 months, 3 to 6 months, 6 to 9 months, 9 to 12 months, 1 to 3 years, 3 to 6 years, 6 to 9 years, 9 to 12 years, and more than 12 years. The researchers identified pediatric trauma victims with abnormal vital signs using empirically-derived vital sign cutoffs,, and found that these abnormal vital signs were associated with major trauma in these young patients. The intent of the research is to improve the care of injured children who are trauma victims by providing a set of standards that appropriately balances sensitivity and specificity in identifying children at risk of trauma-related morbidity.
Suicide remains the second-leading cause of death for children and adolescents in the US
JAMA reports that between 2013-2017 suicide was the eighth leading cause of death among children aged 5 to 11 years, with rates increasing during the past decade. School problems were present in more than one-third of the victim’s cases. One in 4 of the child victims has a history of trauma. JAMA also report that From 2018 to 2021, suicide was the second leading cause of death for adolescents aged 10 to 14 years and the third leading cause of death among those aged 15 to 19 years.
The death rate for children increased in 2023. Children are dying because of gun violence in their communities and mass shootings in their schools. There has been an unprecedented increase in suicide in elementary school children, and suicide is the second leading cause of death for young people between the ages of 10 and 24 years.
There is a Rapid Increase in Pediatric Deaths
There is a surge in pediatric deaths from illicit opioid and fentanyl poisoning. In addition to parents dying of gun violence and fentanyl and opioid poisoning, 2.5 million children are homeless in the U.S. and almost 500,000 are in foster care. Thirteen million children experienced hunger in 2022, and one in every five children are unsure where they will get their next meal. Based on the data, in the U.S. 20% of children in the U.S. experience extremely harmful deprivations and societal traumas that endanger their lives at any given time.
1,473,700 Children Had a Parent in Prison in 2016
The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that nearly half (47%) of the approximately 1.25 million people in the state prisons are parents of minor children, with state and federal prisoners reportedly having an estimated 1,473,700 minor children in 2016. Among minor children of parents in state prison, 1% were younger than age 1, about 18% were ages 1 to 4, and 48% were age 10 or older. The average age of a minor child with parents in federal prison was 10 years old.
100,000 Children Lost a Parent in a 2022
JAMA reports that In 2022 alone 100,000 children in the U.S. lost a parent to a fatal drug overdose or gun violence.
More children lost a parent in that single year than the number children who have lost a parent globally in hot wars. In Ukraine 10,000 civilians and 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers were killed in 2022.
As of October 2024, an estimated 1,969 children in Ukraine had lost parental care due to the direct consequences of the war, such as the death or disappearance of their parents. The extreme plight of American children is evident.
1,000,000 Children Lost A Parent Or Both Parents In The Last Two Decades To Drugs And Gun Violence
In “Youth Experiencing Parental Death Due to Drug Poisoning and Firearm Violence in the US, 1999-2020,” JAMA reports that “US youth are at high and increasing risk of experiencing parental death by drugs or firearms. Efforts to stem this problem should prioritize averting drug overdoses and firearm violence, especially among structurally marginalized groups.” Schluter and his coauthors state, “From 1999 to 2020, the estimated number of youth who experienced parental death increased 345% (95% CI, 334%-361%) due to drug poisoning and 39% (95% CI, 37%-41%) due to firearms, compared with 24% (95% CI, 23%-25%) due to all other causes. (Note: CI means “confident interval”) Black youth experienced a disproportionate burden of parental deaths, based primarily on firearm deaths among fathers. In 2020, drugs and firearms accounted for 23% of all parental deaths, double the proportion in 1999 (12%).”
Gun Violence In The United States Is A Public Health Crisis
Gun violence n the United States is a public health crisis, with severe consequences for the nation’s youth. In 2019, gun injury became the leading cause of death among children aged birth to 19 years, surpassing vehicle-related deaths for the first time. In 2020, the United States was the only country among its higher-income peers in which guns were the leading cause of death among children and adolescents.
The Pew Research Center reports the number of children and teens killed by gunfire in the United States increased 50% between 2019 and 2021, according to their analysis of the latest annual mortality statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Homicide was the largest single category of gun deaths among children and teens in 2021, accounting for 60% of the total that year. It was followed by suicide at 32% and accidents at 5%. Among U.S. adults, by contrast, suicides accounted for a 55% majority of gun deaths in 2021. For all three age groups, homicide was the leading type of gun death in 2021. But suicides accounted for a significant share (36%) of gun deaths among those ages 12 to 17, while accidents accounted for a sizable share (34%) of gun deaths among those 5 and under.
“Gun violence in the United States is a public health crisis,” Luke Rapa et al., state in an article published in Pediatrics (March 4, 2024) entitled, “School Shootings in the United States: 1997–2022.” Rapa and his colleagues report gun injuries in 2019 became the leading cause of death among children aged birth to 19 years. Rapa et al state:
Sadly, children’s exposure to gun violence in the United States, including gun violence associated with school shootings, has become commonplace over the past quarter century. The Columbine High School massacre that occurred in April 1999 heightened American discourse—and remains symbolically at the forefront of the American psyche—about school-related gun violence. Since that time, gun violence has come to typify schooling experiences of the nation’s youth. As such, the issue of gun violence in the United States, including school-related gun violence, demands continued attention, especially in terms of its effects on youth.
The U.S. Has Had 57 Times As Many School Shootings As All Other Major Industrialized Nations Combined
A total of 93 school shootings with casualties occurred in elementary and secondary schools during the 2020-2021 school year (defined as July 1, 2020, through June 30, 2021), which is more than in any other year since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began collecting such data.
Children know that in America kids are killed in their classrooms by shooters, and many of the children also know that when the Uvalde elementary school massacre took place the children faced the gunman alone. No one came to save them. Based on many years of first response field research in the aftermath of disasters the final section of this policy brief provides curricular changes to support children experiencing individual and mass traumas.
“We want to live,” a high school student says when I sit with her and her friends to listen to them as they talk about the gun violence they have survived in their school. She talks about her younger sister who is in first grade and how she is frightened she will be shot and killed in her classroom.
“We want to live,” she repeats, “we want to go to school and learn.” Her friends agree with her, and they all talk about the fear experienced not only by themselves, but also by younger children in their families. “They are terrified,” one of them says. “We are terrified. Tell people we want to live.”
There are detrimental outcomes for every child in America and especially for those children who have experience school-related gun violence firsthand. School-based interventions are urgently required to address this public health crisis. School curricula practices, especially in reading and writing, must support students’ mental health and behavioral needs of children as well as their academic development.
But the life circumstances that hurt many children were ignored by NRP reading researchers who analyzed the experimental studies included in their meta-analyses, even though the report was published at the time of the Columbine massacre when 12 students and one teacher were jilled and 21 were injured by gun fire. Sandy Hook, Parkland and Uvalde are indelibly seared into the American psyche, and yet the negative impact on the health and well-being of the children is ignored in reductive experimental studies in which SES and reading “disabilities
1 In 5 Kindergarten Children Are Experiencing Anxiety And Depression
In the United States there is rapid increase in children in kindergarten and first grade who are experiencing emotional stress including anxiety and depression. Harvard University Center for the Developing Child states, “Toxic stress, which is the result of strong, frequent, and/or prolonged biological responses to adversity, can damage the architecture of the developing brain and increase the likelihood of significant mental health problems that may emerge either quickly or years later.”
More Than 154,000 NYC Public School Students Experienced Homelessness During The 2024-2025 School Year
154,000 New York City public school children in the 2024-2025 school year are homeless – which is 14% of the children in NYC public schools. This is a significant increase from the 2022–2023 school year in which 119,320 New York City schoolchildren in the NYC public school experienced homelessness – which 11% of the children
The primary reason people in NYC become homeless is the lack of affordable housing. Homelessness in NYC has reached the highest level since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Surveys of homeless families have identified the following major, immediate, triggering causes of homelessness in NYC: eviction; doubled-up or severely overcrowded housing; domestic violence; job loss; and hazardous housing conditions.
It important to note that housing instability, as measured by eviction filings, was associated with significantly increased risk of death
Children Who Experience ICE Raids Are At Risk Of Long-Term Health Problems And Negative Educational Outcomes
Attacks on immigrants and mass deportations are negatively impacting the lives of children, and their social, emotional, physical, and academic development. Children who witness an ICE raid are also negatively impacted.
On Thursday, November 5, 2025, there was a news report on multiple channels that federal armed and masked immigration agents entered a pre-school and forcibly removed the children’s teacher who came to the U.S. in 2023 and has a pending asylum application and a valid work permit. She is being held at the ICE facility and lawyers are working to secure her release. In the meantime, parents have reported that the little children in her classroom are frightened and exhibiting stress reactions to the violence they witnessed. It is highly likely that some of the children will remember for as long as they live the masked men who dragged their teacher out of their classroom.
The American Immigration Council reports that large-scale raids by ICE impacts school attendance for students with friends or family members affected by raids. After a mass raid in eastern Tennessee occurred in April 2018, more than 500 students were absent from school the following day.
Many children end up in the child welfare system following the detention or deportation of a parent, and there are limited mechanisms to safeguard the parental rights of parents who are detained or deported.
There are no up-to-date statistics on the number of children who are impacted by the immigration policy of the President and his Administration but the Amerrcial Immigration Council reports that The American Immigration Council reports that 17.8 million children in the United States had at least one foreign-born parent, including parents who were naturalized citizens, lawfully present immigrants, or undocumented immigrants, as of 2019.
Estimates of 8.2 million children or higher are exposed to Intimate Partner Violence and Other Family Violence Each year
In the Juvenile Justice Bulletin article, “Children’s Exposure to Intimate Partner Violence and Other Family Violence,” Sherry Hamby, David Finkelhor, Heather Turner, and Richard Ormrod, present the findings of the U.S. Department of Justice 2011 National Survey of Children’s Exposure to Violence (NatSCEV). In the report Hamby et al present the findings of the NatSCEV survey of exposure to family violence among children in the United States, included exposure to intimate partner violence (IPV), assaults by parents on siblings of children surveyed, and other assaults involving teen and adult household members. They write,
These results confirm that children are exposed to unacceptable rates of violence in the home. More than 1 in 9 (11 percent) were exposed to some form of family violence in the past year, including 1 in 15 (6.6 percent) exposed to IPV (Intimate Partner Violence) between parents (or between a parent and that parent’s partner). One in four children (26 percent) were exposed to at least one form of family violence during their lifetimes. Most youth exposed to family violence, including 90 percent of those exposed to IPV, saw the violence.
Increased Childhood Drug Overdose Deaths
JAMA also reports that 8986 children and adolescents died between 1999 and 2016 from prescription and illicit opioid poisonings. During this time, the mortality rate increased 268.2%. Yales School of Medicine qualifies this data reporting that since 2013, pediatric deaths from fentanyl have risen 3,000%.
Pediatric Deaths From Fentanyl Have Risen 3,000% Since 2013
JAMA reports that there is a steep rise In childhood drug overdose deaths. 8986 children and adolescents died between 1999 and 2016 from prescription and illicit opioid poisonings. During this time, the mortality rate increased 268.2%. The Yale School of Medicine adds to this data by reporting that since 2013, pediatric deaths from fentanyl have risen 3,000%.
Fentanyl was implicated in 5,194 (38%) of the 13,861 fatal pediatric opioid poisonings between 1999 and 2021. In 1999, only around 5% of opioid deaths in children were due to fentanyl, but in 2021, the drug was responsible for 94% of deaths. Pediatric deaths from fentanyl began to rise substantially in 2013, around the same time fentanyl deaths also trended upward for adults. Since 2013, pediatric deaths from fentanyl have risen 3,000%.
Children’s Deaths from Opioid Poisoning
JAMA Adolescent drug overdose mortality more than doubled between 2019 and 2021, with most deaths involving opioids. An estimated 1 in 100 adolescents aged 12 to 17 years has an opioid use disorder (OUD).
Chronic Absenteeism Increased From 15 Percent In The 2018-2019 School Year To 30 Percent In 2021-2022
The White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) states that chronic absenteeism negatively affects the economy and may diminish the job markets with a loss of up to $2 trillion in lifetime earnings. The CEA uses the drop in test scores – correlational at best – to raise alarm, stating, “Beyond test scores, irregular attendance can be a predictor of high school drop-out which has been linked to poor labor market prospects.”
JAMA Pediatrics published a paper by Michelle Shanker, Danielle Dooley, and Rushina Cholera on June 24, 2024, that uses of school attendance data to identify unmet health and social needs. They state, “Unmet health and social needs, such as acute and chronic illness, mental health needs, housing insecurity, and community violence, are key drivers of chronic absenteeism. … reflecting the impact of long-standing structural inequities that influence health and education” none of which are addressed by the White House CEA but are addressed in coming Substack posts.
Screen Time Negatively Affects Neurological Development
In JAMA studies report that consistent associations have been observed between screen time and the communication and problem-solving domains of young children. One meta-analysis reported an association between screen time and language development, and a cross-sectional study found an association between screen time and communication, problem-solving, and personal and social skills.
There is increasing evidence that screen time interferes with the brain development of children as young as one year. That screen time impacts brain development through childhood and significantly effects adolescent neural development and psychological adjustment. The dangers of screen time interfering with the neurological development of children is unmonitored, ignored, and covered-up. It is highly likely that the impact of screen time on the architecture of children’s brains is exponentially increasing given the massive shift at educational publishers are making to digital programs.
The conclusion based on scientific studies is that children who are required to spend their school days in front of a computer screen are at risk of maladaptive changes occurring to their brain architecture that could severely impact their social, emotional, and intellectual development, especially their capacity for collaboration with peers and their emergent problem-solving capabilities.
Children’s First Exposure To Pornography Is Reported to be as Young as 7 - 11 Years Of Age
Children are exposed to damaging images of violent rape on social media, normalizing sexual harm, and negatively impacting their health and well-being.
In 2012 the UK Independent Parliamentary Inquiry into Online Child Protection found that exposure to pornography has a negative impact on children’s attitudes to sex, relationships and body image. The report produced by the Office of the Children’s Commissioner (OCC) is entitled “Basically... porn is everywhere”: A Rapid Evidence Assessment on the Effect that Access and Exposure to Pornography has on Children and Young People. It was authored by Miranda A.H. Horvath, Llian Alys, Kristina Massey, Afroditi Pina, Mia Scally and Joanna R. Adler. Horvath et al state:
It is unclear whether pornography is more extreme and violent today than in the past. What is clear, however, is that children’s access to pornography is fundamentally different from that of previous generations because of the prevalence of these materials on the internet. Explicit sex and violent still and moving images depicting rape, bestiality, the use of pain and humiliation are potentially just a few clicks away. The proliferation of smartphones and tablets and their use by children and young people to access the internet, often away from adult supervision, make it very difficult for parents to control access to these images. In addition, there is a significant problem of sexual bullying and harassment through children and young people sending personal, intimate images to others; this can have profoundly distressing consequences.
The researchers conclude, “Most worrying, the evidence here shows that exposure to sexualised (UK sp) and violent imagery affects children and young people and that there are links between violent attitudes and violent media.”
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Child Sexual Exploitation
AI is an unknown frontier that is perhaps a final frontier for humanity. The Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk considers AI to be an existential risk. At a minimum the known risks of AI include bias, privacy violations, scams, fraud, cyber-attacks, discrimination, and misinformation. Research on the harms of AI manipulated media—like mis- and disinformation, deepfakes, and other AI-generated deceptions – remain largely unknown. However, there is sufficient evidence to state that A.I. generated images are being used to harass, humiliate and bully elementary, middle, and high school students. AI generated sexually explicit and violent images of children and youth have been documented, but there are no laws, rules, or regulations to stop the harm to children’s mental health, and physical safety.
These indisputable facts require an urgent response, first denouncing the public and private entities that have garnered control of public education and how children are taught to read for billions in profits, and second to re-establish public schools as places of learning that protect the health and well-being of children who know the risks that take when they go to school.
The Impacts Of Climate Change Intersect With And Compound Other Factors That Threaten Child Development and Youth Mental Health
The 2023 report Mental Health and Our Changing Climate Children and Youth co-authored by Susan Clayton, Christie Manning, Alison Nicole Hill, Meighen Speiser write:
Children and youth face a myriad of challenges today. The impacts of climate change intersect with and compound other factors that threaten youth mental health, including child development, parental health, increasing rates of depression and suicide, racism, poverty, housing security, adequate nutrition, and access to medical care, as well as major societal issues like COVID-19, gun violence, social media, and much more.
The acute impacts of climate change, such as weather disasters, can cause trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the short term, and many longer-term mental health challenges in the absence of proper interventions. Extreme weather events make children vulnerable to mental health effects due to their dependence on parents and other caregivers and their lack of coping strategies compared to adults. The longer-term impacts of climate change, such as heat, drought, and poor air quality can increase the risk of anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, cognitive function impairment, interpersonal aggression, and other mental health impacts.
I was a first responder in the immediate aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. I presented at global conferences on the impact of climate change on children in 209 and 2010, and at the Planet Under Pressure Conference in London in 2012, and I followed and written about COP global meetings on the climate crisis for many years. The monograph I wrote with my partner entitled The Carbon Clock is Ticking was presented at a virtual global meeting of climate scientists and well received. I will make it available to my Substack readers.
This year the White House has stated that the U.S. will not send any “high-level” representatives to COP30. For children the disengagement of the President and his Administration is an existential mistake.
Nik Martin with AFT, Reuters reports, “A Trump administration official said the ‘tide was turning’ on climate change, which the US President recently called the ‘greatest con job.’”
Dana Drugmand of Inside Climate News, October 26, 2025, reports that Trump and Republicans have joined Big Oil’s all-out push to shut down climate liability efforts. The impact on children’s lives will be extreme, and many children know that the climate crisis will impact what happens to them.
In my second post on Substack, I wrote about how children are especially vulnerable to the rapid increase in hazards that threaten humanity on an unprecedented scale. You can read it here:
The United Nations Office of Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) has defined 281 hazards — from floods and wildfires to pandemics and cyber threats – that are reducing the time we have left to respond to potentially cataclysmic events that acting in concert could create societal failure on a global scale.
You can expect more posts on how the dire consequences of the uptick in life impacting hazards is exacerbated by the obsolete Right-wing education policies and pedagogies that have been foisted on children and their teachers in public schools through ‘science of reading’ state laws that are non-responsive to the harsh realities of the lives of American children.
Children in school today are already impacted by a broad spectrum of interconnected threats, from climate-related issues like heatwaves to the new cyber dangers of artificial intelligence (AI).
Some of the children and young people in school today will be the ones who are tasked with developing comprehensive and cooperative strategies that involve multiple sectors of society, to respond to the rapid increase in hazards that are part of their everyday lives.
Children will not learn the competencies they will need if they spend their time in school sitting passively in front of a computer responding to stimulus-response phonological exercises in digitized “science of reading” commercial reading programs.
The Adverse Effects of Toxic Stress are Endemic in U.S. Public Schools and the Perverse Fixation on Scripted Reading Programs and Explicit Phonics Instruction by Policy Makers is Making Matters Worse
Reading and writing are tools teachers can use to reach and support children who have suffered traumas so grave that many of us cannot even imagine what has happened to them. Schools must step-up.
The transformations of the education system, especially teaching children to read and write, that I will post on Substack have a proven track record of supporting children who have experienced or are experiencing individual and/or mass traumas.
It is possible to minimize the effects of long-term toxic stress, but it will take rescinding the “science of reading” laws, and realistically that is unlikely to happen. Still, even small changes can make a big difference, and that is what we will focus on.
Sixty years of observing children has taught me that reading and writing are constitutive of many other aspects of children’s everyday lives, and the production of written texts is often embedded in their play. Observations of children’s written language engagement in their families, their schools, and communities, often in desperate circumstances, or in the aftermath of catastrophic events, has also made me appreciate the extraordinary role of reading and writing in children’s lives,, as they try to cope with all of the individual and shared adverse life experiences I have documented in this post.
When these evidence-based research experiences are combined with the study of 100 years of research by scholars in different professions, disciplines, and paradigms, the idea that reading and writing are language processes becomes an inescapable finding. The idea that reading is “not natural,” which is the contention of Reid Lyon and many proponents of the “science of reading,” represents a distortion of the scientific evidence, and this distortion is deleterious to the health and well-being of children as well as negatively impacting their reading and writing development.
My hope is that the post Observations of Young Children Writing Undermine Goldenberg and The “science of reading” Contention that “Phonics is the On-Ramp to Reading” has convinced you that the “science of reading” is a made-up concept that has no scientific validity.
The following recommendations for supporting children who have had adverse life experiences – which is a high proportion of children in the U.S. – have been reviewed by psychiatrists, early childhood specialists, and literacy researchers. Once again, the recommendations are based upon the findings of psychiatric and medical research and build on the advice of the National Child Stress Network.
There is a significant body of medical research which supports the proposition that children who have adverse life experiences can be become more resilient if: (1) their families are supported; (2) their schools focus on creating caring learning environments; and (3) they have the opportunity to regain a sense of hope through learning activities that have meaning in their everyday lives; and (4) they experience a sense of accomplishment.
Bessel van der Kolk (2005) emphasizes the importance of “establishing safety and competence for children who have experienced complex traumas. He writes:
o Complexly traumatized children need to be helped to engage their attention in pursuits that do not remind them of trauma-related triggers and that give them a sense of pleasure and mastery.
o Safety, predictability, and “fun” are essential for the establishment of the capacity to observe what is going on, put it into a larger context, and initiate physiological and motoric self- regulation.
o Before addressing anything else, these children need to be helped how to react differently from their habitual fight/flight/freeze reactions.
o Only after children develop the capacity to focus on pleasurable activities without becoming disorganized do they have a chance to develop the capacity to play with other children, engage in simple group activities and deal with more complex issues.” (p.7) (Emphasis added).
o It is important that we do everything we can to create schools as safe, joyful, playful places before life threatening events take place.”
It should go without saying that to foster resiliency in children, schools must make sure that children are not hungry and that the nutritional content of the food provided to them supports their growth and development. It is a crime against humanity to weaponize food, and stopping the distribution of food to children is an act of depravity.
A lifetime of scholarship and fieldwork focusing on children living in hazardous circumstances has convinced me that if children are to have the maximum opportunity to recover from traumatizing experiences – hunger, homelessness, losing a parent, sexual and physical abuse, the list is long – every effort should be made to:
o Establish schools as safe, joyful places for children and teachers.
o Ensure that schools are nurturing and fun environments in which play is central to the curriculum.
o Recognize the importance of the languages that children speak and respect their heritage and national identity.
o Fill their classrooms with books and provide daily opportunities for them to write – we know from the Substack account of Nicola’s experiences in kindergarten, writing on a daily basis before she knew all the letters of the alphabet, that children’s capacity to communicate through written language precedes their knowledge of standard orthography and phonics.
o Enhance academic learning through reading and writing activities across the curriculum and by ensuring reading and writing are constitutive of science and math projects.
o Promote children’s health and well-being by providing them with opportunities to sing, dance and play musical instruments.
o Minimize the amount of time children spend in meaningless decontextualized scripted reading programs that have no scientific validly that are the signature of the “science of reading” state laws.
o Welcome families and encourage parents and caregivers to actively participate in the life of the school through events that incorporate reading and writing in all activities including art, music, theater, dance, science, and literature.
If children are to be prepared for life’s uncertainties, including the government denying their human right to food, they will need much more than the unhealthy curricular practices now prevalent in our schools. Teaching them phonics skills in rote exercises to prepare children to increase their tests scores disenfranchises them by interfering with their innate capacity for meaning-making.
It is important to emphasize that teachers are not therapists, but there is much that educators can do to support the children they teach. Every attempt should be made to take care of the whole child, every child, and make school a joyful place for children to be.
I want to go back for a moment to the story I told at the beginning of this post. The six months when my father was in London, and my mother and I did not always have food to eat, ended when he finished his training and he became an RSPCA inspector in Ashford, Kent. My father had two allotments and grew all our vegetables, and he often came home from a farm with a churn of milk, some eggs or some meat.
After purchasing beds and a kitchen table and chairs my father bought an old upright piano and at three years of age I had piano lessons. My music teacher, Miss Henniker, began instructing me how to read music by teaching me to write musical symbols. We began with the treble clef. I can still make a treble clef the way Miss Henniker taught me. I was reading music before I went to the term in which I had my fifth birthday.
I appreciate that this example is anecdotal, but it is supported by empirical evidence. I have documented in longitudinal studies the lives of many children who live in economically challenging circumstances whose early reading and writing development was not restricted to mandated scripted reading programs or systematic explicit phonics.
When children have agency and are encouraged to be active, engaged, learners they often surprise us. When children were asked to share their ideas about improving their school, one ten-year-old offered the following suggestions:
Today I want to share how I want to make some positive changes to our school.
I would like to start by telling you a little about myself and what I am good at.
Firstly, I am particularly good at collaborating with other children of all ages.
I am a confident and passionate individual who believes that every child can make a positive change in the world.
I think that our school should do more outdoor activities. I recommend this because a lot of our pupils enjoy doing it.
It is also good for us as we are learning, going outside and having fun!
I would like to see every pupil in the school have the opportunity to be able to help themselves and each other – The Class Experts. Children should be able to write their name on a piece of paper and write their skill.
After that when they are doing lessons if they have some trouble, they can look at the list and ask that person for help, as they are confident with that skill.
That will allow children to be proud of themselves. Importantly, that will take stress off the teachers, as I believe every student has their own unique talent.
To solve the school issues in the yard I would like to show something I invented called the school postbox.
People will use this postbox for putting in feedback from the yard equipment.
For example, if there weren’t enough skipping ropes on the yard or more footballs, you would write a note in the school postbox.
There are other reasons to use the school postbox such as feedback from dinner, new ideas for school improvements or wellbeing.
Just remember to drop a note in the school postbox!
Believe, achieve, receive!
Yesterday, a friend in Wales, who is a Dad with two little children, sent me the lyrics of the song, Oxygen, by Willy Mason. My friend wrote that it had so much meaning for him when he first heard it in 2004 and even more meaning today. Here is the line from the lyrics that captures the essence of this post, “I know it’s hard to believe. But it’s easy to see that something here isn’t right, I know the future looks dark. But it’s there that the kids of today must carry the light.” It important that we name the perils that impact children’s lives and do our best to erase them. In this hazardous time we must do everything we can to ensure that children can live their lives in the light.
References for Children In The U.S. Are Experiencing An Unprecedented Acceleration Of Life-Threatening Dangers
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