"While this book reads like fiction, the story is all too typical of the experience of families in the Nation's child welfare system. Summaries in each chapter on what we know, or don't know about ways to address the results of trauma are invaluable for anyone working in child welfare. This is essential reading for anyone engaged in child welfare ... Read moreadvocacy, policy or systems reform."
Carole Shauffer, JD, MEd, Senior Director, Strategic Initiatives, Youth Law Center "Kaufman seamlessly links her authentic, compelling, and riveting case history of one family's journey through the US child welfare system to the underlying research in neuroscience, epidemiology, and evidence-based practice. I highly recommend this powerful clinical, scientific, and policy page-turner to all concerned with improving services for children and families who have experienced trauma."
John A. Fairbank, Ph.D., Co-Director, UCLA-Duke University National Center for Child Traumatic Stress, Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Duke University, Durham, NC USA "This is a remarkable story, told masterfully by one of the world's leading researchers on childhood trauma. Sadly, it is not remarkable because it is unusual, but because Kaufman so compellingly conveys the tragic consequences of addiction, and our ineffective efforts to protect maltreated children through a deeply moving portrait of intergenerational trauma. It is at once a compassionate but searing account of one family's pain, a guide to the scientific questions that emanate from maltreatment, and a consideration of some policies that might make a difference. I consider it nothing less than an urgent call for reform on a national scale."
Charles H. Zeanah, Mary Peters Sellars Polchow Chair in Psychiatry, Tulane University Show Less