27 Search results for "intergenerational trauma"

By Terrence F. Chappell “What your mom did to you, you’re doing to me. You treat me exactly the same way your mom treated you.” My sister didn’t yell this to our mother. Her tone was much more purposeful and so it demanded much more attention. Her words authored a truth that forced my mom […]

Editor’s Note: April is Black Women’s History Month. Throughout this month, Black Youth Project is celebrating Black women. This month is also National Minority Health Month, Autism Awareness Month, Sexual Assault Awareness Month, Child Abuse Prevention Month. We are interested in publishing works that address these topics and the things surrounding them.

This essay contains discussion of suicide. by Donnie Moreland On the other side of her beautiful and hardened, bulging belly, I can feel them. My baby navigating the uterus of the woman I love, curious to the pressure of my palm on the soft brown flesh between them and I. I imagine their curiosity, or […]

By Amber Butts As children, we are told to stay out of grown folk business. As adults and elders, we then continue that wheel and narrative, which doesn’t give space for us to build an intergenerational emotional intelligence. What if children were in more “grown folk” conversations? Could we better prepare for it if children […]

Researchers at the University of California have just published a study in Pediatrics which found that the effects of childhood trauma have mental health implications for generations.

“Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place–the picture of it–stays, and not just in my remory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. […]

Editor’s Note: May is Mental Health Awareness Month and National Masturbation Month. This is also the month that we celebrate Mother’s Day. At BYP, we will be exploring these topics alongside the theme of Imagination and the Arts, and we are interested in publishing works that address these topics and the things surrounding them. This […]

by Donnie Moreland My grandfather—my mother’s father—participated in the first sit-ins in Greenville, South Carolina. My grandfather is a military veteran. He patrolled the tomb of the unknown soldier, was employed as a manufacturer with the Department of Defense and was a supervisor, in the Pentagon, when Flight 77 made contact with the building at […]

by Jamila Dawn Mitchell I’m writing this because I need to feel wanted. That’s it. It may sound selfish to most. To a psychologist, though, this makes sense. Most things we do are done in spite of our desire to want to be loved. The sense of belonging is the essence of our humanity and […]

by Donnie Moreland It’s the eve of what folks are calling the “most important presidential election of our lives.” I’m being told to prepare. I’m being told to panic. I strap both ends of my cloth mask around my ears to drop my ballot at a county library. This is the second time I’m having […]

by Hess Love “Colonialism, capitalism, the myth of white supremacy and all interwoven systems of oppression, have never allowed for the divine unique spark of children to truly flourish – and they were never designed to. Singing this spark back to us is the quest that many of us spend our adult lives journeying upon. […]

by Donnie Moreland  This essay contains discussions of domestic violence and sexual assault  Ruminations of my daughter’s hypothetical death play on repeat, ever since her birth. I’ve accepted them as inescapable conditions of parenthood—Black parenthood especially. I also believe the story of Julia Martin’s death in 2016 partially informs my anxieties in raising a daughter. […]