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Background Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are associated with health outcomes. Resilience factors provide opportunities to mitigate ACEs. This study aimed to understand ACEs and resilience in students at a university in the United States. Methods Students in the 2018-2019 health explorations course completed an online questionnaire (N = 82). Descriptive statistics were completed for all variables. ACE score was created by adding yes responses to ACE questions (range 0-10). Resilience scores were calculated using the Devereux Adult Resilience Scale (DARS, range 20-46). Simple and multiple linear regression were completed with ACE and resilience as outcome measures. Age, gender, family structure, and profession were used as predictors. Results Mean age was 18.4 (SD 1.9%), majority of respondents were female (89%), white (92.7%), rural (55.3%), and single (95.1%). Mean ACE score was 1.63 (SD = 1.99) with 40% reporting no ACEs, 26% three or more, and 18% four or more. DARS score (N = 77) had a mean of 39.29 (SD = 6.14). Age resulted in a slight increase in ACE score, β = 0.20, p Conclusions The response rate was low (20.5%), however, this pilot study provided insights into adversities and resilience factors of first-year students. Future research should include a larger, more diverse sample. Key messages Understanding ACEs and resilience in college students is necessary to mitigate and address ACEs early in adulthood.

Responding to COVID-19 c.risis, leaders are asked to be both empathetic and strict. They must follow safety and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) protocols, but also be flexible with our students, staff, and faculty as each individual will respond differently to the crisis. This chapter explores one educator’s gratitude for the ways in which trauma-informed care training shaped her and her faculty’s responses to the pandemic.

This study aims at understanding students’ perspectives on a university response to a racial microaggression on campus. Responses were collected in the form of an online survey and analyzed using qualitative data analysis to identify themes from students’ perspectives. Insights on how students processed the incident were gathered. Although students were thankful for the university response, there is lingering concern for another incident and for how leadership will equip students to handle similar situations. The authors provide implications for educators.

Guided by research and theory on sibling similarities and differences, this study explored the nature and correlates of two processes of sibling influence-social learning and sibling differentiation-during adolescence. Participants included two adolescent-aged siblings (M = 16.29 years for older siblings and M = 12.59 years for younger siblings, respectively) from 166 two-parent African American families. Significant nonlinear associations between these two influence dynamics and some sibling relationship qualities were discovered. For sibling differentiation, but not social learning, these links were further moderated by sex composition of the sibling dyad. Additional analyses revealed that youths' reports of social learning were generally linked to smaller differences between siblings, whereas differentiation processes were linked to greater differences in siblings' individual characteristics.

This study assessed secondborn adolescents' perceptions of changes in the allocation of family resources following their firstborn siblings' departure from home after high school, and whether perceived changes were related to changes over 1 year in secondborns' academic functioning. Participants were secondborn siblings (mean age = 16.58, SD = 0.91) from 115 families in which the older sibling had left the family home in the previous year. Allocation of resources was measured via coded qualitative interviews. Most (77%) secondborns reported increases in at least one type of family resource (i.e., parental companionship, attention, material goods), and many reported an increase in multiple types of resources in the year following their older sibling's departure. Consistent with resource dilution theory, perceptions of increases in fathers' companionship, fathers' attention, and mothers' companionship were related to improvements over time in secondborns' academic functioning.