During National Adoption Awareness Month, we have compiled a number of Ted Talks covering parenting, adoption, differences in ability, and other topics that we think our friends and families will find interesting. Each week, we will post a few suggested talks. We hope that these will pique your interest, illuminate new ideas, and/or get you talking with those around you.
This week’s videos all reframe identified needs, adversity—what it is and who experiences it—and differences in ability. We welcome you to engage with the rest of the CH/LSS community by sharing your responses to these videos on our Facebook page.
Ted Talk 1: The Opportunity of adversity
The thesaurus might equate “disabled” with synonyms like “useless” and “mutilated,” but ground-breaking runner Aimee Mullins is out to redefine the word. Defying these associations, she shows how adversity — in her case, being born without shinbones — actually opens the door for human potential.
Ted Talk 2: From Stigma to Supermodel
Rick Guidotti is a fashion photographer with a passion project: finding and sharing the beauty of kids with albinism and other conditions that affect their physical appearance — and the way society treats them. At TEDxPhoenix, he shares some of their stories and the empowering effects of a little glamour as he redefines their beauty in a flash.
Ted Talk 3: how childhood trauma affects health across a lifetime
Childhood trauma isn’t something you just get over as you grow up. Pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris explains that the repeated stress of abuse, neglect and parents struggling with mental health or substance abuse issues has real, tangible effects on the development of the brain. This unfolds across a lifetime, to the point where those who’ve experienced high levels of trauma are at triple the risk for heart disease and lung cancer. An impassioned plea for pediatric medicine to confront the prevention and treatment of trauma, head-on.
