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Spanking or striking children in school, or corporal punishment, should be “abolished in all states by law,” according to an updated policy statement by the Council on School Health and released Monday by the American Academy of Pediatrics. The use of corporal punishment has dropped over the years, but it is “either expressly allowed or not expressly prohibited in 23 states,” US Education Secretary Miguel A. Cardona said in March before Colorado banned the practice. “Furthermore, researchers have determined that the use of corporal punishment in schools is likely underreported.” (LaMotte, 8/21)

Children and adolescents who have been physically assaulted are nearly twice as likely as their peers to develop mental illness after the assault — and the risk is even higher in the first year after an incident, research suggests. The analysis, published in JAMA Network Open on Wednesday, looked at the medical records of 27,435 children in Ontario, Canada, including 5,487 kids who had been at an emergency room or hospital after a physical assault between 2006 and 2014 before age 14. (Blakemore 8/19)

Many kids and families struggling with mental health don't get treatment right away and often they're confronted with long wait times. On average, it takes about 11 years from the onset of symptoms for a child struggling with his or her mental health to obtain treatment, according to the U.S. Surgeon General's office. That's due in part to a longstanding nationwide shortage of childhood psychiatrists has left the health care system unprepared for the rise of mental health crises among kids, according to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. (Filby, 8/21)

When Deborah and Warren Blum’s 16-year-old died by suicide in November 2021, they went into shock. For two days, the grief-stricken Los Angeles couple didn’t sleep. But when it came time to write a death notice, Deborah Blum was clearheaded: In a heartfelt tribute to her smart, funny, popular child, who had recently come out as nonbinary, she was open and specific about the mental health struggles that led to Esther Iris’s death. (Waldman, 8/20)

Students across the country are grappling with feelings of depression and anxiety, especially following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic — and women, it appears, are being hit by those feelings particularly hard.   This past spring, 72 percent of female students in four-year undergraduate programs reported feeling stress “a lot of the prior” day while 56 percent of male students said the same, according to recently released Gallup poll findings. (O'Connell-Domenech, 8/20)   

Two years after a new law called for changes in New Hampshire’s mental health licensing, the board that oversees those rules is now taking action to implement it, after pressure from Gov. Chris Sununu. The 2021 law created two new categories of licenses for social workers, as well as a system of conditional licenses for clinicians who are still working toward full licensure. But those changes have yet to take effect, because the New Hampshire Board of Mental Health Practice hasn’t adopted the necessary rules. (Cuno-Booth, 8/18)