For most Oklahoma children, time heals nothing. Traumatic experiences and exposure to family dysfunction during childhood result, decades later, in poor adult health status, early death and crippled communities.

Childhood experience can explain much of Oklahoma’s present. Oklahomans currently face momentous and expensive challenges: the highest occurrence of mental illness in the nation, the only state in which physical health status worsened during the 1990s, and the fourth largest per capita prison population of any state.

Improved childhood experience will contribute greatly to a brighter Oklahoma. As Oklahoma’s youngest citizens experience less adversity during childhood, fewer will adopt risky behaviors, improving their futures and Oklahoma’s.

The Adverse Childhood Experience, or ACE, Study, one of the largest investigations of this type ever conducted, documents a direct correlation between the traumas and family dysfunction suffered in childhood with poor adult health status and premature death decades later.

State Profile: Adverse Childhood Experience is a pdf version of the seven-page narrative from the 2006-2007 Oklahoma Kids Count Factbook.

The following Issue Briefs are in PDF format

Issue Brief One: Childhood Stress: A Ticking Timebomb

Issue Brief Two: Child Maltreatment

Issue Brief Three: Domestic Violence

Issue Brief Four: Mental Illness and Substance Abuse

Issue Brief Five: Absent Parents

Facts-at-a-Glance Part Two: Adverse Childhood Experience