The Alberta Family Wellness Initiative facilitates research into early brain development, addiction, and mental health treatment. Lifelong health is shaped by early experiences in childhood, including the experience of parent separation and divorce. The experiences that children have in their earliest years impact their brain architecture in lasting ways. Children may experience positive stress, tolerable stress, and toxic stress. Exposure to a prolonged parental high-conflict environment can create toxic stress in children, which may weaken a child’s brain architecture and disrupt healthy development.
The Alberta Family Wellness Initiative offers Brain Story Certification, which is a free online course about brain development and it’s consequences for lifelong health. This course aims to put scientific concepts into a format that is useful for both expert and non-expert audiences.