Both mother and infant can suffer when maternal depression or anxiety is not treated promptly. A National Institutes of Health study found that maternal depression puts a child at risk for numerous emotional and developmental issues.
Children
Many aren’t receiving the support they need to create stable lives once they leave foster care. In particular, more than half of foster youth both in California and nationwide age out of foster care without being reunited or connected to a family or other supportive adults.
A proposal by the Trump administration to weigh immigrants’ use of certain public programs when deciding whether to approve applications for permanent residency threatens the health of hundreds of thousands of California children, according to a new report.
The Trump administration’s proposed changes to public charge rules for deciding immigration cases could push thousands of Californians out of government assistance programs and result in billions of dollars of losses to the state’s economy, according to a forthcoming analysis from the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.
The recently formed California Children’s Trust said the state’s mental health system for youth is disjointed, messy, and overly focused on treating mental illness rather than prevention. The result: suicides, mental health crises and hospitalizations among youth have skyrocketed.
A new pilot project in Los Angeles County aims to reduce the burden of childhood asthma in low-income communities and on the public health system by putting “smart” inhalers in the hands of kids.
Eleven-year-old Jaime was diagnosed with leukemia and is currently undergoing chemotherapy. He’s a U.S. citizen but his mother is an undocumented immigrant from Mexico. “His mother told me that when they get home after his chemo, Jaime closes all of the curtains and locks the doors,” explained Jacqueline Casillas, my colleague and director of Pediatric Oncology at Miller’s Children’s Hospital in Long Beach. He’s afraid that his mother will be deported because she takes him to the doctor.
Children and new moms stand to gain improved access to mental health services under two bills recently signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown.
As California increasingly considers how past trauma impacts violence, a new community center in South Los Angeles is focused on healing. Rather than seeing violent crime as a problem exclusively for law enforcement, the Community Healing and Trauma Prevention Center seeks to understand and tackle the root causes of violence and its traumatic effects.
A first of its kind survey of California mothers about their birth concerns and outcomes offers two findings: Health providers often don’t listen to mothers about their birth preferences and African American women are the least likely to be listened to.
Disregarding input from pregnant women increases the risk of death and complications for the mothers and their babies.