Anyone who’s had the responsibility of caring for a newborn or young child can agree on one thing: It’s hard!
Where do families go when they need help or information? What do parents do when they don’t have the support or the resources they need?
Children
Beginning in 2008, as the nation was in the throes of the economic recession, California’s top leaders made a series of cuts to safety-net programs that sent many low-income residents in a downward spiral toward homelessness. While California’s economy has largely recovered since then, and the state’s food stamps and health programs have mostly been restored, the state’s welfare program has yet to see a reinvestment to pre-recession levels.
Children living in high poverty neighborhoods—a disproportionate number of whom are children of color—are more likely to die from child abuse.
My patients in my clinic in South Los Angeles are children from high poverty areas. However, regardless of where they practice, pediatricians have a critical role in the recognition and prevention of child abuse.
More than 81,000 low-income students in California attend charter schools that do not offer free and reduced-price school meals.
Assemblyman Rob Bonta wants to remedy that.
The second week after school starts, kids with respiratory illnesses—everything from simple colds to asthma attacks—fill my clinic. As a pediatrician I expect this.
But this year was different. Many of the kids had atypically high fevers and body aches with their coughs and congestion. They had influenza.
For children in the Salinas Valley with diabetes, seeing a specialist can involve long wait times or many miles in the car. But beginning this week, UCSF Medical Center and Salinas Memorial Healthcare System will give these children another option.
Living in a polluted area as a pre-teen and teenager may have long-lasting, detrimental effects on a person’s ability to reason and problem solve, a new study suggests.
Researchers at the University of Southern California and UCLA Center for Health Policy Research tracked more than 1,300 pre-teens living in neighborhoods across Los Angeles and surrounding counties over a 12-year period.
As Sofia’s pediatrician, I couldn’t miss her mother’s overwhelming signs of postpartum depression. It’s a threat to the wellbeing of babies, their mothers and families.
Nationwide, depression affects 10 to 25 percent of all pregnant women during the perinatal period, defined as three months before pregnancy to one year after giving birth. Across California, the rate is about 20 percent, and in Los Angeles County, it’s 26 percent.
The percent of California public school children who met state fitness standards remained roughly constant between 2011 and 2015.
The 1.3 million California pregnant women and children covered by the Children’s Health Insurance Program don’t have to worry about losing their health care. Child health advocates expressed relief but said they were concerned about the length of time it took to get to this point.