We made the decision to send our son back to in-person school last year despite his vulnerability to infection because our district came up with a reasonable, safe plan to make it possible: Every student had to wear a mask.
Just as we were gearing up for a mostly safe year back at school, the Clovis Unified school board decided to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and create unnecessary confusion over which mask policies would be enforced, despite clear state guidance.
Due to systemic inequities, children and teens of color are affected more often when it comes to mental health crises, with Latinos ages 10 through 19 representing nearly 40 percent of the total deaths by suicide among Californians in this age range in 2017.
The simple truth is that California does not have a sustainable, long-term plan to support children and teenager’s mental well-being. We cannot continue to cobble together a broken system that perpetuates inequity. Here are some recommendations.
How can anyone think about taking away health coverage and critical consumer protections at all, let alone during a pandemic?
California fully embraced the Affordable Care Act, which allowed it to expand Medicaid and create Covered California, our state’s health insurance marketplace. As a result, our uninsured rate fell a whopping 53 percent between 2010 and 2015. Over the last 10 years, we have made tremendous gains in California and across the country. Now is not the time to go backward.
Many parents of children with special needs — regardless of race — struggle to receive prompt diagnoses and services. But for families of color, the challenge is more acute.
“There’s just a lot of systemic racism,” said Kausha King, director of the Community Empowerment Project, a program that provides navigation support and training to Black families of children with special needs in Alameda and Contra Costa counties.
If there is one issue most Americans would agree on right now, it’s that we should protect our youngest children from hunger during the Covid-19 crisis. And yet the closure of child care facilities in California and across the country means hundreds of thousands of infants and young children may not be getting the free meals they regularly depend on.
As the pandemic continues, the government needs to take stronger action to ensure that our youngest children aren’t going hungry.
COVID-19 is decimating our outdated safety net, and the vital links between families and their local economic, health and social supports.
The pandemic has made “underlying conditions” the new code phrase for the social and health inequities disproportionately impacting black and brown communities.
Shelter-in-place policies are compounding the isolation, stress, misinformation and trauma that are common to many communities of color.
The coronavirus pandemic has taken a toll on millions of Californians. This is especially true among low-income families, including my patients at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center.
Most of our families barely get by in the best of times. How will they fare during a viral-induced economic downturn? The pandemic is exposing how fragile their lives are.
As a pediatrician and a father, I can tell you that children are able to sense fear among caregivers. I encourage parents to have age-appropriate conversations with their children to understand what they’ve heard, answer their questions and provide comfort.
We’re all in this together and solidarity will get us through this pandemic.
The federal administration’s attacks on immigrant families and children have been relentless. An entire generation of children is being traumatized.
As the daughter of immigrants and the president of a children’s advocacy organization that advocates for the healthy development and wellbeing of all children, this period of crisis is both personal and professional.
Almost 140,000 Latino children in California aren’t covered by health insurance, even though they’re eligible to enroll in Medi-Cal, the state’s safety-net health care program. Three quarters of the state’s uninsured Latino children ages 18 and under are missing out on health coverage, analysts at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research found.