© 2024 First 5 Center for Children’s Policy. All rights reserved.
Los Angeles Times • Jul 9, 2021
This story was originally published in the Los Angeles Times. Click here to read the original.
This story quotes First 5 Managing Director Sarah Crow.
When a parent takes an infant to the Children’s Health Center in San Francisco for a routine checkup, a pediatrician will check the baby’s vitals and ask how the child is doing at home.
Then Janelle Bercun, a licensed clinical social worker, who is also in the room, will look at Mom or Dad and pipe up: What is this like for you? Your frustrations? Joys? Challenges? And she stays to work with the parent long after the pediatrician has left.
The facility’s team-based treatment is a pilot project, funded by philanthropies. Yet the approach, which California may soon incorporate on a large scale, could hold the key to fostering a healthy home environment where children thrive, child development experts say. Incorporating therapy for the parents, they say, can lower a child’s risk of future mental disorders stemming from family trauma and adversity.
Pediatricians’ offices generally don’t offer formal counseling or guidance to a child’s guardian because they can’t bill insurance for these services. That could soon change for the roughly 5.4 million children on Medi-Cal, California’s Medicaid program for low-income residents, and their parents.
Read the full story in the Los Angeles TImes.
This story was also published in California Healthline, Kaiser Health News, and the Vallejo Times-Herald.
© 2024 First 5 Center for Children’s Policy. All rights reserved.