© 2025 First 5 Center for Children’s Policy. All rights reserved.
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This week California released an important new policy making family therapy a covered benefit for children in Medi-Cal. This is a significant step forward in approaching children’s health from a whole-family wellness perspective.
This moment in history could be pivotal in the landscape of California’s early childhood mental health. Conditions created by the pandemic, such as isolation, economic stress, and community trauma, are all proven to negatively impact a child’s ability to thrive. It is vitally important that young children and their parents and caregivers receive the interventions necessary to support their mental health during this critical time.
Dyadic care models like HealthySteps provide important support to families with young children. Such care is particularly important in this pandemic- recovery time, which exacerbated mental health concerns, family stress, isolation, and income insecurity, particularly for BIPOC families who already face health inequity due to structural racism and oppression.
Before joining the Center, Alexandra was a program officer at First 5 LA. In L.A. she supported local implementation of Help Me Grow, a national model to improve developmental screening rates and s ...
As California focuses on improving the quality of maternal care delivery and reducing disparities for our Medi-Cal birthing population, many First 5s are already engaged in work to support families during the prenatal and postpartum periods.
On August 4, 2023, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first pill for postpartum depression (PPD), marking a significant milestone in treating a condition that affects one in five California women.
In California, Black women are roughly four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than women in all other racial/ethnic groups. California’s Black infants are almost three times more likely to die than white infants, regardless of the mother’s education and income. Indeed, a Black woman with an advanced degree is more likely to lose her baby than a white woman with less than an eighth-grade education.
© 2025 First 5 Center for Children’s Policy. All rights reserved.