Find information about the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) and children's health here.
Let's Do More for Mental Health
Raise Awareness and Celebrate Strength
Mental health affects the health and well-being of children and families across the country. One in five adults live with mental illness, as well as millions of children. Now, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, it's important to raise awareness, provide support, and celebrate resilience. Use this collection of social media graphics and posts to get started.
Build Resiliency During Early Childhood
Adversity during childhood is often unavoidable, even under the best of circumstances and certainly during COVID-19. Fortunately, families and communities can create buffers that protect children from many of the negative health and life outcomes that stem from adversity. Learn more in this article.
Dad's Mental Health Matters
Did you know that one in 10 fathers get Paternal Postpartum Depression (PPPD) and up to 16 percent of fathers suffer from an anxiety disorder during the perinatal period? These numbers may very well increase because of COVID-19. Take two steps today to support mental health for dads:
- Share this infographic, illustrating how much dads’ mental health matters during the early childhood period
- Read this article, which shares four strategies health care providers and public health professionals can use to better support dads’ mental health
Help Moms Know They're Not Alone
When her daughter was 6 weeks old, Elaine DeaKyne began to have frightening intrusive thoughts. “I thought about driving over a bridge, getting out of the car, and jumping off. So, I started avoiding driving over bridges,” she shares. Elaine was suffering from perinatal depression, a condition that affects hundreds of thousands of moms every year and puts the health of moms and babies at risk. Read her full story and learn how to ensure that more mothers are screened for depression and referred to support and resources.
Be a Children's Health Change Agent
Like you, we have a shared passion for improving the health of every child in every state across the country. Join us in our mission. Take action to make a difference for children now and in the decades to come:
- Donate. Give a gift that supports NICHQ’s initiatives that touch millions of children’s lives. Every dollar raised benefits the health and well-being of children.
- Sign up. Join our network of thousands of other subscribers. We deliver resources, articles and webinars right to your inbox so that we can drive change in children’s health outcomes together.
What People Are Saying
I'm passionate about early identification and connection to services and supports for children and families because we know acting early makes a difference. When I learned that the ECCS CoIIN leverages collaboration, innovation and quality improvement methods to improve early childhood systems, I was thrilled to get involved. There is a great focus on parent engagement too, so I was really happy to join the team and be a part of this great work.
Through the Infant Mortality CoIIN, NICHQ has found effective ways to engage all states around six areas of effort to reduce infant mortality and improve birth outcomes. With the support of NICHQ staff and expert consultants, state maternal child health leaders are learning to use traditional quality improvement and innovative approaches to maximize the leadership roles, and to use a health equity lens in this work.
Working with NICHQ has been a very rewarding experience … A partnership with families has been a hallmark of what the Maternal and Child Health Bureau has done for years, but NICHQ really demonstrated how important those partnerships are.
In over 21 years of caring for my son with complex congenital heart defects plus my 20 years working in healthcare quality improvement and my 6 plus years as a patient advocate, I've never known anyone to embrace closing the gaps between patients and healthcare institutions or doctors, as much as the people from NICHQ.
NICHQ has really supported our work by formalizing a process to do PDSA cycles, report and track how our progress is doing. As a data person, CoLab has been really instrumental in terms of gathering the data and tracking it over time.
NICHQ’s role in coordinating these grantees working on improving sickle cell care and making an agenda that at least tries to push for improved care for all of these patients is very important. The role has been not been very well-served and NICHQ, in my mind, has the experience and staff expertise to bring to sickle cell disease the sort of rigor in methods development and analysis of outcomes to move the bar of caring for people with sickle cell disease several notches up.
Being a parent partner for NICHQ ...has been a pure honor. I would encourage anyone that has the opportunity to work on a NICHQ project to take advantage of it. Working with them has opened many doors for me in the medical field.
