I have been raising my granddaughter for eleven years; Child Protective Services placed her with me just before her fourth birthday. There was no real help for children with disabilities when her mom, my daughter, was growing up. She lives on disability, has mental health issues, and has lost all three of her children. Today there is so much help out there that we can make a difference. There wasn’t that much available for my daughter.

Often each system within a community (child welfare, juvenile justice, education, mental health, public health) work independently to serve families and youth. The reality is that many families use services from more than one of these systems/agencies and would benefit from these systems working collaboratively to holistically serve their child and family. In a “system of care,” a community works to build a coordinated network of services and supports to meet the needs of children and youth with serious emotional and mental health disabilities and their families. The guiding principles for building a System of Care should include:
 Services that serve the child’s physical, emotional, social, and educational needs.

To those reading this newsletter, it’s probably a “no-brainer” as to why anyone should care about mental health issues. Mental health affects everyone, whether it’s in the form of a loved one, or if we’re questioning our own. However, stigma related to mental issues still exists, especially in children.
Mental health diagnoses are more prevalent than most people realize. Based on the 2005 American Community Survey (ACS) of civilians who were not currently in an institution, seven percent of the U.S. population between the ages of 5 to 20 described themselves as having a diagnosis. In Kentucky the percentage was much higher at almost 10 percent.

MENTAL HEALTH IN THE U.S.

Dating and domestic violence is a dirty little secret that most people keep quiet about. Men and women don’t admit that it’s happened to them because it’s embarrassing. And nobody wants to ask a friend if it’s happening to them, it might start a fight, or cause a rift in the friendship.

At birth, a baby’s brain has been developing for several months as a fetus, but still has miles to go to reach full development. This is the time when babies begin forming social and emotional attachments to the people most often in their lives, such as parents, siblings, caregivers, etc. Studies have shown that babies will react to human touch, sound, smell, and a face more than any other stimulant. Specifically the touches, sounds, smell, and faces of Mom or Dad.

• By establishing standards for electronic transmission of health information,
• By establishing standards to protect the privacy of individuals' medical records and other protected health information, and
• By ensuring the security of health care information.

How is this done?
• HIPAA establishes safeguards to protect the privacy of health care information.
• HIPAA sets boundaries on the use and release of health records.
• HIPAA holds people accountable if they violate patient rights (civil and criminal penalties)

Protected Health Information (PHI)

Talking to kids about war and terrorism has to be one of the hardest tasks any parent must take on. Hard, because no parent wants to explain to their child why people kill other people. But in this time of war and unrest, it seems a necessary evil. While the goings-on in Iraq seem to have mildly subsided, we still have many men and women in the armed services overseas, many of them fathers and mothers. Both the National Center for Children Exposed to Violence (NCCEV) and the Department of Defense’s (DOD) Healthy Parenting Initiative have published helpful tips on their websites (listed below).

Children with disabilities receive special education and related services through the public school system and are protected by either the Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the federal law that governs special education, or Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. In general, those children covered under Section 504 usually have less severe disabilities than those covered by IDEA, or their disability does not fit within the categories of eligibility under IDEA. It is important for parents to be aware of the differences between the two because of the discrepancies in criteria for eligibility, services, procedures, and safeguards.