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Pulling back the curtains on wage-theft enforcement in MN; Trump's latest attack is on RFK, Jr; NM LGBTQ+ equality group endorses 2024 'Rock Star' candidates; Michigan's youth justice reforms: Expanded diversion, no fees.

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Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg says rebuilding Baltimore's Key Bridge will be challenging and expensive. An Alabama Democrat flips a state legislature seat and former Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman dies at 82.

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Historic wildfires could create housing and health issues for rural Texans, a Kentucky program helps prison parolees start a new life, and descendants of Nicodemus, Kansas celebrate the Black settlers who journeyed across the 1870s plains seeking self-governance.

Children’s Mental Health Awareness Week Promoting Positive Health for Kids

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Tuesday, May 5, 2009   

Pierre, SD – According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, mental health problems affect one in every five young people at any given time. Physician Susan Randall, with the state-based children's advocacy group South Dakota Voices for Children, says this week's Children's Mental Health Awareness observance is an ideal time to remind South Dakota residents that mental health disorders in children are real and treatable.

Her group is bringing a wide range of professionals to Pierre this week for an Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health Training Institute. Randall says the training sessions are geared toward early childhood teachers, doctors and counselors, who will learn more about children's early years, when their emotional foundation is formed.

"When that foundation is laid successfully, with good relationships between parents and young children, kids grow and develop and soar. So that's really where we want to be sure our attention is focused. A lot of these professionals work every day with families where having deeper training, nurturing and supporting parents, and building their child's mental health is really important."

Institute presenter and physician Gerard Costa is a clinical assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. He also is a national consultant to the Early Head Start-National Resource Center and one of 22 national consultants for an infant mental health initiative, ZERO TO THREE. Costa says their research is showing that what happens in the earliest years of child development makes an enormous difference in a whole host of outcomes, "including things like intelligence, emotional capacity, educational ability and learning ability - both medical health and emotional health outcomes. And the research has been overwhelming, particularly in the neurosciences: What happens in the first years of life are critical to form children to be who they become."

Randall says the Institute's professionals are trained to work with both parents and children who are facing mental health challenges. The need for these services is backed up by findings in a report compiled by a South Dakota Children's Mental Health Task Force that shows only 11 percent of children ages zero to 5 who need mental health services are getting help, she adds.

Tools for parents and professionals are available at www.sdkidsmentalhealth.org.




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