additional RESOURCES

Big Brother, Big Sister: Community-Based Program

• Since 1904, Big Brothers Big Sisters has operated under the belief that inherent in every child is incredible potential. As the nation’s largest donor- and volunteer-supported mentoring network, Big Brothers Big Sisters makes meaningful, monitored matches between adult volunteers (“Bigs”) and children (“Littles”), ages 5 through young adulthood in communities across the country. We develop positive relationships that have a direct and lasting effect on the lives of young people.

CASEL: SEL in the Home

• Social and emotional learning starts at home. Parents and families are critical partners in helping their children develop social and emotional know-how. They can model the kinds of skills, attitudes, and behaviors we want all students to master. And they can be important advocates for SEL at school. With the help of parenting and SEL expert Jennifer Miller, we have developed a list of resources that can assist parents in learning more about SEL in schools and in their own parenting practices.

Common Sense Media

• Common Sense Media helps families make smart media choices. We offer the largest, most trusted library of independent age-based and educational ratings and reviews for movies, games, apps, TV shows, websites, books, and music. Our Parent Concerns and Parent Blog help families understand and navigate the problems and possibilities of raising children in the digital age.

Dove Self-Esteem Project

• At Dove, we believe no young person should be held back from reaching their full potential. However, low body confidence and anxieties over appearance keep young people from being their best selves, affecting their health, friendships, and even performance at school. For more than 10 years, we’ve been helping parents, mentors, teachers, and youth leaders deliver self-esteem education that’s reached more than 20 million young people so far.

Embrace Race

• There is a growing body of research and evidence that makes clear that children’s racial sensibilities begin to form in infancy, that almost all children develop racial and other biases by kindergarten, and that those biases become fairly entrenched by adolescence. And yet, most national organizations dedicated to children’s racial learning direct their resources mainly to middle and high school educators. There are too few resources for young children available for parents, grandparents or other caregivers or for early childhood educators. EmbraceRace was founded in early 2016 by two parents who set out to create the community and gather the resources they needed (need!) to meet the challenges faced by those raising children in a world where race matters.

Handhold

• Created by the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health, Office of the Child Advocate, Executive Office of Health and Human Services to guide you through your child's mental health journey. Life can be tough, especially for our kids. You might be noticing your child is struggling in new ways, or that old problems are getting worse. But what can you do right now to help your child with their mental health? We’ve curated a collection of resources that you can try at home today and organizations that we know can help.

Parent Toolkit: Social & Emotional Development

• Research shows that those with higher social-emotional skills have better attention skills and fewer learning problems, and are generally more successful in academic and workplace settings. Like any math or English skills, these skills can be taught and grow over time.

Psychology Today

• Search for local supports to get help, or check out the diagnosis dictionary while also accessing resources for a variety of mental health needs. Psychology Today offers daily articles on a vast array of topics and also releases a monthly magazine.

RESilience Initiative

• The goals of RESilience are to address the effects of racism, racial bias and discrimination through increasing knowledge of racial and ethnic socialization as an important part of identity development, increasing the effective use of racial and ethnic socialization, supporting parents in managing their own experiences while helping their children learn positive messages about race and ethnicity, and increasing attention to RES and related issues among researchers, research funders, practitioners, educators and other stakeholders.

Sesame Street in Communities

• Sesame Street in Communities builds on our almost 50-year commitment to addressing kids’ developmental, physical, and emotional needs. Here, you’ll find hundreds of bilingual multi-media tools to help kids and families enrich and expand their knowledge during the early years of birth through six, a critical window for brain development. Our resources engage kids and adults in everyday moments and daily routines—from teaching early math and literacy concepts, to encouraging families to eat nutritious foods, to serious topics such as divorce and food insecurity.

Sesame Street for Military Families

• As many as 700,000 children under the age of five have a parent in the military. Recognizing the need for first-rate media-based resources to support military families, in fall 2006, Sesame Workshop launched the bilingual (English/Spanish), multimedia outreach initiative Talk, Listen, Connect: Helping Families During Military Deployment (TLC). This critical outreach tool helped military families and their young children cope with the challenges of deployment and build resilience in times of separation and change.

Scholastic Parents: Family Life

• Scholastic was founded in 1920 as a single classroom magazine. Today, Scholastic books and educational materials are in tens of thousands of schools and tens of millions of homes worldwide, helping to Open a World of Possible for children across the globe.