Even under the best circumstances, parenting can be stressful and challenging. For parents facing significant obstacles such as poverty, incarceration, or mental health issues, those stresses multiply and, when passed along to young children, can impact the child’s health for years to come.
“When conducting interventions with children and families, it’s critical to support parents and provide them with stress reduction tools they can use to optimize the possibility of being the best parent they can be to their child,” says Alison Miller, associate professor of Health Behavior and Health Education at Michigan Public Health who studies risk and resilience in children and families.
Last summer, as the community outreach director for the University of Michigan Children’s Environmental Health Center and in partnership with the Healthy Homes Coalition—a nonprofit focused on providing safe and healthy housing for low-income families in Grand Rapids, Michigan—Miller led the development of an educational curriculum for lead exposure prevention and mitigation focused on the needs of parents of young children.
