Hasta La Gadget!

It’s always very challenging for a parent when their child has a serious health condition. It’s even more challenging when their child has a serious condition but has no health insurance to cover the needed care and emergencies. Both were true for one Texas mother whose 12-year-old daughter Evelyn was diagnosed with a heart defect. Evelyn often ended up at her school nurse’s office complaining of shortness of breath. When the nurse encouraged her mother to take her in to the doctor, Evelyn’s mother, who bakes cakes for a living, explained that Evelyn was uninsured and she couldn’t afford the specialist fees that ran into the hundreds of dollars per visit. But the nurse had attended a presentation for school district staff on the importance of connecting students to available health coverage and knew she could put Evelyn’s family in touch with an outreach worker from the Children’s Defense Fund-Texas office to help her apply for insurance.

CDF-Texas helped Evelyn’s mother with her application and with the critical follow up after the first application was misfiled. Once those steps were taken the family was rightfully approved and Evelyn was finally able to obtain the health care she desperately needed. Soon after she had open heart surgery to replace a non-functional heart valve. Specialists at the Pediatric Heart Clinic told Evelyn’s family she was very lucky to have had the surgery when she did. Her mother says, “It was not about luck, it was a blessing!” Evelyn’s family says they feel happy and blessed to have had help applying for health coverage when it seemed they had no hope.

Evelyn is one of millions of children whose story now has a happier ending. This year marks the 50^th anniversary of the Medicaid program, which together with the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) has brought the number of uninsured children to an historic low. Medicaid and CHIP provide comprehensive and affordable health coverage to more than 44 million children—that’s 57 percent of all children in America. With the new coverage options offered by the Affordable Care Act, 93 percent of all children now have health coverage.

But we can never stop working to reach children like Evelyn who haven’t yet been connected to coverage. More than 5.2 million children under age 18 were uninsured in 2013. The overwhelming majority live with working parents and are citizens. More than a third live in three states—California, Texas, and Florida. Uninsured children are more likely to be children of color, children ages 13-18, and children who live in rural areas. More than half —3.7 million—are eligible for Medicaid or CHIP but not yet enrolled.

That’s why CDF continues to work, in partnership with AASA, The School Superintendents Association, to encourage school districts to help get all students the health coverage they need to learn and succeed in school. Our goal is to make school-based child health outreach and enrollment a routine and ongoing part of school district operations. The model is built around a basic question districts add to their school registration materials: “Does your child have health insurance?” Parents who answer “no” or “don’t know” are flagged and receive information from school district staff on Medicaid, CHIP, or other health coverage options. But it doesn’t stop there. Parents also can receive application assistance and often are introduced to community partners to help them successfully navigate the enrollment process the way Evelyn’s mother was connected in Texas.

CDF-Texas with its partners pioneered this technique in the Houston Independent School District almost a decade ago and since then CDF and AASA have partnered with districts in California, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi, including small and large, urban, rural, and suburban school systems, serving elementary through high schools with a rainbow of  Black, Latino, Asian, and White students. Superintendents, principals, teachers, school nurses and other staff have gained a clearer understanding of the critical links between children’s health, school attendance, and ability to achieve in school. Many are now leading public education efforts to engage parents and the broader community in events geared to health and wellness. Keeping children healthy is a win for everyone.

Dr. Kavin Dotson

As Dr. Kavin Dotson, Director of Student Services for the Lynwood Unified School District in California, put it at a recent convening at CDF Haley Farm in Tennessee, “we were unaware of the fact that there were so many students in our district that did not have health insurance.” He now believes that “every school in our country is going to make a 100 percent commitment to ensure that all students are enrolled in some type of health insurance that will meet their health needs.

You too can take action now to spread the word about the importance of health coverage in your own communities with help from the Connecting Kids to Coverage national campaign. Through the end of this month it has print materials and TV and radio ads in English and Spanish that you can customize to reach parents and others assisting children. Children can enroll in CHIP or Medicaid at any time.

How frustrating it is that at the very same time we are celebrating Medicaid’s long and successful history and the recent bipartisan two-year CHIP funding extension and building on successful outreach and enrollment strategies, these critical child health programs are under attack in Congress. The fiscal year 2016 budget resolution proposes deep cuts in Medicaid and structural changes in both Medicaid and CHIP that will jeopardize their reach and make it even more difficult for many more children like Evelyn to get the coverage and care they desperately need. But there’s still time to demand that Congress stop the cuts and efforts to dismantle the structure of Medicaid and CHIP. Why would they fool around with something that is working so well for parents and children? All of us must work together to move forward not backwards to make sure all children get the health care they need to live and learn and thrive.

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Flipping through her phone over an after-school snack, my teenage daughter asked with just a hint of frustration why so many of the people she follows on Instagram always look so perfect: the students she passes daily in her high school halls, the out-of-state friends, the ballet dancers.

Her question opened up the opportunity for some front porch mother-daughter dialogue about a healthier definition of perfection.

Giving my children a spiritual bedrock to stand on has been key to my parenting. The soccer games, ballet classes and trumpet lessons have nurtured their interests, but attending Sunday School and learning how to make scriptural wisdom practical in their daily interactions hasn’t been an extracurricular activity in our home. My husband and I consider it as important as dental hygiene and homework assignments.

Having a spiritual compass and nurturing their direct relationship with God has helped them navigate the tricky channels of social media that provide a steady stream of influence and information in their daily lives. I want them to know their value goes way beyond the surface view of themselves on Instagram, Facebook or Snapchat.

Lisa Miller, PhD and author of the newly released book, The Spiritual Child: The New Science On Parenting For Health and Lifelong Thriving, writes that “Whatever future we envision for our child, without spiritual development a full dimension goes missing from the picture.”

When faced with disappointments and personal challenges, spirituality gives teens something immediate to turn to for answers and direction.

“For a teen, spirituality brings meaning and purpose. They learn their deeper value beyond what they’ve done or not done on the athletic field or in the classroom,” Dr. Miller says in an interview about her book. “All of the work of adolescence, such as identity development and building relationships, looks entirely different from the seat of a spiritual self. The work becomes about calling, meaning and purpose, not just about outward markers of success.”

That day on the porch, my daughter and I discussed how social media is a platform for telling the story you want to tell. And more often than not, the narrative lines up with the poster’s ideal of perfection, from body image and fashion, to friendships and dating. I asked her to consider for herself whether her posts matched a spiritual model of perfection, one that doesn’t come from magazine and media images that can cause envy and comparison, but rather one that considers qualities associated with an individual’s relationship to God, such as artistry, beauty, inclusiveness, joy and light.

The Bible says, “God is light,” and that these things are written, “so that your joy may be full” (I John 1). It also reminds us to “walk as children of light” (Eph 5: 8). My daughter liked the idea of asking herself if her posts would help her followers catch a glimpse of their own spiritual light and make them smile rather than feel unhappy or dissatisfied. Her spiritual education had shown her that “Love, redolent with unselfishness, bathes all in beauty and light.” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Eddy).

That may sound like a high bar to reach, and yet viewing life through a spiritual lens contributes to a mentally balanced view of life. “Young women growing up on Instagram are spending a significant chunk of each day absorbing others’ filtered images while they walk through their own realities, unfiltered,” writes Kate Fagan in her ESPN article, “Split Image.” She cites that in a recent survey conducted by the Girl Scouts, “nearly 74 percent of girls agreed that other girls tried to make themselves look ‘cooler than they are’ on social networking sites.” Fagan relates the story of a college freshman who once posted, “Even people you think are perfect are going through something difficult.”

This points to a need for models of perfection that go beyond self or media-imposed images that can be impossible for anyone to reach. Thoughts focused on a higher power bring a deep settled peace, as expressed in this passage from Isaiah: “You will guard him and keep him in perfect and constant peace whose mind [both its inclination and its character] is stayed on You, because he commits himself to You, leans on You, and hopes confidently in You.”

Having a model of perfection that measures success and accomplishment against the better virtues of love and looks to a spiritual center for guidance is an option we can’t really afford to ignore.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

If all goes well, the U.S. Air Force’s mysterious X-37B will blast off into space for the fourth time on May 20. But for the first time, they’re actually telling us what the space plane will be doing—well, some of it anyway.

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Do not look down on the little ones, as many of them tend to have a kind of imagination that you would be surprised at. Take AJAX for example – this is a unique hydraulic exoskeleton that one might think hails from a higher institution of learning, but in reality, AJAX is the brainchild of students from the Bay School of San Francisco. This unique team of brainiacs comprise of Sammy Kroner, Joseph DeRose, Gabriel Perko-Engle, Ed Burke, Thelonious Breskin, Ian Simons, Connor Dietz, and Cole Yarbrough.

The inspired team of students claim that they came up with the idea of AJAX after watching movies such as Edge of Tomorrow, RoboCop, Iron Man, Elysium, and Aliens, where each of these movies do have its own influence on what an exoskeleton or robot looks like.

DeRose shared, “We (our family) had been throwing the idea of building an exoskeleton around for a while, but we passed it off as too dangerous and too ambitious, fearing that something could go wrong and hurt the user.“ Of course, all of that is water under the bridge now, as the team with support from their respective parents, have come together to work on and support the AJAX project which stands tall and proud today.

AJAX Exoskeleton Created By Children , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.