Panel
Building Mentally Resilient Youth
Milken InstituteJune Henton, Ted Bunch, Nadine Burke Harris, Cynthia Germanotta, Katie Hood, Sherrie Westin
- Sesame Workshop aims to develop content enabling children to identify with characters regarding tough topics while providing adults with coping tools, and plans to extend early education to refugee contexts in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Jordan with local curriculum advisories.
- Katie Hood projects that standardizing K-12 relationship health education and using fictional films and workshops to mobilize communities will equip children with lifelong relationship tools, organically grow education reach, and address downstream mental and physical health issues.
- Ted Bunch anticipates that promoting healthy manhood through the "Live, Respect" curriculum and a continuum of mentorship involving college fraternities and high schools will reduce domestic violence, sexual assault, bullying, and homophobia across all economic, racial, and geographic groups.
- Ted Bunch warns that men rejecting rigid notions of manhood face a six-year earlier death rate than women due to stress-related illnesses caused by suppressed emotions.
- Cynthia Germanotta expects the Teen Mental Health First Aid pilot program, currently operating in eight schools, to successfully teach high schoolers to recognize and respond to mental health or substance abuse crises, characterizing this as part of a multi-decade journey requiring cultural shifts.
- Dr. Nadine Burke-Harris expects that early detection and intervention for adverse childhood experiences will improve health outcomes, with California moving toward universal screening for adverse childhood experiences on Medicaid.
- Dr. Nadine Burke-Harris notes that cumulative doses of buffering and nurturing caregiving systems will improve children's outcomes.
- Sherry Weston plans to leverage Sesame Street content to increase recruitment of vulnerable families and adult engagement during home visits, noting that the long-term physiological impact of gun violence on children is equivalent to that of displacement as refugees.
- The session organizers may allocate time for a Q&A at the end of the schedule if permitted by "June Hinton."