Media Contacts:
Gina Davis, [email protected], 202-864-2934
Morgan Brill, [email protected] 845-596-5328
WASHINGTON – ZERO TO THREE, a national nonprofit dedicated to ensuring all babies and toddlers have a strong start in life, released the following statement from Chief Policy Officer Melissa Boteach in response to the administration’s decision to terminate federal mental health and substance use prevention and treatment grants:
“Ending federal mental health and substance use disorder grants will harm families and communities, and babies and young children will pay the highest price. Babies rely on stable, supported caregivers to grow and thrive. When those supports disappear, children suffer.
“Programs that support the mental health of babies and their caregivers allow early intervention, when brain development is fastest and help can make a lasting difference in a child’s life. Eliminating front-line mental health and substance use disorder funding means more mothers with postpartum depression will go untreated; more children whose parents suffer from addiction will end up in the child welfare system; more babies will lose out on early interventions that could help them thrive. And children will absorb all of that stress at home during the most sensitive years of brain development.
“Project LAUNCH, one of the terminated grants focused on young children, supports programs such as ZERO TO THREE’s HealthySteps, which helps families with young children during regular pediatric visits. In just four years, Project LAUNCH screened more than 100,000 children from birth to age 8 and caregivers, referred tens of thousands of families to care, trained more than 52,000 professionals and built over 1,400 partnerships across health care, early learning, mental health and family support services.
“If these grants are cut, the impact will be immediate: fewer trained providers, fewer screenings, more untreated mental health and substance use conditions and longer waits for care. Moms facing postpartum depression, toddlers experiencing toxic stress or adverse experiences and communities responding to an ongoing substance use crisis will be harmed—often with lifelong consequences.
“We urge the administration to reverse these terminations and work with Congress to protect these critical services. Policymakers should be making it easier, not harder, for families to raise healthy children and for communities to prevent crises before they become tragedies.”
