Nemours KidsHealth: Helping Families Worldwide Stay Healthy
When elementary-school teacher Jackie Bratsis wants to help her students understand anything from white blood cells to head lice to depression and anxiety, she turns to KidsHealth.org.
“It’s such a wonderful, trustworthy resource,” says Bratsis, who has taught in Delaware County, Pa., for nearly 30 years.
That’s just how we hoped teachers, parents and children would feel when we launched Nemours® KidsHealth® back in 1995. Since then, the site has had billions of views, becoming one of the internet’s most-visited sites for reliable information on children’s health and development.
We’re continually expanding and updating the more than 7,000 articles, videos and animations on the site. The free content is tailored to different audiences, with separate sections for parents, kids, teens and teachers. Our doctors and medical experts review every article so you know you can rely on what you find.
Kids and adults can collaborate to build healthy habits. Students can fill out a sleep log that reveals connections between their daytime behavior, quality of sleep and how they feel the next day. After learning about their endocrine systems, students can write letters of gratitude to their glands for all they do. Kids can read sample texts on a chat site and judge which ones make them feel safe or at risk. Downloadable posters offer fun health facts such as: “A sneeze can shoot germs out of your nose at 100 mph.”
Jackie started using KidsHealth in 2015. She counts on the content to supplement her classes, while some of her colleagues use it much more frequently, and even as a basic health curriculum.
“If we’re reading a book about sleep, there’s a cute little game that compares how many hours kids need to what animals need,” she says. “Or if we’re talking about healthy snacks, there’s a lesson about how you make good choices.”
The site is designed to be as useful and easy as possible for teachers. Lesson plans come with quizzes and answer keys. There are slideshows, videos and printable handouts. “It’s all very easy to use with the iPads the students have in class, so it’s often more flexible than our textbooks,” says Jackie.
Parents in a hurry will find easily discoverable and digestible information on urgent questions about discipline, bullying, vaccines, ADHD, complex medical conditions and much more.
“It’s great that when you Google a lot of these questions, the KidsHealth site is one of the first that comes up,” says Jackie. “I always encourage parents to use it and rely on it.”
Babies don’t come with a handbook, as the old saying goes. Neither do growing children. But KidsHealth.org gives families the next best thing — friendly, engaging advice, education and learning activities designed to help the lessons stick.
It’s rare if not unprecedented for a health system to invest so much in education as we do. But being that trusted advisor and coach for families is just one of the ways we pursue our mission to go “well beyond medicine.”