What Elmo Can Teach Your Child About Illness

Posted on 21. Apr, 2009 by TheCuteKid Photo Contest in Entertainment, Movies & TV, Parenting

Sesame Street Gets Serious with Elmo!

A new Sesame Street Elmo Workshop initiative helps children cope with serious illness

By Mary Fetzer

Oh, no! Elmo’s cousin, Chester, is very sick. Chester is in the hospital receiving treatment for a serious illness. Can Elmo help?

In a new outreach project entitled, Here for You: Helping Children Cope with Serious Illness, Sesame Workshop partners with The Center for Advanced Illness Coordinated Care (CAICC) and the Charitable Leadership Foundation to help children identify and express their feelings about their illness. Supported by Paul Newman and the Target Foundation, this new bilingual resource provides advice from expert advisors, cancer survivors, and parents from around the country.

Learn Through Elmo

Sesame Workshop unveiled the Here for You DVD in May 2008, at the 32nd Annual Conference of the Association of Pediatric Oncology Social Workers. On this new DVD, Elmo helps Chester recognize that in addition to receiving the best medical care possible, he can talk to professional counselors such as social workers, psychologists, doctors, nurses, child life practitioners, and chaplains.

With their support – and with the help of their wonderful friends – Chester learns to acknowledge his feelings of fear, anger, and guilt. The cousins find that identifying and expressing feelings can be powerful coping mechanisms.

The accompanying support material reinforces the messages in the DVD. These tools help seriously ill children realize that it’s OK to express their feelings, and that these feelings are often shared by other children in similar circumstances.

Behind the Scenes
“Together, Sesame Workshop and CAICC developed engaging content that addresses the complicated subject of young children facing a serious illness the way that Sesame Street does best: with compassion and honesty,” explains Dr. Jeanette Betancourt, the vice president for outreach and education practices at Sesame Workshop. “We are always representing a child’s point of view and how adults can support children during these stressful times.”

This resource brings “practical guidance to children and their families coping with serious illness,” said CAICC CEO Dan Tobin, M.D. “The Here for You DVD will help children and their loved ones express their feelings and improve the quality of life for the entire family in a way that only Sesame Street could have done.”

CAICC will distribute over 5,000 copies of the Here for You: Helping Children Cope with Serious Illness DVD and supporting material to the nation’s 250 children’s hospitals, pediatric medical organizations, and children’s palliative care programs. Beginning this summer, these resources will also be available free of charge at www.sesameworkshop.org/hereforyou.

For children and their loved ones, facing a serious illness is challenging on every level – practical, physical, emotional, and spiritual. Providing information, guidance, and comfort, Elmo and Sesame Workshop are “Here for You.”

Have you had to cope with a family member’s serious illness? Share your story…

“Children are our future. Every time a child is seriously ill the whole community suffers. This remarkable partnership between Sesame Workshop and the Center for Advanced Illness Coordinated Care will help family and caregivers to communicate with children, allowing them to understand and cope with their illness. That process is the first step toward healing–both the kids and the communities,” said James J. Barba, President and Chief Executive Officer of Albany Medical Center in Albany, N.Y., where the Children’s Hospital at Albany Med is situated.

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Tags: baby advice, Child Illness, child parenting, Elmo from Sesame Street, Elmo Teach Your Child about Illness, Elmo Teaches Kids, parent advice, parent center, Sesame St. Elmo, Sesame Street, TV Show Sesame Street