Parenting children is not an easy job. Parenting children with special challenges adds more complications to the task. Parenting children with chronic or life threatening medical conditions is frightening.
While we as parents need support and education, we must not forget the fact that our children do, too. Whether physically healthy, living with special challenges or struggling with health issues, children need to understand the importance of caring and compassion.
A "caring-and-curing" website, Generation Cures is a new free online community for tweens created by Children’s Hospital of Boston as an innovative way to educate kids about the importance of caring and compassion while raising funds for pediatric medical research.
Although children represent 20 percent of the U.S. population; only a small fraction of our national research funding is allocated to pediatric illnesses. There simply isn’t enough funding to find cures and better therapies for suffering children. As a global leader in pediatric research and one of the nation’s top children’s hospitals, Children’s Hospital Boston founded Generation Cures to try to make a dramatic difference.
The really cool and different thing is how they are going about it. They have created a safe online experience that offers educational digital content to kids and their families for free. The site’s online puzzle-adventure games, animated web stories and "behind the scenes" videos have been designed by experts to help parents teach their kids about altruism and to inspire them to know they can make a difference in the lives of other people.
The secret is that it does all this on the "kid terms" – in a fun, cool and understandable way. Additionally, the content teaches kids about medicine and science and is a great resource for parents.
Generation Cures is currently in Beta status, but will be adding more and more content over the coming months. I wanted to give you this preview into what Generation Cures is doing in hopes that you will check out the site.
While there is never a charge to use Generation Cures, the hope is that the families who enjoy the site will make a gift to Generation Cures. The collective giving of this growing online community will advance the work of doctors and scientists at Children’s Hospital Boston who are dedicated to discovering life-altering cures for childhood diseases and illnesses around the world.
Please visit Generation Cures. Make it better.
Melody can be found writing here at 5MFSN every Tuesday in addition to hosting Special Exposure Wednesday. She can also be found at Slurping Life and what i think.