Support Well Baby Center
The future home of WBC is coming soon – Marian Place!
Well Baby Center began in 2008 as a non-profit community mental health clinic. We have grown to become a premiere counseling and parenting center providing thousands of counseling and parenting support services every year.
Thanks to the support of people like you, no one is ever turned away for inability to pay. We are funded by our service fees and by individual donors and foundations. Every dollar donated to WBC goes directly to the cost of providing scholarships to the most vulnerable families—regardless of their financial or documented status.
Due to the ever-increasing competition for public dollars, preventative mental health and housing services for low income families bear the brunt of financial cuts. As a society, we need to do much more to ensure that low-income families with young children have a fair shot at a meaningful and healthy life.
By investing in Well Baby Center, you are putting your commitment to social responsibility into direct action. Your contribution will have an immediate and long-lasting impact on hundreds of families across the city.
You care deeply about promoting a more inclusive, healthy society and we have a proven track record of serving families toward this end. Together we can make history.
– Dr. Robert J. Watkins IV
Donor
– Alyxandra Chang
Donor
Click to read Camille's Story
Camille came to the clinic in the middle of an emotional and economic crisis. Her marriage was teetering on the brink of collapse, her two young children were dealing with their family’s stress by acting out, and under the circumstances, neither she nor her husband had the resources to respond to them thoughtfully – either lashing out or turning away just when the boys needed their help most. Camille called Well Baby Center on a Friday and by Monday she had been assigned therapists for both herself and for each of her children at a fee she could manage.
Over the course of the next year, both children were able to work through their feelings about their parents’ eventual divorce through the use of the sand tray, child-centered play therapy, and art. They were able to express their sadness, anger, and grief about the many changes and heartbreaks that their family was enduring. They also learned coping strategies including patience and self-regulation in order to manage their feelings of rage at mom’s limited ability to attend to them, she being their primary caregiver and juggling work and home life along with her distress over the divorce. By the end of treatment the children learned about emotional resilience and self-regulation. They showed gratitude to their “feeling doctors” by making each of them thank you cards and expressing how they would miss them in their “good goodbye” sessions.
Eventually, mom began to feel better too, learning in her own therapy sessions that she had always struggled with depression, which had only increased during the pandemic and because of the ending of her marriage. She was able to examine aspects of her childhood that had affected her adult life adversely and found new ways to deal with her new life as a single mom of two rambunctious boys.
Well Baby Center held this family together through a very challenging time. They emerged more resilient than ever — capable of handling future struggles with more grace, fortitude, and compassion for one another and for themselves.
Cedars-Sinai
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