Mount Sinai Parenting Center

The Mount Sinai Parenting Center, located within the Icahn School of Medicine, aims to transform the way pediatric healthcare is delivered by maximizing opportunities to promote strong parent-child relationships and early child development within everyday healthcare interactions. Through provider training, environmental transformation and pioneering research, our programming leverages the healthcare space to reach families in the earliest years.

Current investments in public Pre-K education, home visiting models for high-risk families, and concentrated services for children and families in impoverished neighborhoods are not the full answer. They tend to occur too late in child development, are expensive to scale, and can be difficult for the most vulnerable families to access. The nation’s health care system already reaches almost every American child, beginning at birth if not before. 99% of babies are born in hospitals, and on average a child will have 15 well child visits and countless sick visits in the first 5 years of life.

Our goal is to reach children ages 0-5 through the already existing healthcare interactions almost all children have. We do this by:

• Creating a model curriculum for incorporating parenting into pediatric residency training.
• Using positive parenting to promote children’s cognitive and emotional growth
• Modeling the transformation of pediatric spaces throughout the hospital to promote positive parent-child relationships
• Supporting pioneering new research on changes in healthcare providers practice and beliefs related to parenting