Our Foundation
The Raised with Love and Limits Foundation is a 501c3 nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting caring, supporting and protective relationships to prevent toxic stress and adverse childhood experiences.
“The single most important factor in promoting positive psychosocial, emotional, and behavioral well-being in children is having safe, stable, and nurturing relationships with their mother, father, or other primary caregivers."
~~ The National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s
Vibrant and Healthy Kids: Aligning Science, Practice and Policy to Advance Health Equity
Founded in 2016, the Raised with Love and Limits Foundation grew out of the challenge by the American Academy of Pediatrics to change the underutilized platform of the pediatric clinical practice to help reduce dangerous health, learning and behavior risks to children and adults: Bullying, obesity, depression, drug abuse, cancer, anxiety, heart disease and violence. These risks can all be reduced, according to scientific research data, with the presence of a caring, supportive, protective adult to mitigate stress from before birth forward, so it does not become toxic to the child’s developing brain/body.
“We see how early childhood experiences are so important to lifelong outcomes, how the early environment literally becomes embedded in the brain changes its architecture.”
~~Andrew S. Garner, M.D., Ph.D.
The Foundation is the first grassroots national nonprofit organization dedicated to universally connecting and “tethering” child-facing organizations to over 150 evidence-based, standardized, front-line parenting prescriptions for the most common, predictable behavior challenges children experience as they grow.
Our proven, practical, research-based love and limits approach to raising healthy, happy children is built on a foundation of developmental, neurological and behavioral psychology which studies children in “real” settings—home, schools, and playgrounds. Through our innovative Foundation, we are bringing our experience in parent skill-building to the new public health movement of preventing toxic stress in children’s lives, starting with our flagship initiative, Behavior Checker®, making healthy parent skill-building a systematic, effective, integrated part of caring for, and about, children. Our strategies to help parents teach their children acceptable behaviors and protect them from harm is in aligned with those recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics in their 2018 Policy Statement, “Effective Discipline to Raise Healthy Children” and their new 2021 Policy Statement, "Preventing Childhood Toxic Stress: Partnering with Families and Communities to Promote Relational Health".
Promoting lifelong optimum health, learning and behavior starts before birth by preventing adverse childhood experiences and toxic stress. The less exposure to toxic stress caused by harsh parenting and emotional neglect, the less the risk of the problems listed above, according to the seminal research in the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACE), replicated more than 50 times, since its inception in 1998.
“Early experiences affect lifelong health, not just learning; healthy brain development requires protection from toxic stress, not just enrichment. The time has come to leverage 21st century science to catalyze the design, testing and scaling of more powerful approaches for reducing lifelong disease by mitigating the effects of early adversity.”
~~Jack Shonkoff, M.D., Director,
The Center for the Developing Child, Harvard University
To help prevent and reverse the effects of ACEs and Toxic Stress and build caring, supportive, protective relationships between an adult and a child, research led us to not only develop the novel signature program of the Foundation, Behavior Checker®, but also the online course, “Parenting is Healthcare”, the first online course specifically designed to build the confidence, competence and comfort of those supporting families in healthy parenting as the gold standard of caring for children.
Behavior Checker is an online tool, accessed from the provider's clinic laptop, tablet or desktop, to instantly provide parents with evidence-based strategies to address over 150 common childhood behaviors. Through Behavior Checker, an innovative system of change happens in pediatric healthcare, as well as in mental health and early childhood education settings, in which the education, practice, implementation and delivery of evidence-based personalized practical healthy behavior problem solving is standardized and seamlessly integrated into the organization's routine, workflow and mission.
"Parenting is Healthcare" Online Course
The first online course for healthcare practitioners nationally, “Parenting is Healthcare”, was launched in 2018, in partnership with Johnson County Community College the the Raised with Love and Limits Foundation.
“At least one committed relationship with a supportive parent, caregiver or other adult is the single most common factor for children who develop resilience, executive functioning and self-regulation.”
~~The Center on the Developing Child, Harvard University
Since its pilot at University of Kansas Pediatrics in 2016, Behavior Checker and “Parenting is Healthcare” have been researched and tested in sites across the states of Kansas and Missouri, and is currently in a national expansion initiative to scale Behavior Checker in behavioral health, primary pediatrics, community health centers, social service agencies, the workplace and educational settings across the country.
We invite you to help us accomplish our mission and support our Behavior Checker Home Site National Outreach by making a tax-deductible contribution to The Raised with Love and Limits Foundation.