Community Engagement and Equitable Policy: Promoting Resilience and Stability for Children in Immigrant Families in North Carolina.

Immigrant families in North Carolina, despite multidimensional challenges in the context of national, state, and local policies, enrich our communities. Over the last 18 months, a small group of North Carolina Pediatric Society (NCPS) physicians with concerns about the health and emotional well-being of children in immigrant families have come together to address the challenges facing this vulnerable population. Our goal, as the newly formed NCPS Committee on Immigration, is to advance policy to support immigrant families in obtaining equitable health, educational, and economic opportunities in our state. We are in the process of building a task force to bring together those who work closely with the North Carolina immigrant population to promote resilience and stability through legislative and policy advocacy.

The impact of social media on children, adolescents, and families.

Using social media Web sites is among the most common activity of today's children and adolescents. Any Web site that allows social interaction is considered a social media site, including social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter; gaming sites and virtual worlds such as Club Penguin, Second Life, and the Sims; video sites such as YouTube; and blogs. Such sites offer today's youth a portal for entertainment and communication and have grown exponentially in recent years. For this reason, it is important that parents become aware of the nature of social media sites, given that not all of them are healthy environments for children and adolescents. Pediatricians are in a unique position to help families understand these sites and to encourage healthy use and urge parents to monitor for potential problems with cyberbullying, "Facebook depression," sexting, and exposure to inappropriate content.