This is PediCast.

Welcome to Pediacast, a pediatric podcast for parents.

And now, direct from the campus of nationwide children's, here is your host, Dr. Mike.

Hello, everyone, and welcome.

Once again to Pediacast.

It is a pediatric podcast for moms and dads.

This is Dr. Mike, coming to you from nationwide at Children's Hospital.

It's episode 461 from May 7th, 2020.

We're calling this one, preventing child abuse during a pandemic.

I want to welcome all of you to the program.

So, you know, child abuse is a

really serious topic and something that we're always concerned about. I want to make sure

that kids are safe and healthy. And home safety and safety, you know, in their neighborhoods

and schools and wherever they are is going to be

really important to us. And so the issue of child abuse and neglect and non-accidental trauma,

although they're serious, they're also important things to talk about. And during a pandemic,

when stress is high and folks are together inside the home, there's not really as much interaction

with adults who would be considered mandated reporters outside of the home, like teachers

and medical providers, coaches, you know, people who are seeing what's going on with kids

and then able to intervene when trouble is suspected.

So you really have kind of a perfect storm right now with, you know, kids being sort of cooped up with their family and also a lack of accountability in terms of what would normally get reported.

And so we would expect there to be sort of more incidents of abuse and neglect

...