State Service Champions Community Togetherness During Child Abuse Prevention Month

(CBS4) -- April is National Child Abuse Prevention Month, and state service CO4Kids wants to help us all support families to prevent abuse.

You may have seen pinwheel gardens popping up in neighborhoods. The service uses them as a symbol of its "Growing better together" which asks all of us to take time to strengthen families, especially as we recover from the impact of the pandemic.

"As families have been in the pandemic sort of struggling with economic insecurities or food insecurity, loss of job, those things created stressors and that isolation certainly didn't help as well," Minnie Castillo Cohen said. "So the ways that we can get involved to strengthen families is simple things like being able to offer child care to a parent who may need some time to themselves to run some errands or some self care."

Other suggestions include hosting neighborhood or block parties so everyone knows each other, creating a meal train for new parents or a family in need or simply asking a family if they need something picked up the next time they go to the store.