Our Work
PArental Wellbeing is essential to pediatric healthcare
At The Breath Between, we design tools and resources that help parents find calm in both acute moments of crisis and through the prolonged stress that comes with parenting children with medical needs. This includes not only emotional supports, but also practical relief like meal vouchers, ensuring parents can care for themselves while caring for their child.
Explore below to learn more about how The Breath Between is advancing parental support, improving children’s psychological and physical health outcomes, and strengthening the hospital ecosystem.
Calming Kits
Evidence-based kits designed to bring stability in moments of stress. Each kit includes:
Tactile grounding tool (fidget ring) for sensory regulation.
Aromatherapy intervention to foster physiological calm.
Journals with pens to empower parents to both reflect and actively participate in care with a space for notes and questions.
A QR code that will bring them to a meditation library with meditations created specifically for parents of hospital involved children.
A meal voucher to the families’ home hospital cafeteria.
Guided Meditations
Our meditations are tailored to the unique stressors of pediatric hospitalization and chronic hospital involvement - prolonged uncertainty, disrupted rhythms, request to participate in high stakes decision making and fear that sinks into a parents' very being.
By fostering emotional regulation and reducing stress responses, parents are better able to access clarity, build resilience, and return to their breath as a source of comfort during high-pressure situations.
All guided meditations are written by our founder, Sarah Carvajal, an advanced meditator that acutely understands the nuance of the nervous system within the pediatric hospital setting. All guided meditations are recorded by a trained voice actor.
We are proud to be uniquely positioned as one of the few organizations developing meditations (informed clinically and by lived experience) designed specifically for the realities of pediatric hospitals.
MEaL vouchers
Hospitalization often places families into a state of uncertainty—not only about their child’s health, but about their most basic needs. For many, food insecurity becomes an unspoken layer of stress, compounding the emotional toll of medical decision-making and bedside vigilance.
Food insecurity does not pause for hospital admissions. Parents may spend days—or weeks—at the bedside, stretching limited resources while trying to remain present for their child’s care.
Research underscores the seriousness of this reality. A 2024 study in JAMA Pediatrics found that caregivers of hospitalized children who screened positive for food insecurity experienced longer hospital stays and higher 30-day readmission rates compared to those who did not. The evidence makes clear that food access is not a peripheral issue—it has direct implications for children’s health outcomes.
Because of this, The Breath Between is committed to partnering directly with families’ home hospitals to provide meal vouchers alongside our other supports. This simple but essential offering ensures that no parent is forced to choose between nourishment and being present with their child. By integrating food access into our model, we affirm that parental wellbeing must include the basics: rest, grounding, and the ability to eat while keeping vigil at the bedside
From Pilot to National Standard
While our first priority is the launch of the Calming kits and guided meditations, The Breath Between is built with a wider vision. We are laying the foundation for a future where parental mental health and wellbeing is not viewed as supplemental, but as a core component to pediatric care.
Our long term goals include:
Building a national network of mental health providers trained specifically to work with families of hospitalized or chronically hospital involved children.
We aim to be able to support multiple integrative therapies for parents that have hospitalized and hospital involved children.
National Network of Support
Integrating Care Into Hospitals
Developing hospital integrated caregiver specific support programs.
Expanding Evidenced Based Resources
Expanding our library of guided meditations and psychoeducational tools.
Shaping a New Standard of Care
While we recognize that data collection from every kit may not be feasible—particularly in the early stages—we are optimistic that a combination of anecdotal insights and growing trust within hospital settings will enable us to gather meaningful information. Through parental feedback and observational data from child life specialists, patient experience teams, and clinical staff - we aim to assess the impact on advanced parental emotional support and regulation. These findings will support positioning The Breath Between as a sustainable, evidence-based initiative, advancing parental mental health and wellbeing as a national standard of excellence in pediatric care.
The BReath BEtween begins with calming kits and guided meditations, but the vision extends much further.
Each intervention is:
Based in research
Builds ongoing supportive evidence in favor of our mission
Strengthens family-clinician collaboration
Sets the stage for scalable change.
Our commitment is to demonstrate, with rigor and compassion, that embedding parental wellbeing into pediatric care improves outcomes for children, parents and hospital systems alike.