Clammy hands.  Racing heart.  Clenched stomach. If I could give my children one gift for their lifetime, it would be to manage stress.  I wish they could learn techniques so that they  could be confident and grounded in any situation.  In our society, parents are continually bombarded with the current health buzz.  We are so careful about not eating unpasturized cheese while pregnant.  We ditch the carpet lest our kids are affected by off-gassing, and we work incessantly to make sure there are no parabens in our shampoo, nitrites in our meat and dust in our pillows.  Doing the right things for our children can not only be time-consuming but stressful as well.  And we’ve also heard the buzz about the long-term health consequences of stress.  What better gift could we bestow on any human being than the gift of a healthy coping mechanism?  Child and youth clinical counsellor Michele Kambolis is the Vice Chair of the BC Mental Health Foundation, and saw the need for a program for children to learn the coping skills for stressful situations thoughout their lives.  Enter CHI Kids. It needs more than a drumroll.

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