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New research makes the case for educating women in their 40s — who’ve been caught in the crossfire of a decades-long debate about whether to be screened for breast cancer with mammograms — about the harms as well as the benefits of the exam.

After a nationally representative sample of U.S. women between the ages of 39 and 49 learned about the pros and cons of mammography, more than twice as many elected to wait until they turn 50 to get screened, a study released Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine found.

Most women have absorbed the widely broadcast message that screening mammography saves lives by the time they enter middle age. But many remain unaware of the costs of routine screening in their 40s — in false-positive results, unnecessary biopsies, anxiety and debilitating treatment for tumors that left alone would do no harm.

“In an ideal world, all women would get this information and then get to have their further questions answered by their doctor and come up with a screening plan that is right for them given their preferences, their values and their risk level,” said social psychologist Laura Scherer, the study’s lead author and an associate professor of research at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.

Of 495 women surveyed, only 8% initially said they wanted to wait until they turned 50 to get a mammogram. After researchers informed the women of the benefits and the harms, 18% said they would wait until 50.

“We’re not being honest”

Learning about the downsides of mammograms did not discourage women from wanting to get the test at some point, the study showed.

The benefits and the harms of mammography came as a surprise to nearly half the study’s participants. More than one-quarter said what they learned from the study about overdiagnosis differed from what their doctors told them.

“We’re not being honest with people,” said breast cancer surgeon Laura Esserman, director of the University of California San Francisco Breast Care Center, who was not involved with the research.

“I think most people are completely unaware of the risks associated with screening because we’ve had 30, 40 years of a public health messaging campaign: Go out and get your mammogram, and everything will be fine,” she said in an NPR interview.

Esserman sees women who are diagnosed with slow-growing tumors that she believes in all likelihood would never harm them. In addition, mammography can give women a false sense of security, she said, like it did for Olivia Munn.

The 44-year-old actress had a clean mammogram and a negative test for cancer genes shortly before her doctor calculated her score for lifetime breast cancer risk, setting off an alarm that led to her being treated for fast-moving, aggressive breast cancer in both breasts.

Toward a personalized plan for screening

Esserman advocates for a personalized approach to breast cancer screening like the one that led to Munn’s diagnosis. In 2016, she launched the WISDOM study, which aims to tailor screening to a woman’s risk and, in her words, “to test smarter, not test more.”

The National Cancer Institute estimates that more than 300,000 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer and 42,250 will die in the U.S. this year. Incidence rates have been creeping up about 1% a year, while death rates have been falling a little more than 1% a year.

For the past 28 years, the influential U.S. Preventive Services Task Force has been flip-flopping in its recommendations about when women should begin mammography screening.

From 1996 until 2002, the independent panel of volunteer medical experts who help guide physicians, insurers and policymakers said women should begin screening at 50. In 2002, the task force said women in their 40s should be screened every year or two. In 2009, it said that 40-something women should decide whether to get mammograms based on their health history and individual preferences.

The new study was conducted in 2022, when the task force guidelines called for women in their 40s to make individual decisions.

New guidelines

In 2024, the panel returned to saying that all women between the ages of 40 and 74 should be screened with mammograms every other year. Rising breast cancer rates in younger women, as well as models showing the number of lives that screening might save, especially among Black women, drove the push for earlier screening.

An editorial accompanying the new study stresses the need for education about mammography and the value of shared decision-making between clinicians and patients.

“For an informed decision to be made,” states the editorial written by Dr. Victoria Mintsopoulos and Dr. Michelle B. Nadler, both of the University of Toronto in Ontario, “the harms of overdiagnosis — defined as diagnosis of asymptomatic cancer that would not harm the patient in the future — must be communicated.”

Grocery prices are no longer climbing as much as they did in the last two years — but many Americans are still frustrated by what it costs to put food on the table.

Some people have apparently hit their limit. One of the biggest snack makers said this week that its sales fell this spring as grocery shoppers became more sensitive to rising prices.

Here are three things to know about food prices these days — and why it still feels more expensive at the checkout lane of your favorite grocery store.

What is going on with food prices?

It may not feel like it, but grocery prices have actually leveled off for the most part.

The latest consumer inflation report, out this week, showed grocery prices rose just a little over 1% in the last 12 months. That’s a big improvement from the previous year, when prices jumped nearly 5%, and the year before that, when they soared by double digits.

However, leveling off is not the same as prices coming down, and the U.S. is still feeling the cumulative effect of those earlier increases.

And that leads to frustration for shoppers like Cindy Seinar, a retired autoworker in Lynchburg, Virginia.

“You go in for one thing, and you come out and it’s $45,” she says, describing her experiences at the grocery store.

And for Seinar, just like for many other Americans, the frustration is compounded by “shrinkflation.” That’s when companies reduce package sizes, meaning you get less than you used to for the same or sometimes even higher prices.

“Sugar is only 4 pounds,” Seinar says. “You’re not even getting a 5-pound bag anymore.”

Grocery prices are particularly noticeable because they are such a significant chunk of the typical family’s budget, accounting for about 8% on average, according to government data. For lower-income families, it’s often more than that.

How are people adjusting to higher prices?

For a while, many people just gritted their teeth and paid up — but Americans are starting to push back.

PepsiCo, which reported earnings this week, said sales of its Frito-Lay snacks actually fell during the most recent quarter. Some of that is because shoppers are balking at the higher prices by cutting back on chips altogether or by switching to cheaper store brands.

Amanda Whitworth stocks grocery shelves at a Target store in Florida. She often finds herself steering customers to the in-house bargains at the discount retailer.

“You may not ever have considered the Market Pantry bread, but it’s $1.39 for a big loaf of it,” Whitworth says, referring to Target’s private label. “While that may not be someone’s first choice, it’s a quarter of the price of some loaves.”

Whitworth also does the food shopping for her family and says she has made similar substitutions of her own.

“Before, we would have bought a big bag of frozen chicken nuggets for our son. And the particular bag went up three extra dollars,” Whitworth says. “So we started making homemade chicken nuggets, which we’ll probably never switch back because they’re so good.”

That sends a message to the big food producers. When PepsiCo and others start losing market share, they grow more cautious about pushing up prices. In some cases, they start to offer discounts — and that’s one reason grocery prices aren’t climbing as fast as they had been.

So are grocery prices finally going to come down?

To some degree.

The prices of some individual grocery items have come down. Fruit and vegetable prices have dropped over the last year, for example. So have milk and cheese prices.

However, the overall cost of groceries is unlikely to fall substantially.

But there is a silver lining. As grocery inflation slows, wages are catching up.

Over the last year, average wages have risen 3.9%, or about three and a half times as fast as grocery prices.

The typical worker now has to work about the same number of hours to buy a week’s worth of groceries as in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic.

That’s good news — even if for many Americans it doesn’t feel that way.

Scientists have recreated the three-dimensional structure of the woolly mammoth’s genetic blueprint.

The accomplishment, described Thursday in the journal Cell, marks what is believed to be the first time scientists have been able to produce a multidimensional version of the genome of a complex extinct species.

The advance should provide important new insights into the biology of a creature that has long sparked fascination. In addition, the work could aid efforts to breed a living version of the animal, the researchers and others said.

“It’s exciting,” says Erez Lieberman Aiden, a professor of of molecular and human genetics and director of the Center for Genome Architecture at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. “We think it’s going to be very valuable.”

For years, scientists have been able to peer back in time by analyzing fragments of ancient DNA recovered from bones, fossilized teeth, mummies and even strands of hair.

“In biology, one of the most powerful tools for understanding the history of life on this planet is ancient DNA,” Aiden says. “It’s an incredibly powerful tool for understanding the history of life.”

But there’s only so much scientists could learn from snippets of DNA. So Aiden and his colleagues launched an international effort to try to recreate the three-dimensional structure of the DNA, including the chromosomes, of an extinct creature.

“In so doing, you would be able to see exactly how that chromosome was shaped in a living cell, and you’d be able to both get a deeper understanding of the genomes of ancient and extinct species and how those genomes worked – which genes were on and off in particular tissues,” Aiden says.

Searching for mammoth samples on eBay

The scientists focused on the wooly mammoth, a big, shaggy species of elephant that roamed the tundra thousands of years ago.

“Initially we had embarrassingly bad ideas. I’m a little ashamed to admit it,” Aiden told NPR. “We said, ‘Oh, you know, that looks like a good-looking piece of mammoth on eBay. Let’s try that.’ It’s kind of a little cringe, right, to tell you that. Ebay is a bad place to get your mammoth samples.”

After searching for five years, the team finally found a well-preserved mammoth sample: skin from behind the ear of a 52,000-year-old female that was discovered freeze-dried in Siberia in 2018.

“It was a piece of a mammoth skin that was, you know, wooly. True to the name — it was indeed woolly mammoth skin,” says Olga Dudchenko, an assistant professor at the Baylor Center for Genome Architecture who worked on the research. “And that’s actually not as trivial as it sounds because very often the hair would be lost. So this one was hairy. And that actually is an interesting indicator in and of itself that this is a sample of substantial quality. And that immediately piqued our attention.”

Scientists can look at individual mammoth genes

In fact, the quality of the sample enabled the team to extract DNA and use a technique known as Hi-C to reconstruct the three-dimensional structure of all 28 of the mammoth’s chromosomes — the extinct creature’s entire genome, the researchers reported.

“We were able to assemble the genome of a woolly mammoth just as 25 years ago humans were excited for the first time to assemble our own genomes,” Aiden says. “Now we can do that for animals that were long extinct. That’s obviously a milestone.”

Not only that, the team has been able to peer into the genome to start learning what individual genes did.

“And that’s really exciting to be able to look at an extinct creature and be able to say, ‘Oh, yes. I can see this gene was on. That gene was on. This gene was off. Oh, isn’t that surprising?’” Aiden says. “To be able to do all these specific things in a woolly mammoth is exciting.”

In fact, by comparing the mammoth genome to DNA from modern elephants, the scientists have already discovered clues to what made the woolly mammoth woolly.

“We’ve been internally discussing whether we should start Hair Club for mammoths?” Dudchekno jokes.

Genetic findings could aid efforts to bring back mammoths

But seriously, that insight could help efforts that are already underway to try to bring a version of the mammoth back from extinction — by endowing modern-day Asian elephants with mammoth traits, such as their hairiness, and perhaps even release them to graze the tundra again.

“I do think that this can be helpful for de-extinction,” Aiden says.

Other scientists praised the work.

“I think it’s pretty cool,” says Vincent Lynch, an associate professor of biological sciences at the University at Buffalo who was not involved in the research.

But Lynch isn’t a fan of trying to bring back the mammoth. The unintended consequences of that could be disastrous, he says. And the money for such a project would be much better spent trying to save the elephants that still roam the planet today.

“There’s an huge potential for unintended consequences,” Lynch says. “Just think about all the other invasive species that are in the world. You don’t really know the effect that species is going to have in the environment until it gets there.”

And Karl Flessa, a professor of geosciences at the University of Arizona agrees on the scientific accomplishment and the foolishness of trying to bring back the extinct pachyderm.

“The preservation of genetic architectures from the woolly mammoth is really remarkable,” Flessa says. “But just because you can do it, doesn’t mean that it should be done. A genetically modified Asian elephant is not a wooly mammoth. And releasing such an animal into the wild would be arrogant and irresponsible.”

Others disagree.

“It’s exciting to see that 3D architecture can be preserved in ancient samples. This will help move toward a complete de novo assembled mammoth genome, which could reveal features of the genome that might be relevant to mammoth de-extinction,” Eriona Hysolli, who leads a project to create an Asian elephant with mammoth traits at Colossal Laboratories & Biosciences in Dallas, wrote NPR in an email.

Still, Robert Fleischer, a senior scientist for the Center for Conservation Genomics at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo & Conservation Institute in Washington, says that prospect is exciting.

“If I was a 12-year-old in my science class in junior high school I’d probably think this was pretty cool,” Fleischer says. “And I still think it’s pretty cool.”

When Joe Pascale moved to the desert city of Palm Springs, Calif., about 17 years ago it was hot, but in the mornings and evenings there was a break from the heat.

“You could get up in the morning and it would be relatively cool and you could enjoy outside, even in the dead of summer,” he says. “The mornings would be just brilliant.”

“That doesn’t exist for us anymore, and it’s a huge loss,” he says.

Palm Springs has broken temperature records one after another in the last week. The city hit 122 degrees on July 8, the hottest temperature ever recorded for that day, according to the National Weather Service.

Last Friday, the city broke its all-time high temperature record when it hit 124 degrees. Even in the early mornings this week, the temperature has still been in the low 90s or high 80s.

Pascale recognizes the connection between his increasingly hot city and climate change, caused largely by humans burning fossil fuels.

“Sometimes we feel like we’re screaming into the void,” Pascale says. “There’s a problem that we need to be addressing.”

Last year was the hottest year on record for the world. The U.S. is warming up at a faster rate than the global average, which means the effects of global warming will be more pronounced.

Arizona, California, Oregon and Nevada have all seen record-breaking heat in recent weeks. And while the heat wave is mostly in the West, states across the country like North Carolina and Maryland have also seen temperature records fall this summer.

“It’s not subtle,” says Joellen Russell, an oceanographer and climate scientist at The University of Arizona, who notes her city, Tucson, Ariz., also saw a high temperature record fall this week.

“We’re going to continue [breaking temperature records] as long as we keep increasing the amount of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere,” Russell says.

In 2015, at a U.N. conference in Paris, most countries of the world agreed to try to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels by the end of the century. 1.5 degrees is a threshold that scientists say could unleash more severe climate change impacts.

Given that global fossil fuel use is still increasing, it’s unlikely — but not impossible — that the world will stay below that 1.5 degrees threshold, according to many international scientists.

As of June, the world has already been at or above the 1.5 degree threshold for 12 straight months, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

“But a 1.5 degree target is not a magic number,” says Katharine Hayhoe, climate scientist and chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy, a nonprofit.

Even if the world can limit warming to 1.5 degrees, more temperature records will continue to fall, Hayhoe says.

“We scientists have known for a long time — for decades — that as the world gets warmer, we’re going to see our temperature extremes [increasing],” she says. “Climate change is already affecting the people we love, the places we love, and the things we love.”

The good news is that the world has proven and scalable climate solutions, Russell says.

These include solar and wind energy combined with batteries. Last year was the fastest year of growth for renewable energy, according to the International Energy Association.

WESTBOROUGH, Mass. — Plastic bags of dark powder sit on a metal shelf. The powder contains minerals that came from lithium-ion batteries and are destined to be made into batteries again. That, in itself, is not revolutionary.

But where this shelf is located — in an unassuming industrial park an hour west of Boston — symbolizes how the battery-recycling industry is on the cusp of change.

Today, key steps in the battery-recycling process mostly happen overseas, particularly in Asia. Companies there have spent years building up a battery supply chain in which recycling and building batteries are closely connected.

But more and more batteries spend their lives powering electric vehicles in the United States. Shipping minerals halfway around the world costs money, creates carbon emissions, adds supply chain risks and, from the U.S. perspective, pushes some jobs and profits overseas.

That’s why the U.S. government is pouring money into an effort to bring the whole battery-recycling ecosystem to the United States. Meanwhile, automakers and battery companies, as they build new battery and EV plants across North America, want recycling close by; they’ll have a lot of batteries to scrap in the years ahead as electric vehicle sales rise.

These minerals in their 25-pound plastic bags, recycled by a company called Ascend Elements, epitomize the new geography of battery recycling. They were ground up in Georgia, processed in Massachusetts and headed to Michigan for manufacturing — every step happening in the United States.

Keeping battery minerals closer to home

Lithium-ion batteries are hazardous waste if they’re discarded, but they’re a valuable resource if they’re recycled.

Because they’re hazardous, some states legally require battery recycling. And because they’re valuable, EV batteries are often recycled even where it’s not mandated: Vehicle dismantlers can sell the batteries for money.

But how does it work? Step 1 is safely collecting batteries, discharging them and then disassembling and shredding them. The result is a black powder that’s called “black mass” in the battery-recycling industry. This happens at locations scattered across the U.S., including at an Ascend Elements facility in Georgia.

Then that powder of jumbled-up minerals is frequently shipped overseas to get turned back into something useful. In Westborough, Mass., Ascend Elements is doing those steps closer to home. The powder gets combined with sulfuric acid, where some minerals dissolve and others don’t, making it easier to sort them apart.

Ascend takes out (and in some cases, sells off separately) everything except the nickel, cobalt and other costly minerals that go into a battery’s cathode. The levels of each mineral get fine-tuned, and the mixture is dried back into a powder again.

Last month, the company began shipping the powder coming off the line — precursor cathode active material (pCAM), to use its technical term — to a buyer that will put the material into batteries for heavy-duty vehicles. Ascend believes this is likely the first time that pCAM made wholly in the U.S. from recycled materials is being used in commercial manufacturing.

Newer, cleaner processes for recycling batteries

In some cases, recycling processes, not just locations, are also changing. An older method relied on burning battery materials, which wasted many of the minerals and created pollution.

A newer method involves dissolving the minerals in acid instead, recovering more minerals with less waste (or potentially no waste, if companies reuse water and find uses for all their chemical byproducts). “Recyclers all across the world are adopting this technology,” says battery expert Beatrice Browning.

Meanwhile, Ascend is skipping several steps by not isolating all the minerals separately, like most acid-based processes do. “That’s extracting 98% of the material because you’re worried about the 2% of impurities,” co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Eric Gratz explains. “So we flip the problem around, and we’re extracting the 2% of impurities and keeping the nickel, manganese and cobalt together.”

Imagine you have a large Lego creation and you want to make a different Lego creation. Melting the whole thing down would be a brute-force waste of energy. Taking it apart and sorting all the bricks is more finicky but much more effective — like extracting out each mineral one by one. What Ascend is doing is more like breaking it down but not sorting all the bricks, just keeping them together in a big pile.

Meanwhile, some companies are working on a form of recycling called “direct recycling” that would take the battery apart without shredding it at all. It’s like keeping big chunks of Lego bricks together and reusing them as a single unit. And still other companies are exploring new ways to use electricity or other technologies to refine how metals are, well, refined.

A dual purpose: cutting emissions, boosting profits

Ascend’s production line is built right behind the company’s research and development lab, where Matthew Valdiviezo is watching a vivid teal liquid spin in a beaker as he explains that chemistry is all about rules. And his work is all about manipulating those rules — “to make us money in the long run,” he says, “and help the planet, of course.”

For many environmentally conscious drivers, battery disposal is a major concern. And it’s true that if batteries wind up in landfills, they would be a serious problem. But environmental advocates see a huge opportunity in recycling.

“Battery recycling can play, in the long run, a really big role in making electric vehicles more sustainable,” says Dale Hall of the International Council on Clean Transportation. “Decades from now, we’ll need very little new virgin raw materials to build new EVs. And that’s very different from what you have now with combustion engine vehicles, where you’re going to always have to be producing new virgin oil and feeding tons and tons of that into the vehicles over their lifetime.”

Meanwhile, Valdiviezo’s other motivation — the bottom line? That’s real too, and lots of other companies are chasing it.

Redwood Materials, started by a Tesla co-founder, is building multibillion-dollar plants in Nevada and South Carolina. “There is an incredible opportunity to create this closed-loop supply chain here domestically for the first time,” the company’s vice president of government relations and communications, Alexis Georgeson, told NPR in an interview earlier this year.

And, she noted, battery recycling is profitable today.

Cirba Solutions, another big player, is working on plants in Ohio and South Carolina. “We’re building as fast as we humanly possibly can build,” says CEO David Klanecky. “And I think we’re going way too slow, to be honest with you.”

“It’s not fast enough”

The pressure for speed might seem counterintuitive. EV batteries can last more than a dozen years (maybe much longer — the first mass-market EVs aren’t old enough to have much data beyond that). Some outlive their vehicles and could have a second life, like storing backup power for a building. And there aren’t that many EVs on the roads — yet.

But EVs from the first generation are starting to reach the end of their lives. Recalled batteries or those damaged in vehicular accidents also need to be recycled, as does scrap material coming from the production lines of plants manufacturing new batteries. Meanwhile, the nascent battery-manufacturing industry in the U.S. is hungry for materials, especially ones that meet made-in-America requirements for federal incentives.

That’s pushing companies to move fast. “Two years ago, there was nothing in here,” says Ascend senior process engineer Zain Nasir at the plant in Westborough. “The amount of hours everybody’s put in trying to get this place to where it is is just incredible.”

In the lab where she was testing products to confirm their quality, Rebecca Neslusan laughed when I asked her about the timeline. “The pressure is on,” she said. “As fast as we can do it, it’s not fast enough.”

In fact, the milestone that Ascend hit in June — that first commercial shipment out of this manufacturing line — is itself proof of the sense of urgency. For a chemical plant, the production line here in Massachusetts is tiny. It was originally meant to be a pilot, a proof of concept. But the demand is too high.

“We’re shipping here because the customer wants and needs the material as soon as possible, you know, basically faster than we can build our facilities,” says Gratz, the company’s co-founder and CTO.

His billion-dollar plant in Kentucky is due to open early next year.

A half dozen women — in their 30s, 40s and 50s — gather in a classroom in Phoenix for a few hours on a weekday morning.

They are all caregivers of young children.

There’s Yosbri Rojas. When her own 8-year-old is at school, she takes care of two younger children, whose father works with Rojas’ husband installing fiber optic lines.

“I like that the children feel happy with me,” Rojas says in Spanish.

Graciela Cruz is also here. She works early mornings in a warehouse, from 4 to 9 a.m. During the day, she parents her own 2-year-old daughter and also watches her neighbors’ 1-year-old while the child’s parents are at work cleaning houses and offices.

Cruz and Rojas are participants in an Arizona state-funded initiative called Kith and Kin. The 12-week program aims to give family, friend and neighbor caregivers the kind of training and support that licensed caregivers are required to have.

Licensed or not, caregivers make work possible

While most federal and state funding for child care in the U.S. goes to licensed settings, Arizona is one of a number of states that have long recognized the importance of informal caregiving arrangements that are allowing millions of parents go to work.

Such arrangements, which can be paid or unpaid, are especially common in immigrant communities and communities of color, where many parents hold jobs with nontraditional hours and prefer caregivers who share their language and culture.

A study in the south Phoenix area found that 60% of children from birth to 5 years old were being cared for outside of licensed child care settings.

That study led the nonprofit organization Candelen to launch Kith and Kin in 1999.

“There was the high need to provide both training and support” in communities where families with young children live, says program director Angela Tapia.

Now, 25 years later, programs like Kith and Kin are getting renewed attention in the wake of the pandemic, which put a spotlight on the fragile state of the child care industry.

There’s increased urgency from federal and state policymakers and businesses to ensure communities have access to affordable, high-quality child care, paving the way for parents — especially women — to work, an essential element of a robust and well-functioning economy.

A crash course in caregiving fundamentals

The aunts and grandmothers and neighbors who attend the Kith and Kin classes often don’t think of themselves as caregivers, says Tapia, much less as contributing to the economy.

“It’s more something they do out of love and to help their family and friends,” she says.

But caregiving requires more than love, and that’s where the program come in.

Over 12 weeks, the caregivers, who are predominantly women (though they do see the occasional grandfather or uncle) undergo training in basic health and safety, including CPR, as well as more advanced topics such as child development, positive discipline and injury prevention.

The women share personal challenges, ask for advice and offer comfort and support.

Funding comes from Arizona’s tobacco tax

The sessions are paid for in part by Arizona’s tobacco tax. Candelen estimates it trains about 1,000 caregivers a year.

Melinda Gulick, CEO of Arizona’s early childhood agency First Things First, says the funding is recognition that all children, regardless of where they spend their first years, deserve a high quality early childhood experience.

“Being ready on the first day of Kindergarten is the biggest indicator of academic success and success in life as well,” she says.

Gulick points out, in some rural parts of Arizona, there is no licensed child care, and even where there are options, Arizonans are known for wanting choice.

“This is a liberty and freedom state,” she says. “For many parents, the best place for [children] to be is with their auntie or their grandmother or in a co-op in their neighborhood.”

Keeping caregiving in the family

That’s certainly how Cynthia Diarte felt when she had her son Esteban. He’s now two and a big fan of Bluey, the beloved children’s television character.

Diarte, a teacher, grew up on the Texas-Mexico border, cared for by her grandmother while her mother went to work at an airport restaurant.

Diarte says it was never a question who would watch her children when she became a mother herself. Her mother, Elvia Elena Nunez, insisted she be the one, carrying on their family tradition.

“As his grandmother, my love is different from any other caregiver,” Nunez says in Spanish.

As a Kith and Kin participant, Nunez has appreciated learning new ways to keep Esteban entertained without screens. She also cherishes the community she’s built with the other caregivers and the enrichment Esteban has gotten through the program.

While class is in session, Esteban is with other toddlers, singing songs and playing games in the child care room down the hall.

“He’s bringing more vocabulary. He’s starting to speak up a little bit more,” says Diarte. “He really needed that social aspect, the relationship with other kids.”

And she expects those relationships to endure. A side benefit of the Kith and Kin classes is how close the caregivers become.

“They end up becoming like the madrinas, like the godmothers, the godparents, to each other’s children,” says program director Tapia. “They stay connected throughout the years.”