Melania Trump Announces Children's Issues Campaign

After well over a year in the White House, Melania Trump announced her first formal agenda as first lady on Monday afternoon in the White House Rose Garden.

The children-focused initiative is called Be Best, and consists of three pillars: wellbeing, social media, and opioid abuse.

While many expected her to focus on cyberbullying, she ended up pursuing a broader agenda, reportedly because Trump and his advisers dissuaded her given the optics around the president's own online behaviour.

Her spokesperson Stephanie Grisham put it this way: “There are too many critical issues facing children today for her to choose just one,” she told the New York Times in an email. “She wants to use her platform as first lady to help as many children as she can.”

In her speech on Monday, Melania emphasised teaching children "the importance of all aspects of their wellbeing, which includes social, emotional, and physical health."

The social media part of the initiative will focus on teaching kids to use the internet in "positive ways." As an example of championing kids' wellbeing, the first lady brought up an initiative called the Buddy Bench, which she said "allows classmates to connect during recess and helps ensure that no student feels lonely. If a child sits on the bench, it signals other students to come over and ask them to play." Introduced by a second-grader at his elementary school, she said there's now at least one in all 50 states.

Melania spoke about how deeply affected she has been after visiting clinics that treat children who suffer from opioid addiction. In February, she visited the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center to learn about the opioid epidemic in Ohio, and back in October she visited a West Virginia clinic that treats infants born with opioid addiction where she pledged to "give a voice" to families facing opioid addiction. Through Be Best, she promised to "support the families and children affected by this crisis, bring attention to neonatal abstinence syndrome, and help educate parents on the importance of healthy pregnancies."

The programme is coming under fire not only for a lack of detail, but for a cyberbullying booklet that seems to have been copied from an Obama-era Federal Trade Commission document.