R Markdown add White Space to HTML Output

Question

I've found several suggestions for adding whitespace to R Markdown documents including <br>, \newpage and some other things.

These don't work for my HTML output, maybe there's a better way. I'd like to do two things in the example below:

(1) Add extra whitespace between the title and the first header

(2) Add extra whitespace between the first and second paragraphs

Let's go with the default R Markdown document shown below. How would I accomplish this extra white space for HTML output?

---
title: "Here is the title"
output: html_document
---

```{r setup, include=FALSE}
knitr::opts_chunk$set(echo = TRUE)
```

## R Markdown

FIRST PARAGRAPH This is an R Markdown document. Markdown is a simple formatting syntax for authoring HTML, PDF, and MS Word documents. For more details on using R Markdown see <http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com>.

SECOND PARAGRAPH you click the **Knit** button a document will be generated that includes both content as well as the output of any embedded R code chunks within the document. You can embed an R code chunk like this:

Answer 1

A simple solution to add a line of white space is to use $~$

This adds a line of white space and has worked reliably for me with html output.

# R Markdown

Some text

$~$

More text after a white space