The struggle to balance work responsibilities with family obligations may be most difficult for working parents of the youngest children, those five and under. Any policy changes designed to ease the difficulties for these families are likely to be controversial, requiring a careful effort to weigh both the costs and benefits of possible…

In the 20th century's final decades, advances in the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases sharply reduced the child death rate. Despite this progress, the child death rate in the U.S. remains higher than in many other wealthy nations. The under-five mortality rate in the U.S. is almost three times higher than that of Iceland and Sweden…

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has contracted with the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to examine ways to implement the 2005 Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGAs) into the school meals programs. In the meantime, USDA has requested that state agencies begin proactively implementing the applicable recommendations for the 2005 DGAs…

Arguably, the ultimate application of evidenced-based communications is translating the research recommendations into a full-fledged media campaign. This article explains the development and implementation of Watch Your Mouth, a campaign based on FrameWorks Institute's research on children's oral health. To date, this innovative campaign has been…

School-age children with dysfunctional elimination syndrome (DES) do not always have school support for their treatment plans, including an every 2-hr voiding schedule. The objective of this study was to increase school support of treatment plans by allowing access to bathrooms, thereby improving continence. An eight-question survey about bathroom…

Despite knowing the risks to their children's health, parents continue to expose their children to tobacco smoke prior to and after their birth. This study explores the factors influencing parent's behaviour in preventing the exposure of their (unborn) children to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) and any changes to their smoking behaviour in the…

Recent years have seen a growing level of concern about children's behaviour and emotional well-being in Western developed countries, in particular the United Kingdom. This has given rise to a plethora of parenting programmes and increasing attention to children's nutrition. These developments are rooted partly in evidence that some parenting…

The authors describe a survey of 284 dependency court judges which examined four areas of judicial practice: (a) the extent of the judges' knowledge of infant and toddler development, (b) court capacity to initiate and sustain systems change, (c) the use of judicial authority to initiate systems change, and (d) the barriers judges face in taking…

There is still a pump in the Golden Square neighborhood on what was once called Broad Street. It does not work, for it is merely a replica of the original, and like the original its handle is missing. It serves as a curiously simple monument to the events that took place over one hundred years ago, when the real pump supplied water to the Broad…

Five years ago, the editor of "Exceptional Parent" Magazine requested the author to provide an account of a day in the life of the National Children's Study, an ambitious study by the federal government that aims to find out how the environment affects child health and development. Planning and implementation of the National Children's Study has…

Acquired brain injury (ABI) in children and adolescents can result from multiple causes, including trauma, central nervous system infections, noninfectious disorders (epilepsy, hypoxia/ischemia, genetic/metabolic disorders), tumors, and vascular abnormalities. Prediction of outcomes is important, to target interventions, allocate resources,…

This article presents a commentary on "Making the Most of Information-Gathering Interviews With Children," in which, according to Jones, Larsson and Lamb provided a helpful overview on memory retrieval and communicative ability and on ways these may be fostered in interviews with children. They explored three interview protocols that have been…

Data from a study involving 88 youths who participated in one of two randomized controlled treatment trials of Social Effectiveness Therapy for Children reveals that loneliness scores and social effectiveness predicted changes in social anxiety and overall functioning after the treatment. Child-reported loneliness mediated changes in social…

This article examines, by way of a case study, a community where groundwater has been highly contaminated with nitrate and how that situation brings together matters of public policy, environmental justice, and emerging technology. The Mountain View community lies in an unincorporated area of Bernalillo County, New Mexico; the neighborhood is 77%…

Each year, the Foundation for Child Development and the Child and Youth Well-Being Index Project at Duke University issue a comprehensive measure of how children are faring in the United States. The Overall Composite Child Well-Being Index (CWI) is based on a composite of 28 "Key Indicators" of well-being that are grouped into seven…