Sex education, especially in the southeastern USA, remains steeped in an Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage (AOUM) approach, which sets up barriers to the education of sexually active students. Research confirms that science education has the potential to facilitate discussion of controversial topics, including sex education. Science teachers in the…

Background: World Health organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) have been recommended the application of the Ten Steps to Successful Breastfeeding of the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative (BFHI) in order to promote & support breastfeeding. The aim of this study was to assess pregnant and lactating mothers' attitudes…

Maternal smoking during pregnancy (SDP) has been linked to poorer offspring executive function across development, but SDP does not occur independent of other familial risk factors. As such, poor and inconsistent control for potential confounds, notably shared familial (i.e., genetic and environmental) confounds, preclude concluding causal effects…

Sexuality education as pedagogy is often fraught by the perceived requirement to balance the informational needs of young people with an investment in notions of childhood 'innocence'. Nowhere is this perhaps more evident than in sexuality education that seeks to be inclusive of transgender young people, often resulting in the failure of such…

Objective: To assess college students' sexual and reproductive health (SRH) literacy experiences, specific to contraception use and STI prevention. Participants: In Spring 2015, participants (n = 43) from a large institution participated in six focus groups (two male and four females groups). Methods: Focus groups were guided by the health…

Educational backgrounds of incarcerated women differ from study to study, proportionate to the rest of the country; incarcerated women possess lower levels of educational attainment when they enter prison. Approximately 56% of women incarcerated in state prison entered without a high school diploma. Prior research on urban prisons indicates…

To describe development and pilot testing of the Test of Adolescent Sexual Knowledge (TASK) developed by the researcher using content recommendations of the National Sexuality Education Standards. TASK development was guided by a systematic process described by Kirby and Mathtec. Pilot testing involved the use of talk-aloud interviews with 10…

This article examines neighborhood-level factors to help explain why adolescent birth rate trajectories differ in certain communities in California, with rates in some areas remaining elevated or increasing while rates in other areas with similar demographic characteristics declined. Researchers conducted in-depth interviews with 94 community…

A father's mental health is important for family well-being, but research is scarce on paternal symptoms during the transition to fatherhood. This study identified fathers' latent mental health trajectory classes from the pre- to postnatal period and examined their associations with early fathering experiences. It further analysed, whether a…

Child maltreatment is associated with increased risk of substance abuse in adulthood. However, prior investigations have not examined substance use specifically in pregnancy and have relied on self-report of substance use. The present study addresses these gaps via secondary analysis of 295 primarily low-income, Black postpartum women who agreed…

This study seeks to explain macrolevel drivers of adolescent fertility rate using a panel data set derived from 17 Latin American countries over a period of 16 years (1997-2012). While many studies of adolescent fertility have focused on individual-level explanations, this study explores whether adolescent fertility rate is correlated to…

A healthy lifestyle is important for mothers during the postpartum period. This study was conducted to determine the effects of a lifestyle educational package in primiparous women. This randomized clinical trial was conducted on 220 mothers assigned to two groups using block randomization. In the intervention group, the mothers received…

This study examined whether parental alcohol use in adolescence, adulthood, and for mothers, during pregnancy, was related to their young children's functioning in terms of their on-time development as indicated by the number of developmental areas in which children experienced delay. Observed parenting practices and family socioeconomic status…

Previous studies show that when Nigerian adolescent girls, especially those in the Niger Delta, become pregnant they drop out of school and may never go back again but become low level labourers or miscreants to the society. This study investigated the extent of teenagers involvement in sex, pre-disposition of females to pregnancy in the Niger…

During the high school years, most young people in the United States receive school-based sexuality education, but there is little research on what they want to know about sex and sexuality but may be afraid to ask. This study is a content analysis of anonymous questions about sex (N = 645) asked by ninth-grade students from the greater Los…