Researchers in Utrecht try to confound the skeptics by identifying a potentially effective confidence-building “chemistry” at the heart of a home visiting program. Home-Start provides vulnerable mothers with a useful source of moral support – but it has still to prove it can alleviate their children’s problems.

US researchers Dean Fixsen and Karen Blase recruit an old testament prophet, a civil rights activist and the founder of the Chicago Leadership Institute to the good cause of better implementation science.

BBC radio helps to knit together the case in favor of focusing help for vulnerable children on their needs in infancy by giving prime airtime to the theories of the neuroscientific successors of Piaget and Chomsky.

A new variation on the theme of Iowa State University’s Strengthening Families program is getting a chance to prove its versatility in a Pennsylvania community trial funded by the US National Institute on Drug Abuse.

For "fidelity" and "scalability" read off-the-peg internet delivery – but online drug and alcohol prevention programs work, say researchers in New South Wales, Australia.

The failure of the US Head Start program to produce evidence of lasting benefit is no reason for despair, say Washington researchers. It strengthens the case for making the search for what works more specific and more rigorous.

The principles of the Good Behavior Game, a classroom management strategy designed to reduce aggressive student behavior, are being translated to the more recreational environment of afterschool.

The CEO of the Barnardos children’s charity in Ireland commends an abuse prevention and “behavior policy” program to families in the West, where it is beginning its first community trial.

“If we know how to enhance social-emotional growth in our schools, then we must use what we’ve learned to benefit our children … “ The latest publication from the UK Institute for Effective Education delivers its verdict on the condition of what prevention science is calling the fourth classroom “R” – for regulation.

Two studies of different factors in the public health argument have come to the same conclusion – better to ban smoking in public places and be done with it

“Binge eating disorder”, "skin picking disorder”, “risk syndromes” … the American Psychiatric Association is taking soundings on proposed changes to the classification of mental disorders which may open new developmental avenues for prevention science.

"I want her job to be not just about the bump…" the UK government’s former chief adviser on children's services, Naomi Eisenstadt, wants midwives to play a more pivotal role in a universal family support service.