Lancaster University researchers may be the first to have succeeded in wading through all the myth and supposition to establish how the pattern of young adult offending in the UK has changed over the last 30 years.

Rukmini Banerji’s long experience of community work in India has persuaded her that the struggle to meet the Millennium Development goal of guaranteeing all children access to school by 2015 obscures important questions about how the education system operates in the developing world and the value of a state-imposed curriculum.

New York University researchers have uncovered a puzzle in the the increasingly well-investigated relationship between everyday stress and cortisol responses in children.

Latest findings from the UK’s the first independent national inquiry into what constitutes a good childhood reveal mounting concern over commercialization and its impact on children’s health and behavior.

Improving knowledge about the relationship between stress and neural development suggests that it may to be possible to design more scientifically acute ways to prepare disadvantaged children for school than programs such as Sure Start and Head Start presently provide.

Researchers at the University of Oxford have secured ?1.4 million from The Wellcome Trust for fresh research into the effect of nutritional supplements on criminal behavior. Previous Oxford studies uncovered positive effects for violent adult prisoners; the new work will test the approach with younger offenders.

A Swedish review of parenting studies establishes the value of fathers beyond the purely genetic - but falls short of explaining quite what they are for.

Harmfully advising parents to put their babies to bed on their tummies may have contributed to thousands of randomly distributed cot deaths during the 20 years before 1991. The specter of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome still terrifies parents, but Danish research suggests that these days the continuing risk is strongly associated with severe social disadvantage.

Indiana research makes better sense of the link: don’t drink during pregnancy and you’ll reduce the likelihood of having a child with behavior problems.

A new online service that increases the flow of information about evidence-based programs and practices designed to prevent or treat mental health problems and substance use disorders is just launched.

As progress towards achieving the UN Millennium goal of reducing the under-five mortality rate by two-thirds before 2015 stutters on with small prospect of success, UK researchers argue that a calculated shift of political pressure toward securing children’s rights could galvanize governments into more effective action.

A comparison between the progress of abandoned Romanian children living in institutions or with foster parents has been negotiating some of the ethical problems associated with randomized controlled trials.

Parents are in a unique position to help their adolescents battle against eating disorders, say University of Chicago researchers whose evidence on bulimia suggests that family-based therapy works better than individually targeted interventions

Some of the evidence may be anecdotal – as well as pre-scientific – but the simple act of sitting down and taking part in a communal meal seems to offer practitioners a string of insights into the dynamics of parenthood and family life.

The history of public health activism in the UK has much to say to today’s ambitious community initiatives about the value of the unholy but potent alliances – for example between politics and science and science and the media – that typify successful campaigns.

Thirty years ago a teenager could still cause a storm at home by playing a (vinyl) record and turning up the volume. Much less likely these days: for 20 years parents and children have been listening to much the same music. So what happened to the generation gap and all that character-building, occasionally very damaging mutual incomprehension? US TV thinks it just went online.

What seemed as if it might provide a lesson for the American psyche on the possibility of “less” being “more”, at least where math teaching is concerned, turns out to be a more general reminder about the need for research analysts to take great care when disentangling cause from effect.

Researchers affiliated to Harvard Medical School have been getting good results from trials of two simple public health interventions for treating depression with variations on the theme of family therapy.

Philadelphia researchers argue that so extreme has been the emotional climate generated by the US administration's preoccupation with a war on terror that investigation is warranted into the effects on young people of what they call “secondhand terrorism”.