A long-term study by Canadian researchers has found no evidence that Head Start programs hinder the development of advantaged children in their efforts to help the disadvantaged.

The strategic thinking of Nobel prize winning economist James Heckman, a package of prevention programs based on models from the US and northern Europe, and proposals for a UK assessment body of the caliber of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence at the University of Colorado combine in a major experiment announced today by the UK city of Nottingham.

Knowing how good or bad things are for children in different parts of the world is not necessarily very illuminating unless it goes with an understanding of the underlying trends. Research from the Netherlands is helping to explain the changing European picture.

The UK Good Childhood Inquiry delivers another sharp warning to UK policy makers that they are neglecting the mental health and well-being of the children in their care to the point that most parents think their childhood was happier than their sons’ and daughters’.

Does good parenting have universal characteristics or is it behavior shaped by cultural conditions? Canadian researchers have been investigating and have emerged with a strong case for making scientifically more incisive international comparisons.

A resilience study by the influential Oregon University Child and Family Center suggests that if young people can be helped to set themselves clear goals and stay on task, they’ll probably keep on the straight and narrow, however bad the crowd they’re in with.

The findings of research analysts in Arizona suggest that the Scottish Government’s ?6m investment in family-focused treatment programs to combat obesity among the country’s children will need to be cleverly spent to make much difference.

Alexander Pope was musing about the temperament of the wise critic when he famously wrote in 1711 that “To err is Human; to Forgive, Divine”, but social psychologists are finding that a forgiving nature has transformative powers even in the modern home.

Analysis of studies involving 17,000 adolescents in eleven countries indicates that cooperative approaches to learning are more closely associated with high achievement than competitive, individualistic ones.

Research connecting the experience of mothers and grandmothers in Germany, India and the Cameroons suggests a connection between the worldwide movement from interdependent rural to individualistic urban societies and the emergence of a global "science" of parenting.

More sophisticated risk assessment built on a better understanding of traits and vulnerabilities has enabled US caseworkers to make more accurate predictions about which families in the child protection system are most likely to continue to harm or neglect their children.

Research that has generated the unnerving statistic that the average four-year-old tells a lie once every two hours has also identified an association between honesty in the home and families who argue a lot.

Millions being spent on UK children and families initiatives, a new government press release almost every day – but where’s the investment in research and where’s the evaluation evidence to show that any of it is working?

The Guardian’s Ben Goldacre spells out the danger that mere lip service to scientific principles will backfire and schools won’t trust advice about anything that it might be pleasurable or rewarding for children to do unless it’s dressed up in the “neurosciency language” of the Brain Gym.

Have researchers at the University of Otago in New Zealand hammered the last nail in the coffin of the idea that single parenting is ever at the root of children’s problems?

An instructive, painstaking examination of the realities of joined-up working inside UK children’s services leaves unanswered the big question of whether a multi-agency approach really does enhance outcomes for disadvantaged children.

The possibly short-lived fashion for international adoption has produced an interesting demographic in the US: a generation of children from China, Russia, Guatemala or Kazakhstan raised in multicultural families and inclined to say of themselves as they get older, "I can’t fit in at home, and I can’t fit in here”.

Some modern Machiavellian advice from researchers at Duke University: motivate young people by offering them choice but don’t reward the choosers for choosing, lest they should feel they are being manipulated or controlled.

Work led by the Department of Psychology at Michigan State University suggests that a genetic trait triggered during puberty may help to explain the development or otherwise of eating disorders in adolescence.