Twin research into the relationship between innate language problems and later reading difficulties is nudging forward understanding of the entanglement of genetic and environmental influences in children’s development.

There is tantalizing evidence that we are not only physically and mentally affected by what we eat but that we might also be drawn towards certain foods according to our state of mind – and body.

To rehabilitate adolescents with a history of antisocial and disruptive behavior, send them to Brighton! Thanks to support from the National Academy of Parenting Practitioners, troubled young people in the popular English tourist resort will be the first in the UK to benefit from an evidence-based behavior program called Functional Family Therapy.

As social work programs and interventions are routinely subjected to more stringent, randomized testing, so the professional role of the social worker as "physician" is coming under closer scrutiny.

Prevention science is beginning to be able to speak in the same breath about qualities as indefinable as maternal sensitivity and quantities as infinitesimal as a dopamine receptor gene.

There are signs that work on the long-terms effects of early deprivation by a leading UK education researcher is having a modifying effect on the preoccupation with ‘outcomes’ that has dominated British children's services policy for over a decade.

Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care is the latest US-designed intervention to cross the Atlantic for UK piloting – and this time fidelity to the original is properly on the cards.

Collaborative community-wide efforts to design prevention services in the UK and Ireland should benefit from a new tool developed in the US by Penn State University to overcome the problem of comparing and assessing the effectiveness of programs tailored to meet local needs.

Research to test the hypothesis that parents might be actively responsible for their children turning into bullies or becoming the victims of bullying has found stronger evidence to the contrary – that there is a gene-borne tendency at work.

UK researchers say over-protective parents may be responsible for instilling into their children an over-anxious attitude to everyday experience. Something in their parenting behavior that might be mended, or something transmissible in their genes that suggests a tribe of the half-full?

Daniel Perkins and Brian Bumbarger at the US Prevention Research Center outline the encouraging first results of evaluating their community-driven PROSPER program in Iowa and Pennsylvania.

The Harvard Center for the Developing Child has produced a useful layman’s guide to making good choices among evidence-based and not so evidence-based early childhood programs. But they still wind up by recommending expert advice…

Choose the right “operating system” when introducing prevention programs and your worries that faithful implementation and local ownership are mutually exclusive might just fade away.

Choose the right “operating system” for implementing prevention programs and your worries that faithful implementation and local ownership are mutually exclusive might just fade away.

Why is promoting fidelity in the implementation of evidence-based prevention programs like singing an Irish ballad? The policy co-ordinator at Penn State’s Prevention Research Center, Brian Bumbarger, explains the connection between the oral tradition and effective practice.

Researchers from Liverpool University UK have caused a furore by suggesting that international adoption might have the side effect of hindering the growth of family services in just those countries where improvements are most needed. But is their data equal to the argument?

A US program originally designed to help hearing-impaired children attune themselves to the feelings of those around them is proving its worth as a universal, low cost school-based strategy for improving children's behavior.

UK research using cortisol measurement to monitor stress levels among four-year-olds entering school in south west England finds that impulsive and socially isolated children seem to have the hardest time making the adjustment.