By the time their children reach their later teens, many parents are wishing it might be safe to leave them alone to make their own decisions. But new research brings a reminder from Spain that for those who can stand the wear and tear a decent relationship with parents can help teenagers make the journey toward adulthood.

Researchers from Harvard and California apply social network theory to data from a long running community health study and come up with an intriguing proposition about how far happiness might “go viral”.

Several recent evaluations of school anti-bullying programs have come to the same conclusion – that they don’t work. But take a closer look at the evidence, say researchers from Canada; it’s not as solid as it seems.

Children living in more highly populated areas during their teenage years may be more prone to delinquency, say researchers in Virginia, but overcrowding is not the root cause - and simply moving to a less congested neighborhood probably won’t help.

To seal the connection between research and children’s services practice, a UK study makes the case for a new breed of professional hybrid – the “strategic practitioner” who combines scientific insight with hands-on experience.

Governments have learned the hard way that that they cannot do much to constrain or direct the increasingly fluid structure of family life. Far better that the makers of parenting policy should go sensitively with the flow, for example by supporting the role of fathers, says an expert from Newcastle University UK.

Jane Barlow is a leading proponent of the UK systematic review and a key figure in the Campbell Collaboration, but she remains unconvinced that the randomized controlled trial is the perfect or complete research instrument.

Follow-up research from the UK Institute of Psychiatry comes to the worrying conclusion that poor literacy development in childhood is likely to lead to irreversible setbacks. But at least it confirms the wisdom of tendencies in UK education policy during the 45 years since the first data collection.

Designing effective interventions creates the capacity for improving children’s well-being - but it’s only half the battle. New research from Arizona brings with it a reminder that can be an uphill struggle to persuade people to take part and complete programs, especially the people who stand to gain the most.

Microtargeting, nicheing – even the average neighborhood supermarket is cleverly aware of the demands of the “splintering” society. So should prevention programs be more like shopping carts when it comes to adapting standard models to meet consumer needs?

New UK research gives the lie to the conventional argument that young people’s behavior is declining and incompetent parenting is to blame.

In a neighborhood study that unusually tries to link general environmental factors to the behavioral influence of a particular gene, New Jersey researchers learn how to distinguish between the “orchids” and the “dandelions”.

Wisconsin researchers extract 11 principles of better practice from the current batch of US family-based, evidence-informed prevention programs, and assemble not so much a list of what skillful interventions can do as of what they don’t do yet, but should…

A decade of data backs up the theories of Oregon researchers who say a life of crime is prefigured by poor parenting in the early years and by hanging around with a bad crowd in school.

“Epidemiology can never produce rules of evidence that allow us to speak certainly of cause and effect” – so might the nineteenth century story-making insights of a psychoanalyst, a fictional detective and an Italian art historian still be worth heeding?

Five messages about adapting programs so that they work with child welfare populations are the first lessons to emerge from efforts to increase resilience among Missouri schoolchildren

A young US photojournalist’s portrayal of the life of a vulnerable teenager growing up in poverty in South East Ohio has won a prestigious scholarship awarded in memory of a UK newspaper photographer killed in Romania during the 1989 revolution.

It's a cruel fact of good research: the more independent the evaluation the less impressive the findings. So is prevention science in danger of losing credibility by mutely accepting the more impressive results of program developers who evaluate their own work?

Beefing up a prevention program with “booster” sessions is fairly common practice, but so far there has been relatively little to justify intuitions about their value. Now the evaluation of just such an extra to a family-centered intervention in Chicago suggests that, as well as improving impact, they can spread the benefit to the wider population.