UK epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett argue in The Spirit Level that efforts to increase well-being by increasing material wealth have come to the end of the line. There is too much evidence that in an unequal society the one does not guarantee the other.

The annual conference of the Australian and New Zealand Marketing Academy is becoming an unlikely crossroads for ideas about service design, social cohesion and behavior change, and for exploring the connections between social marketing and emotional intelligence.

Broadcast television may be coming to the end of its reign at the center of family life, but the evidence that early exposure to TV is associated with poor developmental outcomes continues to accumulate. A US study suggests that much of the damage is done by distracted parents.

Cost benefit analysis techniques developed in Washington State by Steve Aos have resurfaced in the UK alongside New Zealand research to give muscle to the argument in favor of a broad, preschool assault on the long-term impact of conduct disorder.

Japan is being urged to invest in preschool care to encourage more women to enter the labor market and rescue the nation’s economy from the worst debt ever experienced by any of the world’s wealthiest nations.

Publication of a report on the long-term socioeconomic damage done by child abuse and neglect – said to be the first study of its kind in the US – makes a contribution to heated debate at home and abroad about the priorities of state-provided health care.

To enter the world of public health alerts, even as tentatively as have Shanna Swan and her colleagues in the Center for Reproductive Epidemiology at the University of Rochester, is still to risk setting a toe across the terrifying threshold of the “big fat house”.

Social learning theory… systems theory… motivational interviewing – the director of the UK Academy of Parenting Practitioners recommends a more eclectic therapeutic strategy for dealing with the problems of hard-to-reach families.

Data analysis by the UK National Heart Forum suggests that projections of child obesity levels in the UK can be scaled down, but the findings also highlight the pitfalls of attributing highly sought-after effects to the success of a public health campaign.

A vehicle for the community-wide implementation and long-term management of prevention programs developed by universities in Iowa and Pennsylvania has US federal cash support to prepare the ground for a national trial.

Canadian psychologists join forces with an Italian criminologist to drive home the politically unpalatable message that some juvenile justice interventions are pushing the crime rate up.

In another of a series of reports on the search for a better science of program implementation, we turn to the influential US Society for Research in Child Development and a symposium published in its quarterly Social Policy Report under the eye of Pittsburgh child development expert Robert McCall.

“There is a mismatch between the gold standard of effective interventions and the gold standard of evaluation methodology. Traditional evaluation has excluded from consideration precisely those interventions that are most likely to have an impact…” Harvard fellow Lee Schorr overturns the randomized controlled trial apple cart.

“You not only have to love but you have to show your love.” Experts at a London Centre for Couple Relationships seminar get to grips with the emotional, conjugal and expressive aspects of parenting skill.

Long-term child development studies on opposite sides of the world uncover compelling evidence for the argument that character-building skills are becoming vital to the well-being and success of the coming generation. But they seem to recommend transferring the investment from home to school as children move toward young adulthood.

New confidence in the value of self-rated health assessment warrants a shift in attention: less the symptoms of disease and illness, more the inner resources that good health releases. Philadelphia pediatrician Christopher Forrest has been telling the International Society for Quality of Life Research conference in New Orleans how professional approaches to health and education are beginning to converge.

Two of his former colleagues, Centre for Social Policy at Dartington fellows Roy Parker and Michael Power, pay tribute to the long life and brilliant career of prevention scientist Jerry Morris who has died at the age of 99.

In the first of two reports from the International Society for Quality of Life Research (ISOQOL) conference in New Orleans, Harvard professor Joshua Salomon traces the rise in the importance of self-rated health assessment, and Catalan researcher Luis Rajmil explains its impact on global understanding of children’s mental health.

Minneapolis has just received national recognition for successfully reframing youth violence as a public health issue. But will the city ever know if its younger generation is any healthier as a result of its ambitious “Blueprint” – or why?