Ensuring babies and toddlers develop good sleeping patterns is crucial to their future well-being. But, as a new study reveals, marital difficulties can act as a significant impediment to infants getting a good night’s sleep

LifeSkills Training is massively popular, delivered to millions of students in more than 30 countries as a way to prevent drug use. Government agencies call it a “proven” program. But a starting new analysis of the data claims that reviewers have cherry-picked results. What if LST has no real effect at all?

Even when a prevention program produces positive effects, how long will the benefits last? A Montreal experiment shows a modest reduction in delinquency 15 years after treatment – and makes a case for the value of longitudinal studies.

Genetic variation does affect the way ordinary children bond with their parents – but a new study finds that maltreatment by parents overpowers the contribution of genes. The good news is that interventions improve bonding for maltreated babies of all genetic types.

When child protection professionals from developed and developing countries collaborate, the results can be profound.

Where will implementation be in a decade’s time? A program to take researchers and policy makers into the future has been hammered out at the first event to look at the subject.

There is now an emerging feeling that looking at the outcomes of an intervention is not enough: what is also needed is to know more about implementation.

Concerns about tough responses to youth crime and violence, especially in the context of the urban riots in England, took on new relevance when a team from the Norwegian Center for Child Behavioral Development spoke at the first Global Implementation Conference this week, on the 15th of August.

Outlining the obstacles to translating effective programs into policies and systems, US prevention scientists propose an approach that draws upon “the best of developmental and prevention science to transform not only practice but also the attitudes, beliefs, values and policies that constrain the use of science to transform the lives of vulnerable children”.

It is predicted that by 2030 depression and anxiety will be second only to HIV/AIDS as debilitating global diseases. But we are only just beginning to understand how to prevent these problems. A new trial set up in Melbourne, Australia, will test whether a parenting intervention can reduce the risk for internalizing problems in preschool children.

If prevention research has a refrain, it’s that “fidelity predicts outcomes.” But it’s hard to measure fidelity – especially in complex family therapy programs that unfold over time. A new study offers an answer.

Pre-school provision is lauded in the developed world and copied in the developing world, but its shortcomings are overlooked and need to
be discussed more.

Evidence from the UK, continental Europe and the developing world indicates that pre-schooling can have a profound effect on the life chances of the most deprived children.

That pre-school provision works is widely accepted but new evidence suggests caution when interventions are extended into school years.

When Peter Adamson opened his plenary speech at this years International Society for Child Indicators (ISCI) held in York, he told the audience they were not getting a presentation, or PowerPoint slides, but a story instead. Prevention Action reports.

New evidence shows that there has been a great improvement in the well being of British children, but that shortcomings are serious and place them in the lower rungs by international comparison.

In a recent blog posting in the London Review of Books, Michael Little from the Social Research Unit at Dartington discusses the role that the private sector plays in improving outcomes for children.

In a recent blog published by the London Review of Books, contributor Laura Jones described the numerous proposals put forward to the UK government to fund early intervention programmes and the challenges they may bring.

When teen suicides hit the headlines, the background is often a story of school bullying that has been going on for years. The 25-year history of a major prevention approach shows how a high-profile tragedy transformed approaches to bullying.