Laws and strategies against underage drinking are unlikely to prove effective by themselves unless actively applied by communities. How far does it help them to have a toolkit for implementation?
February 2015
19 February 2015
More than three quarters of a million parents receive parent training through child welfare services in the US each year. The good news is that there are a handful of well-tested programs for parents of young children. The bad news is that, given low budgets and a tradition of home-grown programs, it’s not always practical for child welfare agencies to use them. A new review suggests a way forward.
17 February 2015
While home visiting programs for parents are widely agreed to be a good way to improve outcomes for their babies, not all evaluations have been positive. Does it help to know more about families that are most likely to benefit?
12 February 2015
Children from military families face different problems to their classmates. Their wellbeing is vital; so is it being monitored in schools?
10 February 2015
Early Head Start, serving more than 100,000 children, is the US’s largest early childhood program. It is designed to promote the emotional and cognitive development of infants and toddlers from low-income households, and to support their parents. A new study suggests that it may also have a positive side effect on an outcome it wasn’t designed to target: child maltreatment.
06 February 2015
Randomized controlled trials are the best way to discover the effects of a program. But there’s a catch. RCTs show only how the program worked with the people who agreed to participate in the trial – and those people may be a very different mix than the population for whom the program is really intended. Here, US-based researchers discuss a statistical solution to the problem.
02 February 2015
Recognizing that schools can play an important part to play in preventing harmful use of tobacco, alcohol and illegal drugs is the easy part for policy makers. Finding interventions that are both practicable and “work” is a whole lot harder – as illustrated by the trial of a substance-abuse prevention program across schools in seven European countries.
