Researchers in Utrecht try to confound the skeptics by identifying a potentially effective confidence-building “chemistry” at the heart of a home visiting program. Home-Start provides vulnerable mothers with a useful source of moral support – but it has still to prove it can alleviate their children’s problems.

A new variation on the theme of Iowa State University’s Strengthening Families program is getting a chance to prove its versatility in a Pennsylvania community trial funded by the US National Institute on Drug Abuse.

The principles of the Good Behavior Game, a classroom management strategy designed to reduce aggressive student behavior, are being translated to the more recreational environment of afterschool.

“Binge eating disorder”, "skin picking disorder”, “risk syndromes” … the American Psychiatric Association is taking soundings on proposed changes to the classification of mental disorders which may open new developmental avenues for prevention science.

Researchers in three US universities are trying to understand the dynamics in the relationship between children’s developing behavioral problems and persistently harsh physical discipline on the part of their parents.

“Scaled up” or “rolled out” on a wide community scale, prevention programs are doomed to disappoint for “climatic” reasons almost too complicated to fathom. What might computer modeling have to offer?

In a special edition of the Journal of Children’s Services, researchers from the UK and US investigate the condition of evidence-based policy and practice and find too much murky business.

Grim findings about the decline in the mental health and well-being of UK teenagers spread dismay and led to government action when they were published in 2004. Five years later, analysis of more up-to-date data paints a slightly brighter, but no less perplexing picture.

“On Saturday, the bear joined me building a Kapla tower and, after that, we watched The Ice Age video that I got from my Mum and Dad as a comfort prize when I was ill…” Is a wandering teddy bear likely to get further under the skin of 21st century family life than the average prevention science researcher?

Familiar statistics carry less familiar recommendations for policy and practice: to break the cycle of damaging effects that link disadvantage to maternal depression and to developmental disorders, government should invest in trials of mother and toddler therapy.

An Australian website is among the first to make local epidemiological information about child development publicly available, to spur on community-based prevention efforts.

Research in Oregon emerging from the state's only health and research university highlights the value of providing as much of the population as possible with a stable focus for medical or social care.