A UK systematic review of the research has confirmed the effectiveness of parenting programs internationally, this time in relation to children with conduct disorder; but it also identifies a lack of consistency in the supporting studies and is able to find only rudimentary information about the long-term cost benefit.

The success of Mexico’s PROGRESA program, which rewards poor parents who keep their children in education, has been emulated in other developing countries, including Colombia, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Jamaica, Pakistan and Kenya. But less successful trials in the UK and the US suggest the importance of context.

Evaluations of Home-Start have encountered a problem that can flaw family support work generally: the most in need are all too often the hardest to reach and the hardest to reach the least likely to accept help.

So many people in the US have said they’d like to be a mentor that, in theory, every child in the country could have one. But the evidence emerging from randomized controlled trials warns that haphazard school based programs often do more harm than good.

Behavior problems increase the risk of foster placement breakdown; foster placement breakdown aggravates behavior problems – a support program trial in San Diego looks like it might offer an escape from a damaging, costly downward spiral.

“If we know how to enhance social-emotional growth in our schools, then we must use what we’ve learned to benefit our children … “ The latest publication from the UK Institute for Effective Education delivers its verdict on the condition of what prevention science is calling the fourth classroom “R” – for regulation.

Might the symbiotic relationship between performance-based contracting and evidence-based services allow prevention science to tunnel its way from the sidelines of public systems to the center?

“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.

The best antidote for a family under duress is a good social network, and good connections. The phrase is social capital, and any prevention program worth its salt is going to have to learn how to create it if it really wants to help kids.

It’s one of the hardest sells in the prevention world—the task of recruiting families to parenting programs. But one intervention is fighting the dismal statistics with a common sense approach. Instead of waiting for the families to come to them, they are going where almost every family is created, and where most have to go multiple times, the local hospital.

The US Department of Health and Human services is putting $110 million into preventing teen pregnancy. But how much of the money is being spent on programs that have been proven to work? One critic says not nearly enough.

For a brief, relatively lightweight intervention, results from the University of Washington’s Preparing for the Drug Free Years alcohol abuse prevention program are impressive.