As this issue of the "Future of Children" makes clear, there is much yet to learn about military children and their families. A big part of the reason, write Anita Chandra and Andrew London, is the lack of sufficiently robust sources of data. Until more and better data are collected about military families, Chandra and London say, it…

Why does the United States lag behind so many other countries on international education assessments? The traditional view targets school-based explanations--U.S. schools attract poorer teachers and lack the proper incentives. But the U.S. educational system may also serve children with comparatively greater academic challenges as a result of…

Head Start is a federally funded preschool program for poor children designed to help close the gap between those children and their more advantaged peers before they begin public schooling. Given that Head Start appears to have positive long-run impacts on its recipients, a natural and important next question to ask is: What are the channels…

This article investigates the effect of inconsistency between parental marital conflict and disruption on children's health. Inconsistent situations arise when minimal marital conflict precedes disruption or when marital conflict is high but there is no disruption. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, two alternative…

Examined how health and environmental risk affected mathematics and reading readiness among 867 5- and 6-year-old children from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Interaction analysis indicated that child morbidity was predictive of poor mathematics performance only for children from impoverished homes. (MDM)

"Data Trends" reports present summaries of research on mental health services for children and adolescents and their families. The article summarized in this "Data Trends" examines the equivalence of the BPI [Behavior Problem Index] across a sample of African American, Hispanic, and non-Hispanic White children drawn from the…

This report uses data from the 1983 through 1988 rounds of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) to provide information about prenatal, infant, and child health. Objectives of the report are to present statistics which should be of value to maternal and child health policymakers, and to provide NLSY users with baseline information about…

This study compared the well-being of children born to mothers younger than 17 years old(very young teens), 18 to 19 years old (older teens), and mothers in their early twenties. Measures of well-being were assessed in five domains: (1) health and psychological well-being; (2) quality of home environment; (3) cognitive development and educational…