This article describes one family's experience in the Young Mother's Clinic (YMC), a medical clinic providing multidisciplinary care to adolescent mothers and their children. The authors highlight the neurodevelopmental changes that occur in the later adolescent period and explore related clinical implications for professionals working with these…

A growing body of evidence indicates that mass incarceration has devastating consequences for children, families, and communities. Estimates from the National Survey of Children's Health indicate that more than 5 million children have had a parent who lived with them go to jail or prison. Yet, most states do not systematically collect information…

A child's early language skills are one of the best predictors of academic success, and a number of community interventions have aimed to increase caregiver-child interactions to improve language development and related outcomes. This article describes ongoing community efforts in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, aimed at enriching…

This article describes the development and implementation of an integrated early childhood mental health and caregiver support program that uses a transdisciplinary approach to engage families and systems, maximize service efficiency, and ultimately create a next generation of safer families. A case example illustrates a family's journey through…

Parents of newborns and infants are especially open to learning, and many new parents are actively seeking information. What do professionals teach them? How do they teach them? "Pathways" is an educator's guide to educating and supporting new parents. "Pathways" guides professionals in developing an approach to parent…

This article details the impact of Emotional Intelligence (EI) training on the 10-year evolution of the Taos First Steps Home Visiting program. While EI has become standard fare in corporate training and practice, it is less well known in the world of early childhood services. This article highlights interviews with key personnel, both in-house…

Through Strong Families Strong Forces, a reflective parenting program for military families with young children, we were privileged to work with contemporary military fathers who served in the post-9/11 conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Due to this work, the authors gained valuable insight into the complexity of fathering during wartime, the…

Nurturing care in early childhood requires responsive interactions and opportunities to learn; however, there are few large-scale programs in low- and middle-income countries that support parents' ability to provide responsive care and activities that help children learn. The Reach Up training program was developed to increase capacity of…

This article describes the Attachment Vitamins program, a trauma-informed parent group intervention for families with young children. Attachment Vitamins is a relational psychoeducational intervention based on the principles of Child-Parent Psychotherapy (CPP). Its goal is to repair the impact of chronic stress and trauma through strengthening the…

Achieving reproductive health and justice matters to family and child well-being. These two ideals are, however, often put at odds in public policies and discourse that shape the systems and programs that affect pregnant women and families. This article describes the Irving Harris Foundation's historic approach to investing in early childhood and…

Caregiver-child relationships offer the first opportunity for a healthy start and the possibility for a secure attachment. Balanced and healthy dyadic emotional communication is referred to as "emotional availability" (EA; Biringen, Robinson, & Emde, 1998). EA in a family is enhanced when there is lower stress, often addressed…

So much more is known now than a generation ago about how and when brain architecture is built and how deeply it is influenced by early experiences. We know for certain now that the way adult caregivers, parents in particular, interact with children during the first 5 years can actually shape their brain architecture for life--for better and for…

Not all mothers who struggle with drug addiction have difficulties parenting, but many of them do. Moreover, evidence-based parenting programs that have proven efficacious with other parent populations often fail with mothers who are fighting chronic substance addiction, perhaps because of the neurobiological changes in neural reward circuitry…

The Community-Based Family Administered Neonatal Activities (C-B FANA; Cardone, Gilkerson, & Wechsler, 2005) offers home visitors and expectant parents a new way to be together during the unfolding months before birth. Adapted from the hospital-based Family Administered Neonatal Activities (FANA; Cardone & Gilkerson, 1990), the C-B FANA…

Millions of children witness intimate partner violence (IPV) in their homes each year, and large percentages of those children are infants and toddlers. Children often continue to live with or have frequent visits with their fathers following IPV. Social services agencies rarely provide services to target the father-child relationship beyond…