Communication and dietetics departments co-created an assignment to design health campaign materials for a rural South African community that promotes healthy eating habits for pregnant mothers and mothers of young children. The goal of this assignment was twofold. First, we explored the possibility of incorporating a service-learning element into…

Background: School health education, including sexual health education, plays a crucial role in shaping adolescents' protective health behaviors, experiences, and outcomes. Adolescents need functional knowledge and skills to practice, adopt, and maintain healthy behaviors for preventing sexually transmitted infections (STIs), including human…

The objective of this systematic review is to identify, appraise and synthesise the best available evidence on the effectiveness of nutritional counselling and education interventions on maternal, infant and child health outcomes, and assess the differences in effects across participants' PROGRESS+ characteristics. To achieve these objectives, we…

Women hospitalized on an antepartum unit can benefit from an open studio art therapy group. A case description follows six women over five group sessions. Several common experiences that occurred throughout the sessions included isolation/boredom, uncertainty, lack of control, and family. Art therapy in a group setting allowed the women to express…

Prenatal maternal depression affects both mother and fetus with long-term implications for offspring vulnerability to psychopathology through alterations to brain development, stress physiology, negative emotionality, and cognitive control. This article reviews evidence for the negative impact of prenatal maternal depression on offspring…

Young African American and Latina women aged 15 to 24 are more likely to adopt short-acting forms of contraception over long-acting reversible contraception. Mobile applications and other forms of digital media may be useful for providing adolescents with information about sexual and reproductive health both inside and outside of the health care…

This article provides an overview of Building Connections, a national initiative in Canada to embed trauma-informed approaches into community-based projects, highlighting the components that indicate successful implementation. Building Connections uses a relationship-based approach (a) to support the readiness to engage in an intervention focused…

Evidence-based home visiting programs exist in over half of the counties in the United States. Because home visiting programs aim to improve the health, education, and life circumstances of pregnant mothers and their children, they are a critical piece of the early childhood landscape. However, the data collected about these programs are siloed,…

Young people in East and Southern Africa need greater access to reliable information about health and education in order to make informed decisions on health matters--focusing on HIV and teenage pregnancy--and to increase basic education outcomes. Young 1ove organization, established in March 2014 in Gaborone, Botswana, is a grassroots, youth-led,…

Adolescents may especially need social and emotional help. They are learning how to handle new demands in school and social life while dealing with new, intense emotions (both positive and negative), and they are increasingly feeling that they should do so without adult guidance. Social and emotional learning (SEL) programs are one way to help…

This study profiles tutoring programs that empower urban youth within the Regional Institute of Tutorial Education (RITE), a community collaborative of universities, youth agencies, community service organizations, and school districts. Representative members of RITE detail how they address shared urban problems of academic deficits, school…

Decades of research have identified dozens of programs that are effective in helping young people reduce their risk for pregnancy, HIV, and STDs. These evidence-based programs utilize strategies that include the provision of accurate, honest information about abstinence as well as contraception and can serve as the foundation for comprehensive sex…

Each year, the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC) releases a list of scientific advances that represent significant progress in the field. The "2019 IACC Summary of Advances" provides short, plain language summaries of the top research breakthroughs selected by the IACC from a pool of research articles nominated by the…

Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting legislation permits states to fund "promising practices"--with the understanding that these models will have a rigorous evaluation component. This article describes an innovative, low cost paraprofessional home visiting model developed in Pennsylvania by the Maternity Care Coalition. In…

The purpose of this article to describe the development, implementation, and evaluation of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health Preconception Peer Educators program at a small private historically black college and university (HBCU). Peer educators were college students who completed a two-day training that…