Background: Millennium Development Goals are the 21st Century worlds' concern to improve human way of life by 2015. In Kenya the Millennium Development Goals for reduction of maternal and child mortality has been recently powered by the beyond zero initiative which started in the year 2014 with the aim of reducing mortality as well as contributing…

Prenatal and perinatal risk factors associated with intellectual disability (ID) were studied in 8-year-old Utah children from a 1994 birth cohort (N = 26,108) using broad ascertainment methods and birth records following the most current recording guidelines. Risk factor analyses were performed inclusive and exclusive of children with a known or…

Executive control (EC) develops rapidly during the preschool years and is central to academic achievement and functional outcome. Although children with perinatal adversity are at known risk for EC impairments, little is known about the underlying nature of these impairments or the mechanisms that contribute to their development over time. Drawing…

Background: Attention problems are among the most prevalent neurobehavioral morbidities affecting very preterm (VPT) born children. The first study aim was to document rates of persistent attention/hyperactivity problems from ages 4 to 9 years in a regional cohort of VPT born children. The second aim was to examine the extent to which persistent…

Home visiting (HV) programs serve women at high risk for developing postpartum depression because of factors such as poverty and low social support. Depression poses serious threats not only to mother-child attachment and healthy infant development but also to women's ability to engage with HV services and supports. The Mothers and Babies (MB)…

Background: Little is known about how children differ in the onset and evolution of separation anxiety (SA) symptoms during the preschool years, and how SA develops into separation anxiety disorder. In a large, representative population-based sample, we investigated the developmental trajectories of SA symptoms from infancy to school entry, their…

Summer slide, uneven growth of academic skills during the calendar year, captures the fact that the learning gains children make during the school year do not continue at the same pace over the summer, when children are typically not in school. We compared growth of reading skills during the school year and during the summer months in children…

Children with pre/perinatal unilateral brain lesions (PL) show remarkable plasticity for language development. Is this plasticity characterized by the same developmental trajectory that characterizes typically developing (TD) children, with gesture leading the way into speech? We explored this question, comparing eleven children with PL -- matched…

The current study examined the stability of temperament over time. Observers and mothers rated child behavior at eight timepoints across three assessment waves (8, 15, and 30 months of age). Internal consistency reliability of aggregates of the eight observer reports and eight mother reports were high. When considering single timepoint…

This four-page document provides an overview of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), a health research agency within the federal government. NICHD is a part of the National Institutes of Health in the U.S Department of Health and Human Services. This brief report describes the mission of…

Neuroscientists have long believed that there are sensitive periods in development during which the effects of experience play a critical role. And developmental psychologists have argued for the importance of early experience in the first years of life as being critical for brain and behavioral development. Most of the neuroscience research…

Background: Elucidating risk pathways for under-achieving at school can inform strategies to reduce the number of adolescents leaving school without passing grades in core subjects. Maternal depression can compromise the quality of parental care and is associated with multiple negative child outcomes. However, only a few small studies have…

Children born into low-income families face barriers to success in each stage of life from birth to age 40. Using data on a representative group of American children and a life cycle model to track their progress from the earliest years through school and beyond, the authors show that well-evaluated targeted interventions can close over 70 percent…

Evidence on best practice for optimizing communication with prelingual deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children is lacking. This study examined the effect of a family-focused psychosocial video intervention program on parent-child communication in the context of childhood hearing loss. Fourteen hearing parents with a prelingual DHH child…

This study demonstrates the unique contributions of perinatal risk and genetic and environmental influences on child behavior using data from 561 domestic US adoption triads (birth mothers, adopted child, and adoptive parents). Findings show distinct patterns of associations among genetic (birth mother psychopathology), prenatal (six maternal…