BACKGROUND Assessment of mother-child interactions is a core issue of early child development and psychopathology. This paper focuses on the concept of "synchrony" and examines (1) how synchrony in mother-child interaction is defined and operationalized; (2) the contribution that the concept of synchrony has brought to understanding the nature of mother-child interactions. METHOD Between 1977...

We document the dramatic decline in the United States of mother sole-custody arrangements following divorce. Our empirical analysis uses Wisconsin Court Records data spanning more than two decades (1988–2010). Updating earlier analyses that showed significant increases in shared custody, we estimate that shared custody (where children spend at least 25% of time with each parent) has now replace...

Asthma affects 8–9% of pregnant women in the USA [1]. Since asthma exacerbations during pregnancy can lead to poor pulmonary function, hypoxia and other adverse health outcomes for the mother, fetus and neonate [2, 3], maintaining good control of asthma during pregnancy is recommended for the health of both mother and baby [4]. Reviews of the safety of asthma medication use during pregnancy sug...

This review describes a simple approach to perimortem caesarean section (PMCS) that can be used by a doctor in the resuscitation room or prehospital environment when faced with a mother of more than 20 weeks gestation in cardiac arrest. It explores the indications for and contraindications to the procedure, the physiological rationale behind it, equipment needed, technical aspects of the proced...

Father-child and mother-child engagements were examined longitudinally in relation to children's language and cognitive development at 24 and 36 months. The study involved a racially/ethnically diverse sample of low-income, resident fathers (and their partners) from the National Early Head Start evaluation study (n=290). Father-child and mother-child engagements were videotaped for 10 min at ho...

BACKGROUND Bipolar Disorder (BD) is a mental disorder usually diagnosed between 18 and 30 years of age; this coincides with the period when many women experience pregnancy and childbirth. As specific problems have been reported in pregnancy and childbirth when the mother has BD, a systematic review was carried out to summarise the outcomes of pregnancy and childbirth, in mother and child, when ...

There is a debate about the extent to which the effect of prenatal smoking on infant health outcomes is causal. Poor outcomes could be attributable to mother characteristics, which are correlated with smoking. I examine the importance of selection on the effect of prenatal smoking by using three British cohorts where the mothers' knowledge about the harms of prenatal smoking varied substantiall...

INTRODUCTION We describe three different fetal or neonatal outcomes in the offspring of a mother who had persistent circulating thyrotropin receptor antibodies despite having undergone a total thyroidectomy several years before. CASE PRESENTATION The three different outcomes were an intrauterine death, a mild and transient fetal and neonatal hyperthyroidism and a severe fetal and neonatal hyp...