Using data (n = 3,790 with 2,119 in the 3-year-old cohort and 1,671 in the 4-year-old cohort) from 353 Head Start centers in the Head Start Impact Study, the only large-scale randomized experiment in Head Start history, this article examined the impact of Head Start on children's cognitive and parent-reported social-behavioral outcomes through first grade contingent on the child care arrangemen...

OBJECTIVE This study aimed to design, implement, and evaluate training in early childhood development (ECD) and in the use of a culturally adapted developmental screening tool, for remote Australian Aboriginal Health Workers (AHWs) and other remote health practitioners. METHOD A case-study evaluation framework was adopted. Two remote Australian Aboriginal health services were selected as case...

This study examined the longitudinal association between marital instability and child sleep problems at ages 9 and 18 months in 357 families with a genetically unrelated infant adopted at birth. This design eliminates shared genes as an explanation for similarities between parent and child. Structural equation modeling indicated that T1 marital instability predicted T2 child sleep problems, bu...

Internationally adopted postinstitutionalized (PI) children are at risk for lower levels of emotion understanding. This study examined how postadoption parenting influences emotion understanding and whether lower levels of emotion understanding are associated with behavior problems. Emotion understanding and parent mental state language were assessed in 3-year-old internationally adopted PI chi...

Risk factors for the childhood development of co-occurring internalizing and externalizing symptoms are not well understood, despite a high prevalence and poor clinical outcomes associated with this co-occurring phenotype. We examined inherited and environmental risk factors for co-occurring symptoms in a sample of children adopted at birth and their birth mothers and adoptive mothers (N = 293)...

Developmental attachment theory and research is now beginning to inform practice, particularly in the field of foster care and adoption. A brief outline of attachment theory and the four main patterns of attachment is followed by a review of attachment-based support services and psychotherapies with fostered and adopted children, including infants, preschoolers, school age children, and caregiv...

RATIONALE infectious diseases screening of international adoptees is complex because of the concurrence of different pathogens in a child at same time. We describe an international adopted child born at Ethiopia infected by 5 different pathogens (Hymenolepis nana, Giardia intestinalis, Entamoeba histolytica, Strongyloides stercoralis, and Trichuris trichiura), 2 of them S. stercoralis and E. hi...

The definition of a modern family is changing. In this case study, we describe the breastfeeding experience of a child receiving human milk from all 3 of his mothers: his 2 adoptive mothers, who induced lactation to nurse him, and his birth mother, who shared in his early feeding during the open adoption process and continued to pump and send milk to him for several months. We review the lactat...

A healthy 13-year-old boy who had spent the first 4.5 years of his life in an orphanage in Thailand before adoption by an American couple became ill with subacute sclerosing panencephalitis and died several months later. The boy had most likely contracted wild-type measles in Thailand. Measles complications are a risk in international adoptions.

In U.S. law, biological parents are presumed to be fit custodians of their children, and have a natural right to the custody, care and control of their children. Only if there is family disruption, for example, divorce, or a substantiated report of neglect or abuse, will the state intervene in the privacy of the family. It is after custody is disrupted or disputed, “challenged,” as it were, by ...