Calls for innovation in education often focus on the need to prepare students for the future. Ensuring that we are supporting their empathy for others is an often overlooked, but critical, aspect of that preparation.

Vida Bath was the only girl of six children born into a chronically poor family. Her birth certificate lists her father as a "general labourer." Her family travelled around New South Wales and southern Queensland, going wherever there might be work. She remembered being scared when her father had been drinking, especially on Friday…

How can we use insights from cutting-edge science to improve the well-being and long-term life prospects of the most vulnerable children in our society? This is both a critical challenge and a powerful opportunity to affect the trajectories of millions of children in the United States and around the world. It is a question of particular importance…

Every Australian citizen expects state and territory governments to protect children from child abuse and neglect. Protecting children from harm is seen as good. This however is not a simple matter. The ultimate act in protecting children is to remove them from parental care. This causes trauma for the child and pain and distress for parents no…

Pamela High, MS, MD, co-director of the Infant Behavior, Cry and Sleep Clinic at the Brown Center for the Study of Children at Risk, discusses the phenomena of infant crying and the impact it has on families. In most cases, infant crying will peak and resolve in the early months, but infant irritability can increase the risk of maternal…

Prevention and intervention programmes for children at risk aim to improve child well-being and resilience. They do so using both direct and indirect strategies, intervening with children but also considering broader contextual factors (such as family dynamics). Children's subjective well-being comprises five main components (physical health,…

This article describes the development of school social work in the Osaka Prefecture of Japan. The article focuses on micro, mezzo, and macro levels of school social work and documents the growth and development of school social work since 2005. (Contains 3 tables and 2 figures.)

Parents who love their children sometimes harm them. They harm them by physically or sexually abusing them and by failing to provide the nurturance that children have the right to expect. They neglect and abuse their children because they lack the necessary combination of knowledge, patience, empathy, and problem-solving capabilities. Intervening…

The birth of a child can be a simultaneously joyous and challenging time for families. Virtually all parents will struggle with the enormous physical and emotional demands of parenting a very young child, but for too many California families those challenges are additionally compounded by poverty, housing instability, lack of social support, or…

The long historical debate over the physical discipline and punishment of children arose from different perspectives on appropriate forms of child rearing and pedagogy. At one end of the spectrum were adults and educators who believed that social order, good behaviour, and moral development required the regular use of disciplinary instruments such…

The national Quality Improvement Center on early Childhood (QIC-eC) funded four research and demonstration projects that tested child maltreatment prevention approaches. The projects were guided by several key perspectives: the importance of increasing protective factors in addition to decreasing risk factors in child maltreatment prevention…

In this essay, Richard Smith observes that being a parent, like so much else in our late-modern world, is required to become ever more efficient and effective, and is increasingly monitored by the agencies of the state, often with good reason given the many recorded instances of child abuse and cruelty. However, Smith goes on to argue, this begins…

This article presents findings from a study that investigated child protection policies and practices, and focuses on data gathered in a child protection agency located in Quebec, Canada. This research project draws upon a qualitative case-study methodology, involving a documentary analysis of both national and local child protection policies, as…

Because most research on military families has focused on children who are old enough to go to school, we know the least about the youngest and perhaps most vulnerable children in these families. Some of what we do know, however, is worrisome--for example, multiple deployments, which many families have experienced during the wars in Iraq and…

As support for intervening early in the lives of vulnerable children has risen in the United States in recent years, so has interest in home-visitation programs. Home visitation is increasingly recognized for its potential to foster early child development and competent parenting, as well as to reduce risk for child abuse and neglect and other…