Since 1997, the Brazelton Centre UK has offered courses to a wide range of professionals working with newborn infants and their families. In 2009, the Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale was recommended in the Healthy Child Programme by the Department of Health. Both the Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale and the Newborn Behavioral Observations…

Over the past decade the issue of food and in particular, food consumed within schools has come to encapsulate a broad range of concerns regarding children and young people's health and wellbeing. In Australia, the UK and more recently the USA, attempts to ameliorate a range of public health concerns have provided the impetus for an unprecedented…

This study examines the location of British health visiting in contemporary policy discourses concerned with public health and safeguarding children. It argues that professional identity and orientation can be understood through health visiting's long history of public health work with children and families, which has included an engagement with…

The increase in exposure to sexually explicit material has been cited as a significant factor influencing adolescent sexuality and health. Concern about the negative impact of this material is increasingly prominent within policy, professional groups, and the media. Little research, however, has been conducted within this area. This article…

Motivated by very different goals, various interest groups argue that the British government should address problems with citizens' emotional well-being. Concerns about emotional vulnerability and poor emotional well-being amongst growing numbers of children, young people and adults produce ideas and approaches from different branches of…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to report the outcome of an education and public health collaboration investigating the impact of adapted training to enhance teachers' potential role to promote child health and wellbeing. Design/methodology/approach: The study was conducted in three phases: a survey of the health education content in…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore views about cycling among members of identified community groups living near the Loop Line, a cycling and walking path in a deprived part of North Liverpool, UK. Design/methodology/approach: Following a literature review, qualitative focus group research was conducted among six groups of children,…

Objective: (1) to provide a commentary on a conference held at the University of Manchester entitled Researching Water Fluoridation: Evaluation and Surveillance; (2) to synthesize from the proceedings of the meeting suggestions for future research and public health surveillance. Method: The main points and problematic issues raised by the speakers…

Breastfeeding is known to confer benefits, both in the short term and long term, to the child and also to the mother. Various health-promotion initiatives have aimed to increase breastfeeding rates and duration in the United Kingdom over the past decade. In order to assist in these endeavours, it is essential to understand the reasons why women…

Childhood obesity has become an emotive and serious problem in Europe. In the UK, it has generated a great deal of interest by the media, health professionals, food companies, scientists, and more recently, the government. Upward trends have been recorded in most countries, levels are interestingly variable, and the origins of this variation have…

The development of community-based programs to support inexperienced parents through home visits by experienced mothers, who are in turned facilitated by child health and development professionals, has become an increasingly common approach in Europe and the United States. This edited volume presents proceedings from an invitational conference on…

This article discusses the social fabrication of risk and ill health in the United Kingdom and how it affect the physical education curriculum and physical education teachers. It is now well over 60 years since the publication in Britain of the Board of Education?s (1933) "Syllabus For Physical Training For Schools." It was a remarkable…

On 16 January 2002, the United Kingdom House of Commons Select Committee published a report entitled "Tackling Obesity in England". Drawing on insights from the work of Bernstein, Bourdieu and Foucault, this article will suggest that the report provides an example "par excellence" of the way in which "the body" (our…

Health promotion redirects thinking about health by: reasserting its social and political aspects; ensuring the people the power to define their own health concerns; and placing health more clearly in the context of other aims in life. This compilation of 41 articles in 8 sections attempts to document this process of redirection of thought. The…

Children from low-income families are more likely than other children to have serious health problems. And, as Anne Case and Christina Paxson show, childhood health problems can prevent poor children from achieving economic success as adults. Income-related disparities in childhood health are evident at birth or even before, and the disparities…