This opening chapter provides an overview of the book, "Healthy Children 2010: Establishing Preventive Services." The article describes the purpose of the work, which is to provide strategies to establish and successfully implement effective prevention services in key socializing settings that powerfully affect the growth an development of children. As a whole, the work emphasizes developmentally and contextually appropriate prevention service delivery models, and identifies state-of-the-art, empirically based strategies to strengthen the environments in which children develop. The article then describes the work's subsequent chapters: chapters 2 to 6 review ways to strengthen the family, child care systems, early childhood education, school-based mental health service delivery and primary prevention approaches, community-based mental health programming, and school-based health services. These chapters point out that programs with strong conceptualization, design, and implementation have potential to enhance children's social, emotional, and physical wellness, thereby reducing the incidence of problems across multiple domains. Chapter 7 focuses on the importance of theory-guided evaluation to clarify the process of program implementation, the extent of program outcomes, and the factors that enhance or diminish program effects. Chapters 8 and 9 emphasize the quality of program implementation as a critical mediator of potential program impact and highlight strategies to disseminate programs broadly while maintaining their efficacy. (SD)