Adolescents may especially need social and emotional help. They are learning how to handle new demands in school and social life while dealing with new, intense emotions (both positive and negative), and they are increasingly feeling that they should do so without adult guidance. Social and emotional learning (SEL) programs are one way to help…

Young children who enter school without sufficient social and emotional learning (SEL) skills may have a hard time learning. Yet early childhood educators say they do not get enough training to effectively help children develop such skills. In this article, Megan McClelland, Shauna Tominey, Sara Schmitt, and Robert Duncan examine the theory and…

In this article, Cybele Raver and Clancy Blair explore a group of cognitive processes called executive function (EF)--including the flexible control of attention, the ability to hold information through working memory, and the ability to maintain inhibitory control. EF processes are crucial for young children's learning. On the one hand, they can…

What do we know about young children with delays and disabilities, and how can we help them succeed in prekindergarten through third grade? To begin with, Kathleen Hebbeler and Donna Spiker write, identifying children with delays and disabilities to receive specialized services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act poses several…

In the contemporary United States, marriage is closely related to money. Men and (perhaps to a lesser extent) women with more education, higher incomes, larger stocks of wealth, and more stable employment are more likely to marry than are people in more precarious economic positions. But is this relationship truly causal? That is, does economic…

Children who are healthy early in life--from conception to age five--not only grow up to be healthier adults, they are also better educated, earn more, and contribute more to the economy. The United States lags behind other advanced countries in early childhood health, threatening both the health of future generations and the nation's long-term…

Better-educated parents generally have children who are themselves better educated, healthier, wealthier, and better off in almost every way than the children of the less educated. But this simple correlation does not prove that the relationship is causal. Neeraj Kaushal sifts through the evidence from economics and public policy and reviews large…

Parents' health and children's health are closely intertwined--healthier parents have healthier children, and vice versa. Genetics accounts for some of this relationship, but much of it can be traced to environment and behavior, and the environmental and behavioral risk factors for poor health disproportionately affect families living in…

The vast majority of high school students aspire to some kind of postsecondary education, yet far too many of them enter college without the basic content knowledge, skills, or habits of mind they need to succeed. Andrea Venezia and Laura Jaeger look at the state of college readiness among high school students, the effectiveness of programs in…

Achieving national goals for increased college completion in a time of scarce resources will require the postsecondary institutions that enroll the majority of undergraduates--community colleges and less-selective public universities--to graduate more students at a lower cost. Davis Jenkins and Olga Rodriguez examine research on how these…

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…

This article first documents evidence on the changing prevalence of childhood physical and mental health problems, focusing on the development of childhood health conditions in the United States. Authors Liam Delaney and James Smith present evidence on the changing prevalence of childhood chronic conditions over time using recalled data as well as…

Education is important for all children, but even more so for children with disabilities, whose social and economic opportunities may be limited. In this article, Laudan Aron and Pamela Loprest assess how well the nation's education system is serving students with disabilities. Aron and Loprest trace the evolution of the special education system…

Much public attention and many resources are focused on medical research to identify risk factors and mitigate symptoms of disability for individual children. But this focus will inevitably fail to "prevent" disabilities. Stephen Rauch and Bruce Lanphear argue for a broader focus on environmental influences that put entire populations at risk.…

Almost fifteen years have passed since the publication of the National Research Council's seminal report "Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children," which provided research-based recommendations on what could be done to better position students in pre-kindergarten through third grade for success in grade four and above. This article by…