Converging trends in family research and pediatrics: recent findings for the American Academy of Pediatrics Task Force on the Family.

Pediatricians and their colleagues in the social and behavioral sciences seek better understandings of how to keep children healthy. Some of the most basic and essential understandings of the processes of health and illness have emerged from the study of families. More than 25 years ago, Litman1 asserted that “the family constitutes perhaps the most important social context within which illness occurs and is resolved. It consequently serves as a primary unit in health and medical care.” More recently, progressive health care professionals and organizations have moved toward family-centered care2,3 and family-focused care,4 reflecting philosophic, practical, and evidence-based commitments to the understanding of children’s health outcomes as a function of family characteristics. This article reviews these recent trends in pediatrics and in the social and behavioral sciences to document the opportunities and challenges faced by pediatricians and other health care professionals as they pursue basic commitments to healthy children and successful families. These emergent mutual concerns of pediatricians and social and behavioral scientists generate many of the implications for training, practice, policy, and research promulgated by the accompanying report of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Task Force on the Family.5 We begin with consideration of contemporary pediatrics’ embrace of biopsychosocial analyses6 and the adoption of child development as a basic science7 as a means of diagnosing and treating within the “new morbidity.”8 Family-centered care and familyfocused care evolve simultaneously with these advances in pediatrics. In the social and behavioral sciences, research themes describing successful families, incorporating cultural diversity and sensitivity, and seeking avenues to contribute to societal needs converge such that child health is a unifying concern. The venues in which such mutual interests of pediatricians and social and behavioral scientists evolve will be described. The manner in which contemporary research on families can guide or enhance pediatric practice will be elaborated on with attention to health maintenance, primary care, chronic care, and community and policy applications.