This article focuses on the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), India’s largest nutrition and early child development programme. It describes the political, organisational and technical challenges to building and sustaining an outcomes-oriented approach to nutrition monitoring in India. We show that the environment is conducive to strengthening nutrition programme monitoring and evalu...

BACKGROUND It is well established that mothers' education has positive effects on child nutrition in developing countries. Less explored is the effect exerted by the education of other individuals--mothers' friends, neighbours and family. OBJECTIVES To examine independent effects of mothers', fathers' and grandmothers' education on child height-for-age and weight-for-age z-score, and the role...

Routine income withholding, mandated by the Family Support Act of 1988, is one of several child support reforms currently being implemented nationwide. In routine income withholding, child support payments are deducted from the paychecks of nonresident parents and transferred to resident parents by a state agency. Routine withholding has previously been shown to increase payments by 11 to 30 pe...

Background Accurate data on care-seeking for child illness are needed to improve public health programs and reduce child mortality. The accuracy of maternal report of care-seeking for child illness as collected through household surveys has not been validated. Methods A 2016 survey compared reported care-seeking against a gold-standard of health care provider documented care-seeking events am...

BACKGROUND As new interventions to reduce childhood mortality are identified, careful consideration must be given to identifying populations that could benefit most from them. Promising reductions in childhood mortality reported in a large cluster randomized trial of mass drug administration (MDA) of azithromycin (AZM) prompted the development of visually compelling, easy-to-use tools that synt...

Human infants are unique amongst mammals in having an extended period when, by virtue of their physical immaturity, food selection is a problem as much for the parent as for the infant. Indeed, the first choice which many mothers make concerning their infant’s diet is often before birth, namely the decision to feed from the breast or from the bottle. This choice has major consequences for the s...

Child safety restraints and seat belts are regarded as the most successful safety and cost-effective protective devices available to vehicle occupants, which have saved millions of lives. This cross-sectional descriptive study evaluated the practice and use of child car restraints (CCRs) among 458 purposively selected respondents resident in two local government areas in Enugu State, Nigeria. S...

The latest available data indicate that 38% of South Asia's children aged 0-59 months are stunted. Such high prevalence combined with the region's large child population explain why South Asia bears about 40% of the global burden of stunting. Recent analyses indicate that the poor diets of children in the first years of life, the poor nutrition of women before and during pregnancy and the preva...

In this paper, we show that unemployment increases child neglect in the United States during the period from 2004 to 2012. A one percentage point increase in the unemployment rate leads to a 20 percent increase in neglect. We identify this effect by instrumenting for the county-level unemployment rate with a Bartik instrument, which we create as the weighted average of the national-level unempl...

We are a group of researchers and clinicians with collective experience in child survival, nutrition, cognitive and social development, and treatment of common mental conditions. We join together to welcome an expanded definition of child development to guide global approaches to child health and overall social development. We call for resolve to integrate maternal and child mental health with ...