Economic Well-Being And Health: The Role Of Income Support Programs In Promoting Health And Advancing Health Equity.

People with low incomes have poorer health outcomes, including greater risk for disease and shorter lifespans. This pattern has the least favorable outcomes for those living in poverty but is present at every level of the income ladder. Income support programs that provide a social safety net for families-including the Earned Income Tax Credit and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families-can influence health by meeting families' basic needs and supporting participation in economic development.

How accurately can we predict repeat teen pregnancy based on social ecological factors?

Many factors at the individual, relationship, family, and community or environmental levels could predict repeat teen pregnancies or births, but research on certain factors is limited. In addition, few studies have examined whether these factors can accurately predict whether teen mothers will have a repeat pregnancy. This study examined theoretically selected predictors of repeat teen pregnancy among 945 pregnant and parenting teens ( age = 17), most of whom were Hispanic/Latina (86%).

Supporting Expectant and Parenting Teens: New Evidence to Inform Future Programming and Research.

Until recently, federal programs had not explicitly focused on improving the outcomes of highly vulnerable teen parents. Established in 2010, the Pregnancy Assistance Fund (PAF) aims to improve the health, social, educational, and economic outcomes for expectant and parenting teens and young adults, their children, and their families, through providing grants to states and tribes. This article introduces the Maternal and Child Health Journal supplement "Supporting Expectant and Parenting Teens: The Pregnancy Assistance Fund," which draws together the perspectives of researchers and practitioners to provide insights into serving expectant and parenting teens through the PAF program.

Meeting the Multifaceted Needs of Expectant and Parenting Young Families Through the Pregnancy Assistance Fund.

Introduction: The Pregnancy Assistance Fund (PAF) program funds states and tribes to provide a wide range of services to improve health, social, educational, and economic outcomes for expectant and parenting teens and young adults, their children, and their families. This introductory article to the Maternal and Child Health Journal supplement Supporting Expectant and Parenting Teens: The Pregnancy Assistance Fund provides a description of the PAF program, including the program goals and structure, participants and communities served, and services provided; presents data on the reach and success of the program; and describes lessons learned from PAF grantees on how to enhance programs and services to have the best outcomes for expectant and parenting young families.

Methods: Performance measure data are used to describe the reach and success of the PAF program, and implementation experiences and lessons learned from PAF grantees were gathered through a standardized review of grantee applications and from interviews with grant administrators.

A Systematic Review of Programs to Promote Aspects of Teen Parents' Self-sufficiency: Supporting Educational Outcomes and Healthy Birth Spacing.

Introduction: Expectant and parenting teens experience many challenges to achieving self-sufficiency and promoting their children's healthy development. Teen parents need support to help them address these challenges, and many different types of programs aim to support them. In this systematic review, we examine the research about programs that aim to support aspects of teen parents' self-sufficiency by promoting their educational outcomes and healthy birth spacing.

Links between Shared Reading and Play, Parent Psychosocial Functioning, and Child Behavior: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial.

Objective: To investigate pathways by which interventions that promote shared reading and play help prevent child behavior problems. We examined whether family processes associated with the family investment pathway (eg, parental cognitive stimulation) and the family stress pathway (eg, mothers' psychosocial functioning) mediated impacts of a pediatric-based preventive intervention on child behavior.

Study Design: The sample included 362 low-income mothers and their children who participated in a randomized controlled trial of the Video Interaction Project, a pediatrics-based preventive intervention that promotes parent-child interactions in the context of shared reading and play.

Head Start Teachers' Professional Development, Well-being, Attitudes, and Practices: Understanding Changes Over Time and Predictive Associations.

Early care and education (ECE) teachers shape children's daily experiences in many ways. Specifically, teachers' well-being, attitudes about child development, and teaching practices are central influences on children's learning. One crucial way ECE programs support teachers to enhance children's learning environments is through the provision of professional development (PD), but little research has examined the PD provided by ECE programs in the absence of focused initiatives to support teachers.

Trajectories of Discrimination Across Adolescence: Associations With Academic, Psychological, and Behavioral Outcomes.

The authors explored trajectories of perceived discrimination over a 6-year period (five assessments in 6th-11th grade) in relation to academic, behavioral, and psychological adjustment in 8th and 11th grades. They distinguished discrimination from adults versus peers in addition to overt versus covert discrimination from peers. The sample included 226 African American, White, Dominican, Puerto Rican, and Chinese adolescents (ages 11-12 at Time 1) recruited in sixth grade from six public schools in New York City.

Racial/ethnic differences in mothers' socialization goals for their adolescents.

Objectives: We explored the socialization goals that African American, Latino, Chinese and White mothers held for their adolescents within 4 domains that are centrally relevant during adolescence-proper demeanor, academics, race/ethnicity, and peers.

Method: A card sort task and subsequent logistic regression analyses were used to explore mothers' choice of the most important socialization goals for their ethnically/racially diverse 6th-grade adolescents (N = 185).

Results: Compared to White mothers, African American, Latino, and Chinese mothers were significantly more likely to select proper demeanor goals that emphasize deference over benevolence, and peer goals that emphasize instrumental over relational friendships.

Increases in maternal education and low-income children's cognitive and behavioral outcomes.

Although the strong link between maternal education and children's outcomes is one of the most well-established findings in developmental psychology (Reardon, 2011; Sirin, 2005), less is known about how young, low-income children are influenced by their mothers completing additional education. In this research, longitudinal data from the Head Start Impact Study were used to explore the associations between increases in maternal education and Head Start eligible children's cognitive skills and behavioral problems in 1st grade. Propensity score weighting was used to identify a balanced comparison group of 1,362 children whose mothers did not increase their education between baseline (when children were aged 3 or 4) and children's kindergarten year, who are similar on numerous covariates to the 262 children whose mothers did increase their education.

Losing our humanity: the self-dehumanizing consequences of social ostracism.

People not only dehumanize others, they also dehumanize the self in response to their own harmful behavior. We examine this self-dehumanization effect across four studies. Studies 1 and 2 show that when participants are perpetrators of social ostracism, they view themselves as less human compared with when they engage in nonaversive interpersonal interactions.

Alcohol's harm to others: self-reports from a representative sample of New Zealanders.

Aim: There is a lack of research, internationally and in New Zealand, on the harms experienced as a result of drinking by others. Such effects have often been neglected in policy development and in estimates of the economic burden associated with alcohol consumption. This study describes the broad range of harms reported by New Zealanders due to the drinking of someone else.