So little Harry won’t eat his vegetables? Well, he’s not alone. Poor Harry is just protecting himself from the danger of alkaloid toxins – although he doesn’t actually know this. At the tender age of four…
Boys are more likely to be diagnosed with neurodevelopmental disorders, such as autism, because girls need more extreme genetic mutations to develop them, according to a study published in the American…
Proposals to allow schools to start looking after two-year-olds go to the heart of a long-standing tension in education policy: is early childhood provision about childcare for working parents or is it…
Days after Pope Francis told mothers to “not think twice” about breastfeeding at church and in public, Sally Davies, the UK’s chief medical officer, called for women to be allowed to breastfeed at work…
Wild bonobos, like all Great Apes, spend long childhoods with their mothers, learning the skills they need to function as socially and emotionally stable members of their community. But orphaned bonobos…
Human foetuses begin to hear sounds outside the womb at about 27 weeks. But whether foetuses can learn from these sounds in ways that shape speech perception and development during infancy has remained…
The Royal Australasian College of Physicians (RACP) is today launching a call for law reform regarding the use of physical punishment to discipline children. Noting the harms of smacking children, it’s…
Iodine is naturally present in a range of food, especially seaweed and fish. So it may seem odd that the people of an island nation (most of whom live along its vast coastline) are not getting enough of…
We all have different expectations about how involved dads should be during pregnancy and childbirth. In the UK, it’s generally seen as a good thing and research is now beginning to show that it matters…
What do newborn babies, children who have been severely deprived of human contact, people with autism, and blind mothers have in common? On the surface, not much. But they provide a common theme for understanding…
Picture this: you’re standing in a long, slow-moving queue. People around you are disgruntled and complaining. You turn to talk with the person behind you and someone else jumps the queue in front of you…
I admit it, I love the Olympic Games. The sport, the over-hyped commentary, the fancy-dress national costumes - it’s two weeks of every four years that I anticipate with excitement. In many ways, the Games…
We all know the scene: a child, wrapped in his or her own imaginary world, fights off aliens while flying through space on a rocket fashioned from an empty box. But could such flights of fancy be critical…
When most people picture the typical school bully, they think of a kid who is likely to have been bullied themselves. A child with low self-esteem who is trying to make themselves feel better by picking…
Soft porn music videos on television. Girls mini-mags featuring fashion and celebrity gossip at the supermarket checkout. Porn at eye-level in the petrol station. Billboards on the trips in between. As…
Breastfeeding generally falls under the jurisdiction of mothers, so I decided to ask a group of mothers I see regularly on Saturday morning what they thought of the recent Time magazine cover portraying…
Language development is a truly remarkable phenomenon. But for a small number of kids, the words don’t come so easily. Most children acquire their first words around 12 months of age, start to string words…
With one in five Australian preschool-age children now overweight or obese, it’s no wonder kids’ weight is so often in the media spotlight. While the causes of obesity are complex and multifactorial, it’s…
Professor, Canada Research Chair in Determinants of Child Development, Owerko Centre at the Alberta Children’s Hospital Research Institute, University of Calgary
Assistant professor, School of Psychology, Scientist, Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa
Director, Center for Community Child Health Royal Children's Hospital; Professor, Department of Paediatrics, University of Melbourne; Theme Director Population Health, Murdoch Children's Research Institute