Health & Parenting News & Features

For the study, a team compared a year's worth of state-verified child abuse cases with the dates that elementary school report cards were sent home.

After alcohol, vaping is the second-most common form of substance use in the United States, the survey found.

After a school district delayed the start time of secondary schools from 7:50 to 8:45, the students gained 35 minutes of daily sleep, felt less sleepy, improved their grades, and increased their attendance and punctuality.

The stronger a student's reported positive family relationships, the more likely a student was to deem aggressive behaviors and retaliation unacceptable, and the more likely they were to intervene in either case, researchers found in a recent study.

The "gateway pattern" of substance use is changing, Columbia University researchers say. Since 2006, less than 50 percent of teens have tried cigarettes or alcohol before trying marijuana for the first time.

The U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) Education Fund’s annual "Trouble in Toyland" report highlights a number of dangers, including data-collecting toys that may violate children's privacy.

Grandparents raising grandchildren -- despite having greater physical and mental health issues, and more behaviorally challenging children -- appear to be managing just as well as biological/adoptive parent caregivers, researchers say.

Striking, yelling at or shaming children can elevate stress hormones and lead to changes in the brain's structure, new research confirms. Harsh verbal abuse is also linked to mental health problems in preteens and teens, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Extra-hot instant soups and noodles cause scald burns in nearly 10,000 kids ages 4-12 each year, researchers estimate.

Teens and young adults who stopped using pot for a month showed improvement in their ability to learn evidence that marijuana is not likely to be linked to permanent damage to the brain or to thinking, researchers say.

On Halloween, there is a 43 percent increased risk of a pedestrian death -- about four extra children are killed trick-or-treating, researchers have found.

Some California doctors are charging parents for exemptions from required childhood vaccines, a study in the journal Pediatrics says.

In countries that ban corporal punishment (spanking and slapping), the rates of physical fighting among teens are as much as 69 percent lower than in countries without such a ban, a study has found.

The percentage of U.S. children under 2 who haven't received any recommended vaccinations quadrupled in the past 17 years, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says.

Among the teens in the study, 28 percent admitted to at least some marijuana use, and 75 percent said they used alcohol at least occasionally.

A new study provides more evidence that young people who use e-cigarettes progress to smoking cigarettes in the future, researchers say.

Teens who averaged less than six hours of sleep a night, were twice as likely to say they had smoked cigarettes, used alcohol, marijuana or other drugs, or had driven after drinking, new research finds.

American teens are using pot in many ways, and smoking is most popular, new research shows. Many also use "edibles" or "vaping" -- where cannabis aerosol is inhaled, smoke-free, with the help of electronic cigarettes.

Kids with the sharpest intellects spent less than two hours a day on their cellphones, tablets and computers, coupled with 9 to 11 hours of sleep and at least an hour of physical activity, according to a study based on data gathered from over 4,500 U.S. kids aged 8 to 11.

U.S. teenagers whose appearance, lifestyle or behavior are different from widely held views of what it is to be male or female face a higher risk for feeling sad, feeling hopeless, and entertaining suicidal thoughts and/or suicidal behavior, a new study has found.

Parents who use coercion or bribes to deter picky eating may be setting the child up for problems down the road, Australian researchers have found.

A new CDC study found a dramatic drop in the number of sexually active U.S. teens, and of those teens, nearly 90 percent used some form of birth control the last time they had sex.

More than 230,000 children younger than 15 months old were treated in emergency rooms between 1990 and 2014 for baby walker-related injuries, new research published in the journal Pediatrics shows. More than 10,000 of those youngsters ended up being admitted to the hospital.

New studies on toddlers are shedding more interesting insights into just what a 2-year-old knows.

Young adults raised by lesbian moms are faring as well as -- or even better than -- other U.S. kids their age, according to the largest, longest-running study to track child development in these families.