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The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide a historic opportunity to implement at scale interventions to promote Early Childhood Development (ECD). While the evidence base for the importance of ECD has grown, the research is distributed across sectors, populations, and settings with diversity noted in the scope and focus. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive updated analyses of ECD interventions across five sectors: health; nutrition; education; child protection; and social protection. Our review concludes that to make interventions, successful, smarter and sustainable, they need to be implemented as multi-sectoral intervention packages anchored in "nurturing care". The recommendations emphasize that intervention packages should be applied at developmentally appropriate times during the life-course, target multiple risks, and build on existing delivery platforms for feasibility of scale-up. While interventions will continue to improve with the growth of developmental science, the evidence is now strong that parents, caregivers, and families need to be supported in providing nurturing care and protection for young children to achieve their developmental potential.

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Tourette's syndrome (TS) is a genetically influenced developmental neuropsychiatric disorder characterized by chronic vocal and motor tics. We studied Slit and Trk-like 1 (SLITRK1) as a candidate gene on chromosome 13q31.1 because of its proximity to a de novo chromosomal inversion in a child with TS. Among 174 unrelated probands, we identified a frameshift mutation and two independent occurrences of the identical variant in the binding site for microRNA hsa-miR-189. These variants were absent from 3600 control chromosomes. SLITRK1 mRNA and hsa-miR-189 showed an overlapping expression pattern in brain regions previously implicated in TS. Wild-type SLITRK1, but not the frameshift mutant, enhanced dendritic growth in primary neuronal cultures. Collectively, these findings support the association of rare SLITRK1 sequence variants with TS.

The complex clinical presentation of OCD can be summarized with a few consistent, temporally stable symptom dimensions. These can be understood as a spectrum of potentially overlapping syndromes that may 1) coexist in any patient, 2) be continuous with normal obsessive-compulsive phenomena, and 3) extend beyond the traditional nosological boundaries of OCD. Although the dimensional structure of obsessive-compulsive symptoms is imperfect, this quantitative approach to phenotypic traits has the potential to advance our understanding of OCD and may aid in the identification of more robust endophenotypes. The need for a dimensional rating scale and suggestions for future research aimed at reducing the burden of this disorder are discussed.

BackgroundDespite robust evidence of fathers’ impact on children and mothers, engaging with fathers is one of the least well-explored and articulated aspects of parenting interventions. It is therefore critical to evaluate implicit and explicit biases manifested in current approaches to research, intervention, and policy.MethodsWe conducted a systematic database and a thematic hand search of the global literature on parenting interventions. Studies were selected from Medline, Psychinfo, SSCI, and Cochrane databases, and from gray literature on parenting programs, using multiple search terms for parent, father, intervention, and evaluation. We tabulated single programs and undertook systematic quality coding to review the evidence base in terms of the scope and nature of data reporting.ResultsAfter screening 786 nonduplicate records, we identified 199 publications that presented evidence on father participation and impact in parenting interventions. With some notable exceptions, few interventions disaggregate ‘father’ or ‘couple’ effects in their evaluation, being mostly driven by a focus on the mother–child dyad. We identified seven key barriers to engaging fathers in parenting programs, pertaining to cultural, institutional, professional, operational, content, resource, and policy considerations in their design and delivery.ConclusionsBarriers to engaging men as parents work against father inclusion as well as father retention, and undervalue coparenting as contrasted with mothering. Robust evaluations of father participation and father impact on child or family outcomes are stymied by the ways in which parenting interventions are currently designed, delivered, and evaluated. Three key priorities are to engage fathers and coparenting couples successfully, to disaggregate process and impact data by fathers, mothers, and coparents, and to pay greater attention to issues of reach, sustainability, cost, equity, and scale-up. Clarity of purpose with respect to gender-differentiated and coparenting issues in the design, delivery, and evaluation of parenting programs will constitute a game change in this field.

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