RAND research on children covers the prenatal period up to age 18 and includes areas such as child health and the role of the family unit, neighborhoods, and communities in influencing child well-being. RAND's family-focused research covers additional topics such as marriage and divorce, senior care, and family finances.
School-based drug education programs for adolescents can have a long-term positive impact on sexual behavior in addition to curbing substance abuse.
Most adolescents referred to long-term group homes in Los Angeles County after being charged with a serious offense reported they were still involved with crime or drugs seven years later.
While the number of charter schools continues to grow, debate continues about whether charter schools provide a better education experience than traditional public schools. Proponents contend that charter schools expand educational choices for students, improve student achievement and provide much-needed competition to public schools.
As the U.S. military continues to rely on the National Guard and Reserve for overseas deployments, making sure their families are adequately prepared for those missions is critical.
The first multi-dimensional effort to quantify the disparities faced by African-American and Latino boys and men in California across a broad spectrum of health and social factors provides a disquieting outlook for their lives.
The economic cost of methamphetamine use in the United States reached $23.4 billion in 2005, including the burden of addiction, premature death, drug treatment and many other aspects of the drug.
Obese women who have weight loss surgery before becoming pregnant have a lower risk of pregnancy-related health problems and their children are less likely to be born with complications.
Adolescents who have high levels of exposure to television programs that contain sexual content are twice as likely to be involved in a pregnancy over the following three years as their peers who watch few such shows.
The U.S. military should reassess its child care system to look for ways to make it better fit the needs of military families and more effectively meet recruitment, readiness and retention goals.
California's pioneering paid family leave program has largely failed to reach one of its major target groups. Few parents of children with serious chronic illnesses have used the program, despite having paid into the program through payroll withholdings, and the vast majority of these parents aren't even aware that the program exists.
More than half of California’s preschoolers attend center-based early care and education programs, but the children who have the most to gain from preschool frequently are those least likely to participate in the programs.
Amid cutbacks in school arts education funding, public and private organizations in six urban regions have collaborated to expand access to arts learning for children in and outside of public school.
Making a virginity pledge may help some young people postpone the start of sexual activity.
A growing body of economic research suggests that public investment in early childhood programs may be able to lower public costs for social services by improving children's long-term welfare.
Chicago's multi-grade charter high schools (those serving students in grades 7-12, 6-12 or K-12) appear to improve their students' chances of graduating and attending college, as compared with the city's traditional public high schools.
Student participation in school choice programs authorized by the No Child Left Behind Act was hindered because parents did not receive clear and timely communication from schools.
While California has basic tracking system architecture in place to allow the state's educators to closely follow the progress of students from kindergarten to post-secondary education, officials must overcome political and financial barriers.
After five years of effort, states have implemented most of the test-based accountability requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001, and now must focus their efforts on improving poor-performing schools that have been identified.
California's sizeable achievement gaps in English-language arts and mathematics in second and third grades have early roots, with the same groups of children that lag in academic performance in elementary school trailing in measures of school readiness when they enter kindergarten.
>An examination of the types of human trafficking occurring in two of Ohio's largest cities found that child prostitution is more common in Toledo while forced labor is more likely to be identified in Columbus.