Children

It is hard to ignore the ubiquitous reminders that Sunday, 16th June, is Father's Day in many countries. As with most annually celebrated events, Father's Day is engulfed in a wave of commercialisation that threatens to obscure its true significance. Although it is undoubtedly important to recognise the role of fathers, perhaps the day should be less about celebrating and more about ensuring that we really understand the vital role fathers play in children's lives. After all, research shows that engaged fathers have a positive influence on their children. Educational success, better social development, and higher self-esteem are some of the documented effects on children who have dads involved in their everyday life.

Understanding this, policymakers have tried to increase the involvement of fathers by adapting leave policies after childbirth. As illustrated in the country profiles on the European Platform for Investing in Children (EPIC), many EU countries have implemented parental leave policies that allow both mother and father to take time off from work to look after children. Despite policy changes, however, mothers still take advantage of parental leave more than fathers. This is unfortunate.

With the end of the U.S. school year approaching rapidly, parents are scrambling to make sure their kids have worthwhile, instructional activities over the summer.

Summer learning programs can help prevent the “summer slide,” a loss of skills and knowledge that disproportionately affects low-income students and widens the achievement gap between them and their more advantaged peers.

This commentary appeared on CNN on May 31, 2013.

Last Monday, a massive tornado devastated Moore, Oklahoma, leveling or largely destroying hundreds of homes, businesses and two elementary schools. Plaza Towers Elementary School, where 75 students and faculty had taken shelter, was in the direct path of the tornado. Moore Medical Center lost an entire floor of its facility, requiring many of the injured, including children, some with severe injuries, to be taken to other area hospitals. At least 24 people were killed and hundreds more injured.

The tornado struck only days before the two-year anniversary of the deadly EF5 tornado that hit Joplin, Missouri, causing significant devastation and 155 fatalities. That twister lasted only minutes, but its toll on the mental health of Joplin's residents lingered much longer. And the incident holds some important lessons for Moore and future disaster areas as they try to recover.

The remainder of this commentary is available at cnn.com.

“The child shall enjoy special protection, and shall be given opportunities and facilities, by law and by other means, to enable him to develop physically, mentally, morally, spiritually and socially in a healthy and normal manner and in conditions of freedom and dignity” (Principle 2, Declaration of the Rights of the Child 1959).

This declaration prompted the designation of an annual Children's Day, celebrated in many European countries on the first day of June. On this date, children typically receive presents from their parents and participate in various sport and cultural activities. However, the historic objective of Children's Day was not simply to celebrate children for who they are, but to bring attention to children around the world who suffer from exploitation, violence and discrimination. Raising awareness and strengthening children's rights have long been objectives for many international and national organizations.

The toll of last week's tornado on school students in Moore, Oklahoma, cannot be overstated. Two schools in the Oklahoma City suburb—along with a hospital and countless homes—were destroyed. Tragically, seven of the 24 people killed in the storm were elementary school students. Now those who survived the storm must deal with the emotional effects of the traumatic experience.

Along with December's shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, the Moore tornado is the second tragedy in recent memory that left a community scrambling for ways to help its young schoolchildren and their families cope with the trauma.

Contaminated drinking water contributes to the deaths of some 750,000 children under the age of five every year due to diarrheal disease. As a result, there is a pressing need in the developing world for ways to make water safe to drink that are affordable and widely used.

A RAND project, with USAID funding, is using mobile phones to increase the sales and use of safe-water filters in Kenya. The ceramic filters are microbiologically effective and often preferred by users over chemical disinfection (e.g., adding chlorine to water).

To celebrate our first 60 years, we created 60 Ways RAND Has Made a Difference, an online book to illustrate our most notable contributions. On our 65th birthday, we provide five of the most recent ways in which we at RAND are proud to have made a difference.

1. Improving the lives of servicemembers, veterans, and their families

A RAND study of return-to-work programs for veterans with service-related health problems identified which programs are most effective, which provide the best return on investment, and what strategies are needed to encourage servicemembers and veterans to utilize them.

In response to the disturbing increase in military suicides, RAND researchers looked at the support programs offered by the Department of Defense, and identified improvements to make suicide prevention strategies more effective.

RAND revisited its research on sexual orientation and U.S. military personnel policy and provided the Senate Armed Services Committee with current data as it considered and repealed the policy known as “Don't Ask, Don't Tell.”

Drug and alcohol use among the nation's youth remains a problem. While evidence-based prevention programs are available, practitioners, especially those in smaller, community-based settings, often have difficulty using them. This is because resources are limited, prevention is complex, and communities often lack the capacity to adapt and implement “off the shelf” programs. A result of this “gap” between research and practice is that communities and schools often do not use the most evidence-supported programs, and often implement them poorly when they do.

For example, a recent report (PDF) by the Department of Education showed that fewer than 10 percent of schools were implementing evidence-based drug prevention programs, and fewer than half of those schools were doing a good job of implementing those programs. Common ways to bridge this gap, such as information dissemination, fail to change practice or outcomes at the local level, in part because they do not sufficiently address capacity or use community input. Building a community's prevention capacity through greater collaboration between researchers and practitioners could improve the quality of prevention and outcomes.

This commentary appeared on guardian.co.uk on April 9, 2013.

President Obama should stay strong on his universal preschool initiative. This is about giving low-income children a good start.

In his state of the union address this year, President Obama proposed “working with states to make high-quality preschool available to every single child in America”. It was one of the more unexpected pitches, and it immediately became politicized. Advocates were buoyed by the president's support for early childhood education. Detractors claimed that he was pushing “Head Start for all,” a reference to the federally funded preschool program for children in poverty.

Let's not forget that allocating public dollars to early education has a history of bipartisan support. Both solidly red states (such as Georgia and Oklahoma) and swing or blue states (such as Florida and Illinois) have established or are moving toward universal preschool for four-year-olds. Enthusiasm for public investment in preschool is backed by a solid body of rigorous research showing that children who participate in high-quality early learning programs are better prepared for kindergarten and subsequently perform better in school, as measured by achievement test scores and other educational outcomes, such as special education use, grade repetition, and high school completion.

President Barack Obama has called for the greatest federal expansion of early childhood programs since the Department of Health and Human Services launched Head Start in 1965, including a proposal to provide high-quality preschool to every American child via a new federal-state partnership.

High-quality early childhood interventions can improve academic achievement, reduce crime and delinquency, and enhance future labor market success. Research has also shown that these programs can yield returns to society ranging from $2 to $17 for every dollar spent.

The operative phrase, however, is “high quality.” And for early childhood programs to be high quality, they must have qualified instructors. After all, teachers affect student achievement more than any other school-related factor.