ACAMH Website Content Types
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The origins of fussy eating in young children
As young children make the transition from a solely milk-based diet to a ‘family diet’, they are gradually introduced to increasing numbers of foods. While some children happily accept novel flavours and textures and enjoy widening their dietary repertoire, many are hesitant or even suspicious about trying new foods.
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Addiction & Substance Use
Irrespective of the age group it is just as important to be aware of what we don’t know as what we can be more confident about. This is particularly true of young people and drug use, as most research investigating prevention and interventions has tended to focus on adult populations.
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In Conversation… Autism Diagnosis Trends
The first prevalence studies estimated one in 2,500 children were autistic whereas the latest figures indicate around one in every 39 children is reported to have an autism diagnosis. Dr Ginny Russell discusses why we may have seen such an exponential increase.
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What is attachment theory used for?
Attachment theory is amongst the most popular theories of child development and has received much attention from psychologists and researchers across the world for the last 50 years. Such popularity implies that it is perceived by many to be of great importance and utility to understanding people and their behaviour in different contexts – but, why?
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In Conversation… Professor Kathy Sylva
Hear from Professor Kathy Sylva OBE on her research which has explored early education and children’s development, parenting interventions, and the impact of children’s centres on families.
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In Conversation… Professor Tamsin Ford
Tamsin Ford is a Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of Exeter Medical School. While Tamsin set out on her career path aiming to become an old age psychiatrist working as a clinician, she ended up as a child psychiatrist working in research. Discover more about Tamsin’s career and her research group assessing the effectiveness of services and interventions which aim to support the mental health and wellbeing of children and young people.
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European experts develop a new framework to screen early ASD
Early detection of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) can improve outcomes for children, yet the effectiveness and validity of universal screening methods has been questioned. Now, researchers have created a new framework to generate a valid early ASD screening method using a novel approach based on “face and content validity”.
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Early social communication intervention reduces autism severity in young infants
The first, very early social communication intervention for infants at high risk of autism shows promise to reduce the overall severity of early symptoms and a capacity to positively enhance parent–child social interactions.
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The challenge: Getting research interventions into community where they are needed
This article is a summary of the paper published in JCPP – Hybrid implementation model of community‐partnered early intervention for toddlers with autism: a randomized trial.
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Parents should keep talking to boost infant language development
Children from low socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds tend to have poorer language skills when starting school than those from higher SES backgrounds. Now, data shows that increasing the amount of “contingent talk”— whereby a caregiver talks about objects that an infant is directly focusing on — within an infant’s first year of life promotes a wide vocabulary later in infancy.
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