JMIR Pediatrics and Parenting

Childhood obesity is a global health concern with long-term cardiometabolic and psychosocial consequences. Establishing healthy feeding and lifestyle behaviors from infancy is critical to population health efforts with a life course perspective. Recently, digital health applications have gained traction in reaching out to parents and promoting healthy feeding behaviors.

This study assessed families’ comfort levels with information-sharing between health care providers and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) using a survey-based approach.

Patients with mucopolysaccharidosis (MPS) appear to have an increased risk of developing dental disease.

Virtual, augmented, mixed, and other immersive technologies, collectively referred to as extended reality (XR), are increasingly used to enhance experiential learning in health education. By creating interactive 3-dimensional or 360° environments, these technologies allow expectant parents to engage in realistic prenatal and childbirth scenarios, promoting emotional preparedness, knowledge acquisition, and confidence. Although XR has been widely studied in clinical training, its application in prenatal and childbirth education for parents remains less systematically explored.

Virtual reality (VR) technology offers a new approach for the intervention of social communication skills in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but the comparative effects of different forms of VR technology remain unclear.

Parents of young children with type 1 diabetes (T1D) are vulnerable to experiencing fear of hypoglycemia (FH), an emotional condition that includes persistent and intense worry about hypoglycemia and/or use of unhealthful behaviors to avoid hypoglycemia. Despite greater uptake of continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) and automated insulin delivery systems, FH remains prevalent and under-addressed in parents of young children. As such, we developed Reducing Emotional Distress for Childhood Hypoglycemia in Parents (REDCHiP), a video-based telehealth intervention designed to reduce FH in parents by providing T1D education and teaching parents how to apply evidence-based strategies from cognitive behavioral therapy and behavioral parent training in their child’s daily T1D care.

In this interview study with 24 adolescent-serving clinicians, participants described current online sexual and reproductive health resources they share with adolescents and highlighted areas of improvement to better meet the developmental needs of this age group.

The California Advancing and Innovating Medi-Cal (CalAIM) initiative supports Enhanced Care Management (ECM) for high-need pediatric populations but published evidence of the impact of ECM in pediatric populations is lacking.

Teachers have the potential to be influential figures in school-based health promotion as informal caregivers; yet little is known about what motivates them to initiate preventive conversations with students. Attribution theory offers a useful framework to explore how perceptions of responsibility shape communicative behavior, but it has rarely been applied in the context of teacher-student interactions around health risks such as smoking.

Digital health programs are increasingly important in the treatment and prevention of mental health problems in young children. However, suboptimal family engagement with a program may hamper its effectiveness. Family engagement in digital mental health programs is multifaceted and poorly understood, with ill-defined relationships among aspects of participation and program outcomes (ie, what constitutes engagement). Moreover, little is known about the barriers and facilitators to effectively engaging families at risk for anxiety, who may not be actively seeking treatment.

Oral health in early childhood is vital for long-term well-being, yet dental caries is highly prevalent among young children in the United States, especially in low-income and immigrant families. Brazilian immigrants, a rapidly growing Latin American population in the United States, face distinct barriers to oral health care, such as language differences, limited access to care, and a lack of culturally tailored resources. Despite this, Brazilian immigrants are understudied in public health research. Understanding Brazilian immigrant parents’ perspectives is essential to advancing oral health equity through culturally responsive strategies.

Sickle cell disease (SCD) is a genetic blood disorder affecting millions globally, with life-threatening complications, and most patients live in sub-Saharan Africa. Particularly, children with SCD have a high risk of stroke. Although early screening for stroke could help prevent many cases, access to effective stroke screening remains limited in low-resource settings (LRS). Existing traditional approaches are highly operator-dependent, costly, resource-intensive, or difficult to deploy at scale in pediatric care. These limitations highlight the urgent need for accessible, scalable, and child-appropriate stroke screening and assessment tools suitable for low-resource health care contexts.