ABSTRACT
In the health world, some of the greatest advances have come from prevention strategies. Accurately representing the incidence of childhood and adolescent problems is fraught with difficulty. One reading of the research is that most people have been brought up relatively untouched by instability, family discord, delinquency or health and education problems. The chapter considers how problems develop and interact in several areas of the child’s life; in other words it tries to disentangle the wires in the flex. Poor parenting puts children at risk but, just as certainly, good parenting protects children from later problems. Children from deprived backgrounds who avoid later problems will often have experienced high quality parental care and supervision: there is plenty of evidence for this. Some factors that predispose children to social and psychological difficulty change over time. Personal social services increasingly acknowledge the connections between childhood problems.
