WHAT'S KNOWN ON THIS SUBJECT: Childhood obesity is already prevalent by preschool age, particularly among Latinos. Parents have tremendous influence on factors that contribute to childhood obesity (eg, diet, physical activity); thus, family plays a crucial role in pediatric obesity prevention. WHAT THIS STUDY ADDS:This randomized controlled trial examined the effect of a behavioral intervention involving LatinoAmerican parent-preschool-aged child dyads. The intervention resulted in reductions in absolute BMI across the 3-month study period, with patterns suggesting the largest effect for obese children.abstract OBJECTIVE: To test the effect of a culturally tailored, family-centered, short-term behavioral intervention on BMI in Latino-American preschool-aged children. METHODS:In a randomized controlled trial, 54 parent-child dyads were allocated to the intervention and 52 dyads were allocated to an alternative school-readiness program as the control condition. Parent-child dyads were eligible if the parent self-defined Latino, was at least 18 years old, had a 2-to 6-year-old child not currently enrolled in another healthy lifestyle program, had a valid telephone number, and planned on remaining in the city for the next 6 months. The Salud Con La Familia (Health with the Family) program consisted of 12 weekly 90-minute skills-building sessions designed to improve family nutritional habits and increase physical activity. Both programs were conducted in a community recreation center serving an urban neighborhood of mostly Spanish-speaking residents.RESULTS: Forty-two percent of participating preschool-aged children were overweight or obese. Controlling for child age, gender, and baseline BMI, the effect of the treatment condition on postintervention absolute BMI was B = -0.59 (P , .001). The intervention effect seemed to be strongest for obese children.CONCLUSIONS: A skills-building, culturally tailored intervention involving parent-child dyads changed short-term early growth patterns in these Latino-American preschool-aged children. Examining long-term effects would be a prudent next step.

This study explores the relationship between individuals' risk tolerance and occupational injuries. We analyze data from a national representative survey of U.S. workers that includes information about injuries, risk tolerance, cognitive and noncognitive attributes, and risky behaviors. We measure risk tolerance through questions regarding individuals' willingness to gamble on their lifetime income. We estimate zero-inflated count models to assess the role played by such measures on workers' recurrent injuries. We discuss some implications of our results for future research and occupational safety policies. Our results highlight the concurrent and changing role played by individual, work, and environmental factors in explaining recurrent incidents. They show that risk tolerance affects recurrent injuries, although not in the direction that proponents of the concept of proneness would expect. Our measure of risk aversion shows that individuals who are somewhat more risk tolerant have fewer recurrent injuries than those who are risk averse. But the estimated relationship is U-shaped, not monotonic and, therefore, not easy to predict. At the same time, we find that individuals' "revealed risk preferences"-specific risky behaviors-are related to higher injury probabilities. Demanding working conditions, measures of socioeconomic status, health, and safety problems experienced by workers during their youth remain among the most important factors explaining the phenomena of recurrent injuries. So our results contribute also to the important debate about the relationship between health and socioeconomic status.

Background: Living near community recreation centers (CRC) is associated with increases in adolescent and adult physical activity, but the efficacy of efforts to increase use among Latino parents and young children is unknown. We hypothesized that Latino parent-child dyads with exposure to a CRC through culturally tailored programming would be more likely to use the facility for physical activity a year after programming ended than dyads living in the same geographic area who were not exposed to the programming.Methods: self-identified Latino parent-child dyads who had participated in a randomized controlled trial (RCt) of a culturally tailored healthy lifestyle program and completed a 12-month follow-up assessment constituted the "exposed" group (n = 66). the "unexposed" group included 62 parent-child dyads living in the same zip codes as the exposed group, all within a 5-mile radius of the CRC. Participants completed in-person structured interviews.Results: Approximately two-thirds of exposed parents reported more than monthly use of the CRC for themselves a year after programming ended, compared to one-third of unexposed Latino families with the same geographic access (c2 = 11.26, p < 0.01). Parents in the exposed group were four times more likely than the unexposed group to use the CRC with their children on a monthly basis (odds ratio = 4.18, p < 0.01).Conclusions: CRCs that develop culturally tailored programs that invite Latino families inside can increase sustained CRC use for physical activity in this population at heightened risk for childhood obesity.

Workplace ergonomic training is cost-effective and should be implemented wherein other engineering-control interventions are precluded due to infrastructural constraints.

Workplace incivility and bullying may carry monetary costs to employers, which could be controlled through work environment modification.

During the 1980s the United States has experienced an increase in both international trade and the skill‐premium. The association between these two phenomena has proven elusive in the early empirical literature on the subject. Indeed, the consensus among labour economists seems to be that trade has not been the main cause of such increase in the skill‐premium. This view has been challenged by Feenstra and Hanson (1999, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 114, 3, 907) who find that offshoring sizably affects the skill‐premium. I revisit this debate using individual workers’ data from the March Current Population Survey combined with industry‐level trade data. This strategy improves upon the work of Feenstra and Hanson who do not control for the demographic characteristics of the labour force. In my results, offshoring can explain between 9 and 30 per cent of the increase in the college wage premium, relative to high‐school workers. In addition, I find that offshoring can explain 21 per cent of the increase in the relative employment of skilled labour. These results suggest that offshoring may play an important role in the increase in the relative demand of skilled workers.

The rapidly growing Hispanic American population is experiencing an academic achievement gap that seems to be rooted in disparities in early childhood education and literacy development. Children of non-English-speaking immigrant parents are at greatest risk of poor school performance, but there is potential to capitalize on immigrants' drive by encouraging them to engage with their children in dialog while reading native-language storybooks. This paper reports on a community-based randomized controlled trial (N = 79) delivered to mostly Mexican immigrant parents of preschool-age children. Intervention group parents attended three monthly 60-minute sessions based on the Dialogic Reading Model-C.A.R. (Comment and Wait, Ask Questions and Wait, and Respond by Adding More), which teaches parents to have a conversation about pictures in books, with the goal of enhancing verbal exchanges with the child in the parent's native language. After the 3-month intervention, parents in the bilingual early language development intervention reported placing greater value on children's active verbal participation in reading compared to control group parents who participated in a healthy lifestyle intervention. These results suggest that Hispanics' educational outcomes may be improved by educating parents on the value of playful conversations with young children while reading books in one's native language.

We estimate the effects of obesity on wages accounting for the endogenous selection of workers into jobs requiring different levels of personal interactions in the workplace. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 combined with detailed information about occupation characteristics from O*Net, we confirm the results from the literature finding a wage penalty for obese White women. This penalty is higher in jobs that require a high level of personal interactions. Accounting for job selection does not significantly change the estimated wage penalty.