The ledger
What changed, and when
Nothing here is a black box. Every card published, every rating re-verified, and every legal authority re-checked is recorded with a real date. If a citation, grade, or precedent-health status changed, it changed in the open.
Cards added to the library
August 2026
- Randomized human evidence shows that severe early deprivation of stable, responsive caregiving can cause lasting cognitive and psychiatric harm, and that early placement into stable, high-quality family care can substantially improve outcomes.Policy & Advocacy
- Higher prenatal and early-childhood exposure to air pollution, especially fine particulate matter, is associated with lower cognitive performance and poorer attention and executive functioning in children.Policy & Advocacy
- Prenatal and childhood secondhand tobacco-smoke exposure is associated at the population level with small differences in some cognitive, executive-function, attention, learning, and developmental outcomes, but findings are inconsistent across domains and exposure windows.Policy & Advocacy
- Chronic environmental-noise exposure, particularly aircraft noise around schools, is associated with poorer reading comprehension and long-term memory in children.Policy & Advocacy
- Frequent, destabilizing, and often involuntary residential moves are associated with greater behavioral and emotional difficulties in children, but effects depend on timing, reason, destination, continuity, and support. Moves into safer, more stable, or higher-opportunity environments can be neutral or beneficial.Policy & Advocacy
- Household food insecurity is associated with poorer academic and cognitive functioning and increased behavioral and mental-health risk in children; severity, persistence, and transitions in food security may matter.Policy & Advocacy
- Maternal smoking during pregnancy is associated with some adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes, including developmental coordination, small average IQ differences, ADHD diagnoses, and selected brain or behavioral measures, but causality is outcome-specific; genetically sensitive research does not support a clear causal prenatal-smoking-to-ADHD relationship.Policy & Advocacy
- Adverse housing conditions, including damp or mold, overcrowding, and poor structural or indoor quality, are associated at the population level with increased emotional and behavioral difficulties among children and young people, but findings vary by exposure, outcome, and context.Policy & Advocacy
- Maternal depression during pregnancy and after birth is associated at the population level with small average differences across children's cognitive, emotional, social, and behavioral development; findings for language, motor, and particular later outcomes are less consistent.Policy & Advocacy
July 2026
- Youth of color — Black youth most consistently — are overrepresented at every stage of U.S. juvenile justice processing, and meta-analytic and matched-comparison evidence shows disparities persisting after offense and prior record are controlled, especially at detention, formal processing, secure confinement, and waiver; how much of the remaining disparity reflects differential system treatment versus unmeasured differences in involvement remains genuinely debated.Juvenile Defense
- Structured forensic-interview protocols built on open-ended prompts — canonically the NICHD Investigative Interview Protocol — reliably improve child interviews: interviewers use several times more free-recall invitations and far fewer suggestive and option-posing questions, children provide more (and more central) information, and ground-truth studies show the added information comes at no cost to accuracy.Family & Custody
- Delayed disclosure is the norm in child sexual abuse: most victims do not tell during childhood or delay for months to years, with predictable barriers (young age, intrafamilial abuse, lack of caregiver support), so delay by itself is not evidence of fabrication; how often disclosed cases involve subsequent denial or recantation is genuinely contested, with recantation estimates ranging from uncommon to roughly 23% in dependency samples — where recantation tracks family pressure rather than false allegation.Family & Custody
- Maternal (and more broadly parental) depression is a well-replicated risk factor for children's emotional, behavioral, and cognitive difficulties; the average associations are small, are strongest when the depression is severe and chronic, extend from infancy into adolescence, and diminish when the parent's depression is effectively treated.Family & Custody
- Parental corporal punishment (spanking) is associated with more child aggression, behavior problems, and other adverse outcomes — never with developmental benefit — across meta-analyses, 69 prospective studies, quasi-experimental matching designs, and 92 countries; average effects are modest and the causal magnitude, though not the direction, is debated.Family & Custody
- Youth in the juvenile justice system carry a far higher burden of trauma exposure and trauma-related psychiatric disorder than adolescents in the community: roughly nine in ten detained youth report traumatic exposure — typically multiple, beginning early in childhood — and PTSD prevalence (about 9–24%, higher in girls) is several times community rates.Juvenile Defense
- An earlier age at first conviction or arrest is a significant predictor of persistent and violent offending among justice-involved youth.Juvenile Defense
June 2026
- Childhood neglect — the chronic absence of expected cognitive, linguistic, social, and caregiving input — is associated with substantial, often lasting deficits in cognitive ability, executive function, and brain development; the deprivation pathway is distinct from the threat pathway of abuse, and randomized evidence from early-deprivation studies supports a causal contribution.Child Welfare
- Solitary confinement is associated with substantial adverse psychological effects — distress, self-harm, and elevated suicide/mortality risk — with harms that appear to exceed those of general incarceration and that fall most heavily on those with mental illness and on adolescents; the evidence is consistent across two centuries though complicated by selection and measurement, and professional bodies oppose its use for juveniles.Juvenile Defense
- High-dosage tutoring — frequent (typically >=3 sessions/week), sustained, small-group or one-to-one instruction delivered during the school day by trained tutors — is among the most reliably effective interventions for raising student achievement, with consistent positive effects across dozens of randomized field experiments; effects are largest in early grades and for lower-achieving and lower-income students.Policy & Advocacy
- Fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD) produce robust, well-replicated deficits in executive functioning — working memory, inhibition, planning, and set-shifting — and in adaptive functioning that persist independent of IQ; because these organically based impairments bear directly on reasoning, impulse control, and capacity to foresee consequences, they are recognized as legitimately mitigating of criminal culpability by analogy to intellectual disability.Juvenile Defense
- Young children's reports can be substantially distorted by suggestive, leading, or coercive interviewing, creating a real risk of false accounts; at the same time, children are not inherently unreliable — with developmentally appropriate, non-leading, supportive protocols they can give accurate accounts — so reliability turns on interview quality and conditions, not age alone.Family & Custody
- Children's exposure to intimate partner violence (IPV) between caregivers is prospectively associated with elevated internalizing and externalizing problems and other adjustment difficulties; the association is robust across many studies and strengthens over time, but it is modest in magnitude, varies widely across children, and operates substantially through co-occurring maltreatment, impaired caregiving, and maternal mental health rather than as a uniform, direct effect of witnessing alone.Family & Custody
- Delaying secondary-school start times (toward 8:30 a.m. or later) reliably increases adolescents' sleep duration and is associated with better mood, attendance, and some academic and behavioral outcomes; the sleep effect is well established and replicated, while the magnitude of downstream academic gains and the practical trade-offs (transport, scheduling) are more uncertain.Policy & Advocacy
- Children raised by same-sex (lesbian or gay) parents do not differ from children of different-sex parents in psychological adjustment, cognitive ability, or social development; what predicts child outcomes is family process — parenting quality, parental well-being, stigma, and support — not parental sexual orientation.Family & Custody
Ratings re-verified
A human re-read the evidence and confirmed the two ratings hold.
- Prenatal and childhood secondhand tobacco-smoke exposure is associated at the population level with small differences in some cognitive, executive-function, attention, learning, and developmental outcomes, but findings are inconsistent across domains and exposure windows.
- Maternal depression during pregnancy and after birth is associated at the population level with small average differences across children's cognitive, emotional, social, and behavioral development; findings for language, motor, and particular later outcomes are less consistent.
- Maternal smoking during pregnancy is associated with some adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes, including developmental coordination, small average IQ differences, ADHD diagnoses, and selected brain or behavioral measures, but causality is outcome-specific; genetically sensitive research does not support a clear causal prenatal-smoking-to-ADHD relationship.
- Chronic environmental-noise exposure, particularly aircraft noise around schools, is associated with poorer reading comprehension and long-term memory in children.
- Frequent, destabilizing, and often involuntary residential moves are associated with greater behavioral and emotional difficulties in children, but effects depend on timing, reason, destination, continuity, and support. Moves into safer, more stable, or higher-opportunity environments can be neutral or beneficial.
- Household food insecurity is associated with poorer academic and cognitive functioning and increased behavioral and mental-health risk in children; severity, persistence, and transitions in food security may matter.
- Higher prenatal and early-childhood exposure to air pollution, especially fine particulate matter, is associated with lower cognitive performance and poorer attention and executive functioning in children.
- Adverse housing conditions, including damp or mold, overcrowding, and poor structural or indoor quality, are associated at the population level with increased emotional and behavioral difficulties among children and young people, but findings vary by exposure, outcome, and context.
- Randomized human evidence shows that severe early deprivation of stable, responsive caregiving can cause lasting cognitive and psychiatric harm, and that early placement into stable, high-quality family care can substantially improve outcomes.
- Childhood sexual abuse is associated with a broad, dose-responsive elevation in long-term psychiatric and physical-health risk — depression, anxiety, PTSD, suicidality, and substance dependence among them — and the strongest designs (umbrella reviews, longitudinal cohorts, discordant-twin studies) indicate the association is at least partly causal and not merely a product of shared family confounding; nonetheless many survivors show resilience and no measurable lasting impairment.
- Children's exposure to intimate partner violence (IPV) between caregivers is prospectively associated with elevated internalizing and externalizing problems and other adjustment difficulties; the association is robust across many studies and strengthens over time, but it is modest in magnitude, varies widely across children, and operates substantially through co-occurring maltreatment, impaired caregiving, and maternal mental health rather than as a uniform, direct effect of witnessing alone.
- Positive, engaged father (or father-figure) involvement is associated with better child social, emotional, behavioral, cognitive, and academic outcomes; the benefit tracks the quality of positive engagement and the father-child relationship, not the sheer quantity of contact or financial support, and the associations are small in magnitude and substantially confounded by selection.
Authorities re-checked
Precedent-health status for the cases the science is bridged to, refreshed against the citator. Treatment is human-set; the check date is when it was last confirmed.
- K.C. v. Superior CourtK.C. v. Superior Court, 182 Cal. App. 4th 1388 (Cal. Ct. App. 2010)
- Pierce v. PiercePierce v. Pierce, 2006-Ohio-4953 (Ohio Ct. App. 7th 2006)
- In the Interest of S.H.A.In the Interest of S.H.A., 728 S.W.2d 73 (Tex. App. 1987)
- New Jersey Division of Youth & Family Services v. C.M.New Jersey Div. of Youth & Family Services v. C. M., 436 A.2d 1158 (N.J. Super. Ct. App. Div. 1981)
- California Building Industry Association v. Bay Area Air Quality Management DistrictCalifornia Building Industry Ass'n v. Bay Area Air Quality Management District, 2 Cal. App. 5th 1067 (Cal. Ct. App. 2016)
- A.G. v. C.S.A.G. v. C.S., 246 Cal. App. 4th 1269 (Cal. Ct. App. 2016)
- State of Washington v. United States Department of the NavyState of Washington v. United States Department of the Navy, No. 2:19-cv-01059 (W.D. Wash. Dec 10, 2021)
- In re K.A.W.In Re KAW, 133 S.W.3d 1 (Mo. 2004)
- In the Interest of J.C.D.Y. et al.In the Interest of J.C.D.Y. AKA J.Y., J.E.D.Y. AKA J.Y., M.M.D.Y. AKA M.Y., I.E.J. AKA I.J., M.D.K.G. AKA M.Y. AKA M.O.D.Y., and J.T.D.Y. AKA J.Y., Children v. Department of Family and Protective Services, No. 01-23-00713-CV (Tex. App. Mar 29, 2024)
- In the Interest of A.D.T., a ChildIn the Interest of A.D.T., a Child v. the State of Texas, No. 07-19-00142-CV (Tex. App.—Amarillo Oct 16, 2019)
- In re G.V.In Re GV, 674 S.E.2d 479 (N.C. Ct. App. 2009)
- In re M.M. and C.M., JuvenilesIn re M.M. and C.M., Juveniles, 133 A.3d 379 (Vt. 2015)
Dates are recorded, never inferred. Publication dates are precise from the audit trail forward; older entries show the library timestamp. See the method for how a claim becomes citable.