This issue of Family & Community Health discusses a variety of approaches for providing health promotion and disease prevention strategies. Several of the articles use the life course health development (LCHD) framework to guide their work. This framework is consistent with the vision, mission, and goals of Healthy People 2020, especially the goals and objectives related to early and middle childhood and adolescence, both of which reference the LCHD, physical activity, and social determinants of health. The LCHD approach recommends that more attention be paid to targeting the "upstream" determinants of health. What the author means is that moving upstream suggests addressing health risks earlier in life, during developmentally sensitive periods. The contention is that prevention, early intervention, and health promotion are much more effective in developing a healthy population that relies on curative health care practices.1 The LCHD model advocates that health is a "developmental process occurring throughout the life span."1(p1) This approach contends that it is not just the life stage that is important but also there are optimal times for positive interventions and recommends that health programming be most intense at earlier stages of life span development.
As mentioned, the LCHD model is consistent with the vision, mission, and goals of Healthy People 2020. For example, an aspect of the mission of Healthy People 2020 is to "increase public awareness and understanding of the determinants of health, disease, and disability and the opportunities for progress" and one of the overarching goals is to "promote quality of life, healthy development, and healthy behaviors across all life stages."2 As another example, one of the new goals of this document is to reduce obesity by 10% and to increase physical activity among children, youth, and adults while decreasing their sedentary behaviors.
The articles in this issue deal with looking at parent-child relations and the impact on health disparities based on factors such as ethnicity, and selected illnesses such as HIV, obesity, and caregiver stress for those caring for children with asthma. Consistent with the concepts in the LCHD model, attention is paid in this issue to the use of novel ways to communicate health promotion information such as through the use of comic books. Readers should be able to find material that is useful and applicable to their work including teaching, practice, and research.
Jeanette Lancaster
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