Researchers used a phenomenological approach and recruited parents through the facility’s follow-up clinic until data saturation was reached. The participants were 19 mothers and one father. Their mean age was 30.1 years, with a standard deviation of 6.1 years; all had completed secondary education, and 55 percent had also received tertiary education.

Focus group recordings were transcribed and analyzed thematically, with data managed using NVivo version 1.0. The work examined parents’ reported preferences concerning the content, timing and delivery of information, as well as their suggestions for improving communication during hospitalization. Four main themes emerged.

The first was pragmatism in information sharing: parents described the value of information reaching a parent who was present and available to communicate directly with the health team. The second theme concerned paternal involvement, including fathers’ participation in information exchange and shared decision-making, with attention to cultural sensitivity. The third theme favored incorporating communication into the unit’s existing routine to avoid multiple separate sessions.

The fourth emphasized respectful care and the need to individualize communication according to each parent’s strengths and weaknesses. Together, these themes presented communication as a contextual process shaped by family availability, gender roles, cultural norms and local health-system conditions. The authors said the findings could inform efforts to make communication pragmatic, respectful and individualized within routine newborn care while involving both parents.

They also emphasized that parents can offer insights and suggestions relevant to improving the quality of care for hospitalized infants. The evidence remains bounded by the study design and setting: it was a small qualitative study at one tertiary facility in Northeast Nigeria, and the participants were recruited from a follow-up clinic. The results describe the experiences and preferences reported by these parents rather than establish universal preferences across Nigerian neonatal units or demonstrate effects on clinical outcomes, parental anxiety, satisfaction or care engagement.

Subject of Research: Parent communication and information needs during hospitalization of preterm infants in Northeast Nigeria

Article Title: A qualitative study of the communication and information needs of parents of preterm Infants in a tertiary health facility in Northeast Nigeria

Article References: Adeniji, Y. R., Wariri, O., Musitia, P. M., & Jalo, I. (2026). A qualitative study of the communication and information needs of parents of preterm Infants in a tertiary health facility in Northeast Nigeria. BMC Health Services Research. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-026-15645-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12913-026-15645-1

Keywords: preterm infants, parent communication, neonatal care, Nigeria, qualitative research, focus groups, shared decision-making, family involvement, respectful care, newborn unit, qualitative, communication

Against this backdrop, a research team at Maryland Treatment Centers in Baltimore, working with colleagues at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, has adapted a behavioral intervention called Youth Opioid Recovery Support, or YORS, for adolescents aged 13 to 17. The intervention had already shown large effects on medication adherence in young adults aged 18 to 28 across multiple pilot trials since 2018, but it had never been tested in younger adolescents, nor in patients taking sublingual buprenorphine, the dissolvable tablet under the tongue that is by far the most common medication choice among youth. The new pilot, published in Frontiers in Adolescent Medicine, also took a broader view of success than previous work. Rather than measuring only medication adherence and opioid use, the researchers explored recovery capital, a framework describing the accumulated resources across financial, human, social, and community dimensions that support a person’s recovery. For adolescents, these resources include stable housing, school engagement, sober friendships, supportive family, and access to peer recovery groups.

The study enrolled 11 adolescents seeking treatment for opioid use disorder from inpatient or outpatient addiction programs in central Maryland between April 2024 and January 2025. Each participant nominated a family member or support person to serve as a treatment significant other, and 10 such adults, all parents, joined the trial. The design was a 16-week uncontrolled feasibility pilot, meaning there was no comparison group and the goal was to establish whether the adapted intervention could be delivered successfully and whether adolescents and families found it acceptable. The sample was diverse and clinically severe: participants were primarily African American and Hispanic, mostly male, with a mean age of 15.8 years, smoking fentanyl as their primary route of opioid use, and relying on public insurance. Their first opioid use occurred at a mean age of 14.3 years, and more than a quarter reported a lifetime overdose.

YORS is built on four core components, each designed to strip away the barriers that typically cause adolescents to fall out of medication treatment. The first is low-barrier access to medication: there was no requirement to attend counseling sessions in order to receive prescriptions, medications were prescribed in flexible supplies of one to four weeks, and free rideshare transportation was offered for injection visits or pharmacy pickups. Research staff monitored refills, coordinated medication visits, and offered same-day appointments outside regular business hours. The second component is motivational incentives, in which participants earned cash gift cards verified for taking their medication, with schedules totaling up to 200 dollars for injectable adherence or 208 dollars for daily sublingual buprenorphine over the 16 weeks. Incentives were dispensed only when adherence was confirmed through medical records, direct observation, or a trained support person.

The third component is assertive outreach and therapy. Every adolescent was assigned a YORS therapist for individual sessions, family sessions, and frequent contact by text and phone. Staff contacted patients weekly and support persons at least biweekly, with sessions flexible enough to accommodate school schedules, and maintaining engagement treated as the top priority even when patients declined formal sessions. The fourth component is family involvement: each adolescent and their designated support person created a written treatment agreement with the therapist to set goals and expectations, revisited in monthly family sessions, supplemented by education and coaching on opioid use disorder, coping skills, peer support, and weekly family support groups. The intervention was layered on top of usual care, which consisted of completing an acute inpatient stay where applicable and referral to continuing outpatient services.

The primary outcome was self-reported days of medication adherence, assessed biweekly with the timeline follow-back interview method. Participants averaged 78.7 days of adherence, or 70.3 percent of the 112-day intervention period, with missing days conservatively imputed as non-adherent. When calculated only across days with available self-report data, adherence reached 92.4 percent. Six of the 11 participants reported adherence above 90 percent, well over the 80 percent threshold conventionally considered good medication adherence, while the remaining participants ranged from 25 to 53 percent, producing a strikingly bimodal distribution. On the secondary outcome of opioid use, participants reported use on only 4.8 percent of days with available data, and nine of the 11 participants, or 81.8 percent, reported complete opioid abstinence across the intervention. Urine drug screen data collected as a validity check flagged only one discordance, in which a participant self-reported two abstinent weeks contradicted by a positive screen in the first month.

Feasibility signals were strong. The trial exceeded its enrollment target of eight adolescents with 11 enrollments, and reached 90.9 percent of its goal for enrolling a support person for each participant. All intervention components were implemented with variable uptake: 72.7 percent of adolescents completed at least one individual therapy session, averaging 3.3 sessions, while 72.7 percent of patient-family dyads completed at least one family session, averaging 1.2. Staff averaged 47.9 days of outreach per dyad across the intervention, and the average incentive dispensed was 93.64 dollars, roughly 46 percent of the total possible, on par with dispensation rates commonly reported in the contingency management literature. Session attendance was low, which the authors attribute to the model’s flexible principle of accommodating whatever level of care patients will accept while persistently reengaging them, and to the high volume of shorter impromptu contacts through calls, texts, and check-ins that supplemented scheduled care.

Acceptability ratings were uniformly high among the seven adolescents and five support persons who completed satisfaction surveys. Every participant with prior treatment experience rated YORS as better than previous treatment, and all adolescents described the outreach level as the right amount. Adolescents rated the helpfulness of components on a 10-point scale: having a support person involved scored a perfect 10, low-barrier access to medication 9.7, cash incentives 9.4, relapse prevention medication 8.4, individual therapy 8.3, frequent calls and texts 8.3, and family sessions 7.3. Support persons rated components similarly, with low-barrier access and support person involvement both at 10, and frequent calls and texts at 9.6. Adolescents reported mean satisfaction of 8.9 out of 10 with their family member’s involvement in recovery, while support persons reported 9.0 satisfaction with their loved one’s recovery.

The exploratory recovery capital indicators showed promising pre-to-post signals, though the authors caution these were not validated measures and missing data reached 36 percent for adolescents and 50 percent for support persons. Among the seven participants with complete data, two reported homelessness in the past year at baseline, but only one reported homelessness during the intervention. Five of seven were in school or employed at baseline; all seven were in school or employed at week 14. None attended self-help groups at intake, but four, or 57.1 percent, attended at least one group by follow-up, with two attending regularly. Five of seven reported at least one lifetime arrest at baseline, yet only one arrest occurred during the intervention and no participant was charged with a new offense. Both adolescents and support persons rated family involvement in recovery above 9 on a 10-point scale. Three psychiatric hospitalizations occurred during the trial, classified as unrelated to the intervention by the principal investigator and an independent data safety monitoring board.

The authors emphasize that this small, uncontrolled pilot cannot establish efficacy, and its limitations are substantial: no randomization, no validated adolescent recovery capital measure, reliance on self-report with 20 percent missing opioid use data suggesting the use rate may be underestimated, exclusion of non-English speakers despite a largely Hispanic sample, and a fixed rather than escalating incentive schedule for daily medication. The trial was also not pre-registered. Still, the bimodal adherence pattern offers a concrete research question for future work, since understanding what distinguishes adolescents who thrive under the model from those who struggle could guide targeted improvements. The team calls for adequately powered randomized trials, cultural adaptations for Spanish-speaking families, longer intervention durations, and the development of validated recovery capital measures for adolescents, a gap experts in the field have highlighted. If confirmed, the findings would suggest that a family-centered, low-barrier, persistently assertive treatment model can help a critically underserved population not only stay on medication but begin building the resources that make recovery durable.

Subject of Research: Behavioral treatment and recovery capital in adolescents with opioid use disorder

Article Title: Targeting recovery capital for adolescents through treatment for opioid use disorder: a pilot expansion of the Youth Opioid Recovery Support intervention

Article References: Taylor, L., Wenzel, K., Mallik-Kane, K., Pfeltz, C., Massie, E., Davis, K., Lavorato, L., & Fishman, M. (2026). Targeting recovery capital for adolescents through treatment for opioid use disorder: a pilot expansion of the Youth Opioid Recovery Support intervention. Frontiers in Adolescent Medicine, 4, Article 1720332. https://doi.org/10.3389/fradm.2026.1720332

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fradm.2026.1720332

Keywords: adolescents, opioid use disorder, Youth Opioid Recovery Support, medication adherence, buprenorphine, recovery capital, family involvement, motivational incentives, assertive outreach, pilot trial, Frontiers in Adolescent Medicine, addiction treatment

The research, published in Archives of Sexual Behavior, comes from a team led by Jiefeng Ying of Beijing Normal University and Utrecht University, working alongside Chiara Antoniucci of Sapienza University of Rome, Xinchun Wu of Beijing Normal University, and Joyce J. Endendijk of Utrecht University. Their starting point is a puzzle that has intrigued social scientists for years: the Netherlands ranks among the most gender-equal countries in Europe, yet it sits below the European Union average on gender segregation in education, with far more women than men entering healthcare, teaching, and other care-oriented fields. This so-called gender-equality paradox, in which more egalitarian societies sometimes show larger gender differences in occupational interests, has been attributed to the persistence of cultural stereotypes, which change far more slowly than structural indicators of equality.

The researchers wanted to understand where these patterns begin. Gender gaps in career aspirations and in expected balance between work and family emerge as early as middle childhood, between the ages of 6 and 12, according to prior research. Theoretical frameworks of gender socialization, including gender schema theory and social cognitive theory, suggest that pressure to conform to gender norms is a key engine of these early differences. Children anticipate positive reactions to gender-typical behavior and negative reactions to gender-atypical behavior, and when these anticipated reactions are internalized, children become sources of conformity pressure in their own right. The study distinguishes between two forms of pressure: same-gender pressure, meaning anticipated encouragement of behavior typical for one’s own gender, and other-gender pressure, meaning anticipated discouragement of behavior typical for the other gender. Each form was measured as coming from three distinct sources: parents, peers, and the self.

The team recruited 257 Dutch families through social media parent groups and personal networks, ultimately analyzing data from 319 children, 44.5 percent of whom were boys, with an average age of just over 10 years. During home visits, children completed questionnaires on tablets under the supervision of research assistants while parents filled out their own surveys in a separate room. The hypotheses and analysis plan were preregistered on the Open Science Framework, and power analyses confirmed that the sample was large enough to detect even small effects. Because some families contributed more than one child, the researchers used Generalized Estimating Equations, a regression-based statistical technique designed to handle dependency among siblings clustered within the same families.

The measurement approach was notably creative. To assess children’s gender-typical expectations about future family versus career involvement, children were shown two same-gender adults, one working full-time and one staying home with children while working part-time, and asked which adult they thought they would be more like when grown up. To gauge the gender-typicality of desired careers, children answered the classic question of what they wanted to be when they grew up, and each answer was coded against official Dutch statistics on the proportion of men and women working in that occupation. Children’s gender typicality, meaning how similar they feel to boys and girls as groups, was measured with a validated graphical scale using circles of varying overlap.

The results confirmed that gender-typical patterns remain deeply entrenched even in this egalitarian society. Boys most often aspired to pedagogical careers, but overwhelmingly of the sports variety, with football player or coach accounting for over two-thirds of boys’ pedagogical ambitions, followed by technical fields and public administration. Girls also gravitated toward pedagogical work, but specifically as primary school teachers, followed by care and welfare professions and creative or linguistic pursuits. Both genders preferred careers dominated by same-gender workers, with average gender-typicality scores of 0.61 for boys and 0.60 for girls, well above the neutral midpoint of 0.50. Interestingly, one unpreregistered finding showed that children from higher socioeconomic status families aspired to less gender-typical careers, possibly reflecting exposure to more egalitarian parental role models.

One surprising result concerned family life. Both boys and girls expected to prioritize family over career in adulthood, and girls held significantly more gender-typical expectations on this dimension than boys. The researchers suggest this may reflect the distinctive Dutch context, as the Netherlands has the highest percentage of men and women working part-time in the world, meaning boys, like girls, may learn to value family involvement rather than absorbing the belief that men should be primarily career-driven. The familiarity of family settings compared to workplaces, along with the study’s depiction of a family-oriented adult who also worked part-time, may have further encouraged children to favor balanced work-life arrangements over full-time careers.

The central statistical story, however, revolved around self-imposed pressure. Less pressure children placed on themselves to engage in gender-typical behavior was consistently associated with less gender-typical career aspirations, a result the authors say supports the developmental theory of occupational aspirations, which holds that children prematurely circumscribe and compromise their career choices along gendered lines during middle childhood. Meanwhile, the link between lower self-imposed pressure to avoid other-gender behavior and less gender-typical family-versus-career expectations appeared only among children who scored high on gender typicality, that is, those who felt strongly similar to their own gender group. This mirrors earlier findings among Swiss adolescents, in which highly gender-typical individuals were most sensitive to changing gender norms.

Even more unexpected was the role of parents. Among children with high gender typicality, less parental encouragement of same-gender behavior was actually linked to more gender-typical career aspirations, a finding that runs counter to what social learning theory would predict. The researchers offer two explanations. For children whose gender-typical preferences are strongly internally motivated, additional parental pressure may be redundant or even counterproductive, thwarting children’s growing need for autonomy in middle childhood. Alternatively, given the cross-sectional design, the arrow of causation may run the other way: parents of children who already express strongly gender-typical aspirations may deliberately ease up on conformity pressure, hoping to encourage their children to explore a broader range of career options. Peer pressure, notably, showed no significant association with children’s gender-typical views at all.

Gender itself did not moderate the associations between felt pressure and gender-typical views, meaning boys and girls appeared similarly susceptible to conformity pressure when envisioning their futures, even though boys reported significantly more pressure overall from all three sources, both in the form of encouragement toward masculine behavior and discouragement of feminine behavior. Nor did pressure mediate the relationship between gender and gender-typical views, possibly because middle childhood is simply too early a developmental stage for accumulated conformity pressure to fully shape future-oriented thinking, with such pathways potentially strengthening during the gender intensification of adolescence. The authors caution that their sample was relatively affluent and highly educated, and that recruitment materials highlighting gender stereotypes may have attracted more egalitarian families, potentially explaining the low levels of other-gender pressure observed. Still, the practical message is clear: parents and youth professionals should focus on dismantling the internalized pressure children place on themselves to conform to gender norms, particularly for highly gender-typical children, and should affirm that deviating from gender norms is acceptable. Helping children choose careers and family roles based on their skills and talents rather than their gender, the researchers argue, could reduce the early roots of occupational segregation and open up more diverse, freely chosen futures for both boys and girls.

The study’s reliance on children’s own occupational knowledge offers a useful lens for interpreting its findings. By coding each career choice against official Dutch labor statistics, the researchers captured not just what children say they want to do, but how strongly those preferences align with the actual gender composition of the workforce they will one day enter. This method grounds abstract questions about stereotypes in concrete, measurable patterns of segregation that persist into adulthood.

The finding that boys reported more felt pressure overall than girls, across all three sources, adds nuance to the picture. It suggests that masculine behavior may be more tightly policed in middle childhood, consistent with earlier work showing that gender-atypical behavior in boys often draws stronger social sanctions than comparable behavior in girls. Yet despite this asymmetry in pressure, boys and girls proved equally susceptible to its influence on their future-oriented thinking.

The open-access status of the article means readers can consult the full preregistered analysis plan and measures directly. The use of sibling-aware statistical modeling also strengthens confidence that results are not inflated by shared family environments. As longitudinal follow-ups could clarify whether self-imposed pressure in middle childhood genuinely predicts later occupational choices, this dataset may prove a valuable baseline for tracking how these early gendered visions of work and family evolve through adolescence into adulthood.

Subject of Research: How felt pressure to conform to gender norms relates to gender-typical career and family aspirations in Dutch children aged 8 to 12.

Article Title: Associations Between Felt Pressure to Conform to Gender Norms, Gender Typicality, and Dutch Children’s Gender-Typical Views on Future Career and Family Life

Article References: Ying, J., Antoniucci, C., Wu, X., & Endendijk, J. J. (2026). Associations Between Felt Pressure to Conform to Gender Norms, Gender Typicality, and Dutch Children’s Gender-Typical Views on Future Career and Family Life. Archives of Sexual Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-026-03496-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10508-026-03496-0

Keywords: gender norms, gender conformity pressure, gender typicality, career aspirations, work-family expectations, child development, gender socialization, occupational segregation, Dutch children, gender schema theory, family involvement, gender equality paradox