A stepfamily forms when one or both adults in a new couple bring children from a previous relationship. Although stepfamilies look like first-time families on the outside, they are very different on the inside.

The 3A Project has received very encouraging response from six sub-regions with keen competition among high quality entries. Having gone through the process of vetting these projects, 16 projects (2 with same scores) have been short-listed as below.

The submission of initial entry synopsis ended on 26th April 2010. The first round result announcement will be on 17th May 2010. We will inform the individual participant upon the completion of the first round adjudication.

In the last 30 years, there has been a significant increase in the number of grandparent-headed families. Census data indicate that in the United States there are approximately 2.4 million grandparents raising 4.5 million children.

The National Institutes of Health estimate that as many as 22 million individuals in the United States have an autoimmune disease; over two-thirds of them are women. Autoimmune diseases are a diverse group of illnesses that share one key feature–the body views part of itself as a foreign substance and launches an attack on this tissue or organ.

Eating disorders are extreme disturbances in an individual’s behavior and feelings related to food, weight, and body image. They are most likely to develop in young women, during adolescence and young adulthood. But children, preteens, adult women, and men also may develop these problems. They are serious problems with life-threatening consequences.

Childhood obesity has become the most common health problem in children today, and for the first time ever, policy makers are concerned that this generation of children may not outlive their own parents.

Dissociation is a common, naturally occurring defense against childhood trauma. When faced with overwhelming abuse, children can dissociate from full awareness of a traumatic experience. Dissociation may become a defensive pattern that persists into adulthood and can result in a full-fledged dissociative disorder.

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a serious and complex mental illness that affects 2 – 3% of the population. Once thought to be on the “border” of schizophrenia, BPD is now believed to be more closely related to mood disorders such as depression, or possibly to impulse control disorders like Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. People with BPD have difficulty regulating their emotions and controlling their impulses.

Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (AD/HD) no longer has a “poster child”–not even a “poster person,” for that matter. The image of AD/HD in past decades has been the frenzied, elementary-aged boy dangling from the monkey bars, disrupting his class and disobeying all authority. This behavior drove his desperate parents and teachers to seek an understanding of his symptoms. As more has been learned, what was thought to be a disorder of childhood, of males, and of hyperactivity alone, has undergone significant revision.