Children in the UK are growing up against a background of changing family size and structure as well as changing demographic, economic and societal circumstances, which together have important implications for their health (Peckham, 1998). It is important to understand how the changes in patterns of caring for children and family context influence health in early childhood and the adoption of child health promoting behaviours by parents and carers. In recent years, there has been increasing interest in the contribution of these changes to obesity, asthma and related allergic diseases, autoimmune conditions, and disorders of social communication and behaviour (Gent et al 1994; Bach, 2002; Lobstein et al, 2004). The factors underlying these trends remain poorly understood, although they are clearly of great public health and human importance. The importance of an interdisciplinary perspective combining social, environmental and biological approaches to elucidate their causes is increasingly recognised.

Plan of this chapter

In this chapter, after considering the data sources in more detail, we describe the health during infancy of the cohort children through investigating the baby's birthweight, its infant weight at 8-9 months, and the early nutrition and patterns of breastfeeding. A range of parental and community influences on the baby's health are then considered – namely, parental smoking and alcohol use, immunisation, health problems and other use of services. Finally, the chapter examines indicators of good health in infancy and concludes with the implications of the findings for child health policy.

Data sources

At the first contact with the families when the children were aged around 9 months, information was obtained by parental (usually maternal) report on a wide range of measures. This included those relevant to the prevention of illness and promotion of health in the child, such as breastfeeding, parental smoking and immunisation status, and to conditions and illnesses that have implications for growth and development. Also included were measures which provide a baseline for examining later patterns and trajectories which will change with increasing age – for example, birthweight and bodyweight.

Data were also enhanced with respect to child health information by verifying maternal reports at the time of interview from information recorded in the personal child health record (Walton et al, 2005) and, subsequently, by linkage to routine birth registration records and health service information either at the individual or health service level (Bartington et al, 2005; Tate et al, 2005).