It takes two to tango, so when public-health officials examine the troubling rise in out-of-wedlock births, they need to look not only at unmarried mothers. Unmarried fatherhood thus defines the focus of a study recently completed by scholars from Columbia University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The researchers begin their inquiry acutely aware “that nonmarital […]

Even when social scientists refuse to confront the moral questions, they must admit that a woman giving birth outside the bonds of marriage is creating serious problems for herself, the child, and society at large. So what personal and household circumstances foster such births, and what contrasting circumstances prevent them? In a study recently completed […]

In their fight against the use of illegal drugs among Latinos—the nation’s largest and still rapidly growing minority group—law-enforcement officers have need of every support. And according to a study recently completed at California State University, San Bernadino, religion and wedlock count as two particularly powerful allies.   The reasons for the Cal State researchers’ […]

The lambent visionaries who scripted the Sixties promised that Americans would be much better off after they had shed restrictive marital roles. So why, a half century later, are social scientists from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) concluding that in cutting their marital ties, Americans have actually been shredding the social safety […]

Public-health officials throughout the industrialized world recognize the tremendous advantages—immunological, neurological, nutritional—that babies enjoy when their mothers breastfeed them.  Unfortunately, these officials have struggled to increase the number of mothers giving their infants such advantages.  But in a study recently completed at the Universities of Dundee and Leeds in the United Kingdom, epidemiologists will find […]

Much research has centered on the factors that contribute to adolescents’ later abilities to forge their own healthy intimate relationships.  A good parental marriage has already been identified as one crucial factor, as adolescents imitate positive relationship views and behaviors that they learn from watching their parents interact.  Also crucial, researchers from the University of […]

A mountain of empirical evidence compels social scientists to acknowledge that children pay a high price when their parents fail in marriage—or when their parents never marry in the first place.  A study newly completed at the University of Denver now indicates that part of that price is the singular difficulty that children of divorced […]