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Two Parents = One Healthy Adulthood

As national healthcare costs spiral out of control, few questions press themselves more insistently than those predicting long-term health. Investigating precisely such questions, a team of researchers at the University of California-Berkeley and the University of California-San Francisco recently completed a study designed to determine what childhood circumstances put individuals on a trajectory of healthy […]

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Children in Broken Homes—Twenty More Years of Research

Almost two decades ago, the flagship journal Social Forces published a landmark 1994 study analyzing the well-being of children living in different kinds of family structure. Now Elizabeth Thomson and Sara McLanahan, two of the authors of that original study, have published a retrospective commentary highlighting “the article’s popularity as a referent point for subsequent research” and underscoring the degree to which “subsequent research [has] confirmed many of [their] findings.”

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The Untold Story behind the Childhood Obesity Epidemic

Few public-health issues have received more attention in recent years than that of childhood obesity. And because of the way childhood obesity predicts adult diabetes, heart disease, and other health problems, this attention is well warranted. However, a closer look at the matter reveals that the commentators bewailing the upsurge in childhood obesity have been […]

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Wild Toddlers, Troubled Adults

In recent decades, social scientists have accrued considerable evidence indicating that out-of-control preschoolers often mature into disturbed and disruptive adults. And now a new study has established that the toddlers headed for a lifetime of distress disproportionately come from single-parent households. Conducted by researchers at the University of Glasgow and national public-health agencies, this new […]

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More Traditional Gender Roles, More Sex

In this age of increased egalitarianism in work and domestic roles, many researchers have sought to discover how changing roles influence one component of the glue that binds married couples together—sex. Much media attention has been given to a handful of studies that demonstrate that husbands who do more housework get more sex, as their […]

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Divorce and Diapers

Anxious about the long-term effects of depressed fertility, demographers are pondering unexpected questions these days. One of these questions—might divorce actually foster fertility?—recently received attention from a team of demographers from Sweden, Canada, and Austria, countries that all share the dubious characteristic of sub-replacement fertility, with Austria reporting the lowest fertility. Acutely aware that “during […]

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Failed Marriages, Fractured Minds

The epidemic of mental illness in recent decades has psychiatrists looking for causes. One of those causes of psychopathology—namely, marital failure—stands out clearly in a study recently completed by an international team of researchers. Affiliated with Kern Medical Center and California State University at Bakersfield in the United States and Chonbuk National University Medical School […]

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Filial Sobriety

With good reason, public-health officials worry about teen drinking. Those officials should attend to a new study probing alcohol use among adolescents and identifying as its causes disrespect for parents and absence of parents (caused by family disintegration). Conducted by researchers at the RAND Corporation, this new study draws on data collected in 2008 and […]

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Stable Souls Who Marry, Wild Egotists Who Divorce

At a time when national marriage rates are astonishingly low and national divorce rates remain distressingly high, Americans might learn something from a new Finnish study about the personal characteristics of those young people most likely to make enduring marriages and about the contrasting personal characteristics of those most likely to divorce. Conducted by a […]

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Divorcing Parents, Psychologically Suffering Children

Parental divorce seriously hurts American children, some progressives have argued, only because the United States is politically backward compared to advanced social democracies, such as, say, Sweden. But that line of thinking loses plausibility when assessed against the results of a new study of parental divorce in that very land of the progressives’ hearts’ desires. […]

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