Chimps and Children

For models of good motherhood, naturalist Jane Goodall sees more to admire among the chimpanzees of Africa than among many modern humans in economically developed countries. In an interview with journalist Eduardo Punset, Goodall highlights the human relevance of chimpanzee social patterns. In particular, she stresses that humans have much to learn from zoologists who […]

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Mothers Know Best

While the media continue to glamorize the minority of mothers with careers, moms themselves aren’t fooled. Judging from a poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, American mothers have few illusions that working full-time outside the home is all that it is cracked up to be. In fact, American mothers find outside careers even less […]

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A Gender Gap Feminists Overlook

While fretting about every perceived gender inequality in employment, education, and sports, the politically correct crowd seems oblivious to the gender gap that arises from the consequences of premarital sex. Typical is sociologist Ann Meier of the University of Minnesota, whose study documents the heightened risk of depressive symptoms among teenage girls upon losing their […]

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Abortion, Unwed Births, and Crime

Back in 2001, law professor John Donahue and economist Steven Levitt made headlines with a study in theQuarterly Journal of Economics suggesting that legalized abortion may account for almost half the drop in the U.S. crime rates during the 1990s. Now a study by John R. Lott Jr. of the American Enterprise Institute and his colleague […]

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Not Just Genes

Even researchers indifferent to traditional morality recognize that adolescent sexual activity entangles young people in serious problems. Pregnancy and Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs) are two problems that receive attention in a study of adolescents completed by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. To understand why some young people are more at […]

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Poison in the Blood

Public health officials have devoted considerable effort to understanding the lethal biochemistry of pediatric lead poisoning. Now medical researchers from Brown University are beginning to clarify the family dynamics of that distressing phenomenon. Toxic lead, it turns out, is less likely to end up in a child’s bloodstream if that child lives with a married […]

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Boys (and Girls) from Brazil

Commentators often dismiss concerns about family disintegration as a peculiar obsession of America’s religious conservatives. But the consequences of family breakdown are attracting ever more attention from scholars around the world. Indeed, those consequences received scrutiny from scholars from the University of São Paulo and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. In a […]

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Childless – and Godless

A growing number of American women are avoiding the maternity ward. The circumstances of America’s childless women receive illuminating attention in a study completed by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). This study highlights—among other things—the sterilizing consequences of irreligion. The NCHS scholars see a number of clear patterns in nationally representative data collected […]

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Don’t Confuse It with Marriage

The loss of marriage as a social ideal expresses itself in multiple fashions, including moves by researchers and governments to lump married persons and cohabitants into the same statistical (as well as tax and legal) category. In fact, some observers hope that rising levels of cohabitation will minimize or eliminate existing differences between the two. […]

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Even in Law School, Boys Differ from Girls

Women increasingly comprise close to 50 percent or more of all students in law and medical schools, a trend over which the news media fawn as holding promise of gender equality in America. Yet a study by sociologists at Tulane University suggests that differences in the motivations, aspirations, and even academic performance of men and […]

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