New research continues to show that marriage is connected to longer life. A new study from researchers at Michigan State University and the University of Cincinnati compares mortality rates between married and cohabiting individuals. Researchers found that among some groups, married individuals have lower mortality rates compared to individuals who …
It’s back-to-school time, and parents are scurrying to equip their children for success. But children’s school preparation should begin much earlier than August. As numerous studies show, it should start during a child’s toddler years. Parents’ involvement with their children (both academically and otherwise) from their earliest years in life …
Parents instinctively know that the over-sexualized culture promoted by Hollywood is not healthy for their teens. A recent study in the academic journal Psychological Science quantified such concerns. In the study, researchers from Dartmouth College counted the number of seconds of sexual content in the top 684 grossing movies released …
A recent New York Times article about the growing marriage and class divide in America featured two middle-class families in Ann Arbor, Michigan. At the heart of the story are the disparate lives of their children. Jeremy, 12, and his brother, Justin, 10, are raised by married, college-educated parents. Kirsten, …
The best anti-poverty program is a job. That was the mantra of the 1996 welfare reform, which changed the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program into the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, for the first time requiring able-bodied welfare recipients to work or prepare for work in …
Fact: According to the latest National Youth Risk Behavior Survey, 53 percent of high school students have remained sexually abstinent. Indeed, in the last two decades, the share of abstinent teens has increased by nearly 15 percent. Moreover, two in three teens are currently abstinent. For teens, delaying sexual activity …
Summertime often means more family time, and that’s good news. Research consistently shows a strong association between spending time as a family and adolescent well-being. In particular, frequent family meals have been linked to a host of positive teen outcomes, including physical and psychological health, school performance, and reduced risk …
Marriage, these days, is getting bad press. For example, a string of recent headlines claim that living together is healthier than marriage, citing a study published in the Journal of Marriage and Family. Though provocative, headlines can be misleading, focusing only on a non-representative subset of findings. A more nuanced …
