Research continues to confirm Russian novelist Yevgeny Zamyatins identification of daycare centers as “child-rearing factories.” As part of its on-going investigation into the effects of early nonmaternal child care, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development published more findings as to how America's own child-rearing factories are generating long-term social pollution. Findings published in 2003 indicated that young children in non-relative care during their early years were decidedly more likely than peers in maternal care to manifest problem behavior (aggression, defiance) in kindergarten. Now, a follow-up study indicates that such problems persist through the sixth grade among those children who had been placed in daycare.

The authors of the study believe that their findings deserve attention, based as they are on data collected from “a large, diverse sample, a prospective longitudinal design, a rich array of measures obtained from multiple methods, and from multiple respondents.”In part, these findings might seem reassuring. For instance, the researchers report that, placement of children in nonrelative care in their early childhood becomes a “weaker predictor” of “externalizing problems” and “teacher-child conflict” as the children involved grow older, “eventually becoming [statistically] nonsignificant” by the end of sixth grade.

However, when the researchers narrow their focus to analyze the effects “not just by time in nonrelative care in general, but time in center care in particular,” the results are disturbing. Using multi-variable statistical models, the researchers establish that, compared to peers cared for by their mothers in their early years, “children with more experience in center settings continued to manifest somewhat more problem behaviors through sixth grade” (emphasis in original). In other words, “this seemingly adverse consequence of center-based care did not dissipate” by the time the children had finished sixth grade.

When scrutinizing the effects of center-based care, the authors remark that “it is not entirely clear why the predictive power of center-care experience vis-à-vis problem behavior remains unchanged through sixth grade,” adding that “the actual mechanism of influence by which . . . experience in center care . . . exerts the detected 'effect' remains somewhat of a mystery.” But ordinary Americans are likely to ask: Are the consequences of growing up in a child-rearing factory rather than under a mother's care at home really so mysterious?

Nor is the persistence of the harmful effects of center-based day care the only reason for concern. The authors worry that problems may lie ahead even among children who have been placed in non-relative care outside of a daycare center. True, the apparently harmful effects of such non-center care do fall below the threshold of statistical significance by the time the children have finished sixth grade. However, the researchers note, “caution seems warranted before concluding definitively that these earlier detected problems have permanently disappeared.” After all, research focused on “earlier developmental periods” has established that “significant relations between child care and child development that had seemingly disappeared subsequently re-emerged.” Furthermore, a number of developmental theories indicate that “important transitions, such as beginning a new school, entering puberty, or dealing with adolescence . . . can create challenges in which 'old' issues are resurrected.” Americans thus have reason to fear that child-care related problems that “were present early, then disappeared by the late-elementary-school years, could re-emerge in adolescence.”

America probably does not yet know the full story about the horrific national experiment of taking young children out of their mother’s arms and placing them in the hands of employed strangers.

(Jay Belsky et al., “Are There Long-Term Effects of Early Child Care?” Child Development 78 [2007]: 681–701.)

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 study, this international team of researchers identifies family failure as a prime cause of psychological distress among Brazilian children and adolescents—and they suggest that this pattern of causation holds global significance.

The authors of the study seek to identify the antecedents of poor mental health by parsing cross-sectional data collected from 1,112 Brazilian children, ages 7 to 14. In their multivariate analysis, “living in a nontraditional family” emerges as a strong statistical predictor of both “overall psychopathology” and of the “specific psychopathology” evident in behavioral problems. When the researchers then compared the mental health problems showing up in single-parent households with those appearing in stepfamilies, they found “no evidence that different types of nontraditional families differed in their association with child mental health.”

Though the data for this study comes from Brazil, the researchers view their findings as “broadly in line with previous findings elsewhere.” In particular, the researchers stress that “the importance of living in a nontraditional family as a risk factor for poor child mental health, and its particular association with behavioral problems, replicates the findings from” the British-Child and Adolescent Mental Health Surveys of 1999 and 2004.

When family disintegration threatens the mental health of children in São Paulo and Surrey, in Rio de Janeiro and Renfew, surely children in Seattle and Richmond have reason to worry as well.

(Anna Goodman et al., “Child, Family, School and Community Risk Factors for Poor Mental Health in Brazilian Schoolchildren,” Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 46 [2007]: 448–56.)

Delaying Wedlock?

Commentators have argued for decades that young people are better off socially and personally if they postpone marriage until they have finished college and are well launched in their careers. Many young people have been listening. Consequently, an overall pattern of delayed marriage defines the context for researchers who studied the differences separating young people expecting to marry early (between the ages of 18 and 23) and peers expecting to marry later (in their mid-20s or later). This team of researchers affiliated with the University of Minnesota, Brigham Young University, Loyola College (Maryland), and McDaniel College thus begin their report with an acknowledgement that “many young people [are now] delaying marriage.” “Since 1950,” the researchers write, “the median age at first marriage has substantially increased in the United States and is currently at a historic high—25.6 years for women and 27.4 years for men.” Consequently, in 2005 only one-quarter (25 percent) of women and only slightly over one-eighth (14 percent) of men ages 20 to 24 were married.

The remarkable delays in marriage should please progressives. However, the research suggests that many young people who deliberately delay wedlock are developing deeply problematic attitudes and behaviors.

To clarify “the impact of varying marital horizons,” the authors parsed data collected from 813 students attending six American colleges of varying character (three large public universities, two church-related universities, and a small private liberal-arts college). Regardless of the school young Americans attend, the researchers find that “most . . . report high levels of agreement that marriage is an important part of the projected life plans.” However, when the investigators compare young people who expect to marry before age 23 with those who intend to postpone marriage until at least their mid-twenties, they uncovered sharp differences in social attitudes and personal behavior. The researchers report, for instance, “the desire to delay marriage was found to be associated with higher substance [i.e., alcohol and drug] use [p<.001 for men; p<.05 for women] and increased sexual permissiveness [p<.01 for men; p<.001 for women].” Moreover, young women who intend to delay marriage report “less child-centered goals” than do peers who plan for earlier marriage (p<.05).

Readers may well ask: “Who benefits from later marriage—besides distillers, drug pushers, and doctors who treat sexually transmitted diseases?” Even the one benefit traditionally associated with later marriage—that is, reduced vulnerability to divorce—now looks dubious to the researchers. After all, they point out, recent studies have identified “permissive sexual behavior,” and “alcohol use” as “risk factors for divorce.”

(Jason S. Carroll et al., “So Close, Yet So Far Away: The Impact of Varying Marital Horizons on Emerging Adulthood,” Journal of Adolescent Research 22 [2007]: 219–46.)

Acting Like Children

Divorce almost always forces children to be the adults in a family, making them adjust to the often child-like wishes of their parents. Moreover, that reversal of roles remains twenty years after divorce, judging from a clinical study, by Constance Ahrons of the University of Southern California, that found that adult children of divorce still long for their divorced parents to behave like adults, not like kids.

Ahrons reviewed data from the Binuclear Family Study, a longitudinal study of which the first wave (1979) interviewed 98 pairs of former spouses with minor children from Dane County, Wisconsin, and the most recent wave (1999–2000), which included interviews with 173 by-then the adult children representing 89 of those dissolved marriages. Even though 60 percent of the children reported that their divorced parents were now “cooperative,” they still expressed concerns that their parents might badmouth each other or create a scene at special family functions.

These anxieties seem to affect particularly the 40 percent of children who reported that their parents were still less than cooperative 20 years after the divorce. All these adult children claimed that loyalty conflicts between parents that had started at the time of divorce remained; they also found that special occasions like graduations and weddings (when both parents would be together) posed dilemmas. Some “hoped and prayed” that their parents would not spoil the celebration while others had to lay down the law to their parents beforehand or simply not invite them, perhaps the equivalent of sending a child to his room.

Yet this isn't the only baggage that divorcing parents dump on their children. Almost all the children in this study (95 percent) were forced to cope with the remarriage of at least one parent, and one-third of these children claim the remarriage caused more grief to them than the divorce. Not only were these children confronted with a whole new set of relationships (stepparents, half-siblings, stepchildren, and step grandparents), but also these new connections could disappear as quickly as they came, given that 25 percent of the parents in the study had either experienced a second divorce, were cohabiting, or were in a third marriage.

As much as her study confirms the impact of divorce on family relations, Ahrons believes that therapy that clearly points out these realities to divorced parents and their children can somehow help temper the side effects. While she might be theoretically correct, the professor unfortunately fails to stress how warning married parents about the tangle web of divorce upstream—before they decide to split—may be far more productive than attempting to undo the damage downstream twenty years later.

(Constance R. Ahrons, “Family Ties After Divorce: Long-Term Implications for Children,” Family Process 46 [March 2007]: 53–65.)

Life-Long Wedlock Keeps Doctor Away

What can be done to lower risks of diabetes, cancer, heart attack, and stroke, the leading causes of death and disability in the United States? Health professionals are quick to hound Americans about eating right and exercising regularly. Yet perhaps they should also be calling attention to the conclusions of a study by scholars at the University of North Carolina and Princeton that found that the longer men and women stayed married—and married to the same spouse—the lower risks they face of developing these chronic conditions.

Armed with fifty years of age-specific marriage and health data representing 9,000 men and women born between 1931 and 1941 who participated in the biannual waves of the Health and Retirement Survey between 1992 and 2000, Matthew Dupre and Sarah Meadows calculate what they call the hazard rate (the instantaneous probability of an illness or health event occurring at a certain age, given it has not already occurred) by gender of various life trajectories. Those trajectories include men and women who have never married, those who are married, and those who have experienced up to three cumulative transitions such as divorce, widowhood, and remarriage.

The researchers found that marriage duration correlates with lower rates of diabetes, cancer, heart attack, and stroke. The preventative effects of marriage duration at a certain age were greater for men than for women, even as the effects were statistically significant for both genders. For example, a 50-year-old male who has been married ten years faces a hazard rate of .64; if he has been married twenty years, the hazard rate is significantly lower (.41). For a 50-year-old female who has been married ten years, the hazard rate is .76; if she has been married twenty years, the rate is .58, which the researchers call a “sizable” reduction.

On the other hand, divorce transitions were found to increase significantly the likelihood of disease for both men and women. For every divorce, the researchers found that women are 1.22 times more likely to exhibit disease onset; for men, 1.10 times. Reflecting that marriage yields greater health benefits to men, widowhood was found to be a significant predictor of disease for men but not for women. Every transition to widowhood increased men's hazard rates by 44 percent.

Some risks associated with divorce (for both genders)—but not the risks of widowhood for men—were mediated by marriage duration and were found to diminish over time. Yet there is no getting around what the researchers conclude: “As health risks increase with age, women with long marriage duration(s) are more likely to delay the onset of disease” and “men who accumulate more years in marriage have the lowest risk of developing a disease condition.”

(Matthew E. Dupre and Sarah O. Meadows, “Disaggregating the Effects of Marital Trajectories on Health,” Journal of Family Issues 28 [May 2007]: 623–52.)

Dr. Christensen, editor-at-large of The Family in America, teaches writing and literature at Southern Utah University. Mr. Patterson, editor of The Family in America, teaches political rhetoric and speechwriting at Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, Virginia.