When mothers leave their toddler-age children in day care rather than care for them at home, they expose them to stress severe enough to adversely affect their body chemistry. The troubling biochemical effects of day care recently received attention from a team of child-development experts at the University of Minnesota, who worry that day-care stress in young children may translate into serious later psychological problems.

In their study of 111 children in four full-day day-care centers, the Minnesota researchers carefully monitored the levels of cortisol in the children’s saliva — cortisol attracting their particular scrutiny as “a potent steroid hormone” usually regarded as “stress-sensitive.” In comparing cortisol levels for these children on days they spent at home with the cortisol levels observed on days when they were in day care, the researchers detect “a significant effect of setting (home vs. child care).” “Home cortisol levels,” report the Minnesota scholars, “were lower than child care cortisol levels.” What is more, while “there was no change in cortisol over the day by age at home,” the researchers limn a pattern of rising cortisol levels over the day when these same children were in day care. “Among the infants (3-16 months), 35% showed a rise in cortisol across the child care day,” the researchers remark, “whereas among the toddlers (16-38 months), 71% showed a rise.”

Noting the particularly high percentage of toddlers manifesting a rise in cortisol levels when in day care, the researchers further established “the magnitude of the increase was greater for toddlers” than it was for younger or older children. The researchers accordingly suggest that “the toddler period may be the peak period for rising stress-sensitive hormone levels.”

Because previous researchers have interpreted “elevated cortisol levels … as boding ill for physical and emotional health,” the authors of the new study must ask: “What do these cortisol findings imply for children’s health?” The researchers admit that they simply “do not know if there are adverse affects” of the elevated cortisol levels they have documented in day care. In particular, they acknowledge that “we do not know… whether early experiences of mild repeated neuroendocrine stress such as that observed in the present study for toddlers have any influence on the developing brain.”

Since “cortisol is known to dampen activity of the immune system,” the researchers speculate that the chronic elevation of cortisol levels in day care “may contribute to the heightened susceptibility to illness that is well documented, particularly among toddlers in child care.”

But the researchers raise much broader concerns by citing animal experiments that have provided “strong evidence that early experiences shape the reactivity and regulation of neurobiological systems underlying fear, anxiety, and stress reactivity.” The researchers thus see reasons for concerns about day care when they review animal studies concluding that “early experience” helps create “the neural substrate of vulnerability to anxiety and depressive disorders.” If infant animals exposed to stresses that drive up their cortisol levels later become “adults [that] exhibit heightened fearfulness and greater vulnerability to stressors,” what future lies ahead for “toddlers [who] exhibit a rising pattern of cortisol across the child care day” because they have been placed in a “context [that] is challenging?” The Minnesota scholars provide no firm answers, but they offer a most helpful clue when they remark that “during periods of rapid brain development, contact with parents prevents elevations in cortisol, and this has been interpreted as nature’s way of protecting the developing brain from the potentially deleterious effects of this steroid.”

(Source: Sarah E. Watamura et al., “Morning to Afternoon Increases in Cortisol Concentrations for Infants and Toddlers at Child Care: Age Differences and Behavioral Correlates,” Child Development 74 [2003]: 1006-1020.)

It has long been part of American folk wisdom that “The family that prays together stays together.” Sociologists at the University of Michigan and the University of Illinois at Chicago look at things from a different angle: in a study of adolescent religiosity recently published in Youth & Society, social scientists from these two institutions report that when families stay together, they pray together — teenaged children included. These researchers further conclude that when families break up, prayers often stop — at least for the adolescent children involved.

Parsing nationally representative data collected from more than 80,000 eighth-, tenth-, and twelfth-grade students, the authors of the new study scrutinize “current patterns, recent trends, and sociodemographic correlates of religiosity among American adolescents.” In simple single-variable analysis, the researchers find that family structure predicts the likelihood that a teenager will belong to a faith community and the likelihood that he will actually attend services: “Across the three grade levels,” they report, “frequency of attendance at religious services is higher, and nonaffiliation is lower among students who live with both of their parents as compared to those who live in other family configurations.”

But living in an intact family does more than put adolescents on church rolls and in the pews: it significantly increases the likelihood that teens will personally regard religion as an important part of their lives. In a sophisticated multi-variable data analysis, the Michigan and Illinois scholars limn clear evidence that adolescents “who live with both of their parents are more religious than their peers who do not live with both parents.” The intact-family teens judged “more religious” differ from less religious single-parent peers not merely in frequency of church attendance but also in the importance they attach to religion. The researchers find higher levels of “religious importance” among teens from intact families than among peers from one-parent homes in all three grades (p< .01 for all three grade levels).

Though its effects do not appear as pervasive as those of family structure, maternal employment also appears to significantly affect the religious lives of adolescent children — at least 12th-grade adolescent children. More specifically, in the researchers’ multi-variable statistical model, “12th graders whose mothers worked outside of the home (full- or part-time) report that religion is less important to them, attend religious services less frequently, and are more likely to be religiously unaffiliated than those whose mothers did not work.”

The authors of the new study see in their findings little evidence “to confirm a simple secularization hypothesis — the notion that religion is on the decline among U.S. young people.” However, their findings do suggest that religion is fading among teens who see their families disintegrate.

(Source: John M. Wallace, Jr. et al., “Religion and U.S. Secondary School Students: Current Patterns, Recent Trends, and Sociodemographic Correlates,” Youth & Society 35 [2003]: 98-125.)

Journalists and feminists give so much attention to episodes of domestic violence that many Americans might now understandably regard the home as a dangerous place and the family as a perilous association. A much-needed corrective to such views recently appeared in a study published in the Journal of Marriage and Family under the title “The Infrequency of Family Violence.”

Using survey data collected in the United States and Korea, sociologists from The Pennsylvania State University, Texas A&M University, and the Korean Institute of Criminology collaborated to analyze patterns of violence involving family members and strangers. Although the authors of the new study acknowledge that hundreds of thousands of Americans are annually victimized by domestic violence, they still question the common judgment that “family violence occurs with high frequency.” “This judgment,” they point out, “requires a standard of comparison — high relative to what?” And when they carefully and systematically compare “frequency of family violence to the frequency of violence outside of families,” they can only conclude that the family is actually a very nonviolent social configuration.

To begin with, the researchers point out that “according to the National Crime Victimization Survey, only 11.7% of assaults involve a family member.” The researchers do acknowledge that this statistical indication of the relative infrequency of family violence might be misleading because “respondents may still be less likely to view family violence as something worthy of reporting in a criminal victimization survey.” Therefore, these scholars painstakingly investigate survey data and conflict-incident analyses for hundreds of Korean and American adults, some drawn from the general population and some from a population of ex-offenders living in the community.

The survey data and incident analyses reveal, as the researchers had expected, that “verbal altercations are more likely in conflicts involving family members than conflicts involving strangers,” apparently “because of the relaxation [within the family] of the rules of cooperative face-work.… Either individuals are more likely to express their grievances openly with intimates or they are more likely to attack them verbally once grievances have been expressed” than they would with non-spouses and non-family members.

However, the researchers are compelled to admit that “our results did not support our hypothesis that altercations involving couples are more likely to become violent than altercations involving strangers.” To the contrary, “incidents involving couples … are actually less likely to become violent than incidents involving strangers.” Indeed, the researchers calculate that “for men, the ratio of violence to total aggression against partners is lower than the ratio for behavior targeting strangers.” In other words, “men tend to be inhibited about using violence against their wives.”

Parallel analyses likewise show that “incidents involving parents and children are less likely to become violent than are incidents involving strangers.”

The American and Korean researchers acknowledge that living together can produce tension within the family. “Family life,” they remark, “produces more conflict, more grievances, and more disputes than life outside the family.” They further acknowledge that “some of these conflicts lead to verbal altercations, which occasionally escalate into physical violence.” But their final comment provides a much-needed perspective on the deplorable episodes of domestic violence that do occur: “The level of [domestic] violence would be much greater… were it not for inhibitions about using violence against family members.” Such inhibitions apparently do not restrain strangers.

(Source: Richard B. Felson, Jeff Ackerman, and Seong-Jin Yeon, “The Infrequency of Family Violence,” Journal of Marriage and Family 65 [2003]: 622-634.)

The often-lauded Federal welfare reform of the 1990s may well prove a curse to the children affected by it in the new millennium. Indeed, a new study of welfare reform by economists at Michigan State University suggests that reformers took a welfare system that fostered fatherlessness and created a system that enforces motherlessness as well: because welfare-reformers have laid down employment requirements for welfare mothers with infant children, hundreds of thousands of those young children are now spending their days in state-subsidized day care. Lest progressive thinkers acquiesce too insouciantly in government’s complete cannibalization of the family, the Michigan State researchers draw attention to an incalculable loss to the children being affected: these children are losing the physiological and emotional benefits of maternal breast-feeding.

As context for their analysis, the Michigan State scholars survey the medical literature identifying “human milk [as] the gold standard for infants’ nourishment.” This literature clearly establishes that compared to bottle-fed babies, breast-fed infants are remarkably free from “urinary-tract infections, lower and upper respiratory-tract infections, diarrhea, allergic diseases, otitis media, bacterial meningitis, botulism, bacteremia, and necrotizing enterocolitis.” Research has shown that “human milk also benefits children’s cognitive and educational abilities.” Researchers have even amassed evidence that breastfeeding conduces to the well-being of mothers, conferring “a greater sense of self-esteem, bonding with the infant, and success in mothering.”

Given “the substantial evidence of the benefits of breast-feeding for children and their mothers,” and given recent research indicating that “employment can negatively affect the breast-feeding rate of women with infants,” the Michigan State investigators began their study with concern about the possible adverse effects of new work requirements for women receiving welfare. And indeed, when the authors of the new study scrutinize national survey data on breast-feeding against the backdrop of a national welfare rules database, they found just what they expected to find: “work requirements [for welfare mothers] substantially and statistically significantly reduced breast-feeding.” More precisely, when they look at breast-feeding rates among women enrolled in the Special Supplemental Program for Women, Infants, and Children (mothers “who are at substantial risk of entering welfare”), the researchers find that “the most stringent laws reduced breast-feeding by 22% relative to imposing no work requirements on new mothers.” The researchers’ nationwide data “for all mothers, not just those who participated in WIC, imply that if welfare reform had not been adopted, national breast-feeding rates six months after birth would have been 5.5% higher than they were in 2000.”

In interpreting their findings, the Michigan State scholars stress that “the costs of the decrease of breast-feeding accrue not only to recipients and their children but also to society as a whole.” Because “breast-feeding decreases health care costs,” welfare programs that force mothers into employment may well mean “a greater burden will be placed on Medicaid.”

(Source: Steven J. Haider, Alison Jacknowitz, and Robert F. Schoeni, “Welfare Work Requirements and Child Well-Being: Evidence from the Effects on Breast-Feeding,” Demography 40 [2003]: 479-497.)

Sociologists have extensively documented how parental divorce hurts children. They have devoted far less attention to how parental remarriage affects children. In part to remedy that imbalance, a team of researchers at the University of California at Berkeley recently interviewed 45 young adult stepchildren, so producing one of the very few studies “that actually have asked the children themselves about their stepfamily experiences.”

The young adults interviewed for this study did identify some “positive aspects” of living in a stepfamily, such as the “increased financial stability and resources” not available to them in a single-parent home. However, they also recalled a great deal of emotional distress. Many of the young adults interviewed spoke of “the conflict between families and within the family [as] the worst part of living in a stepfamily.” Indeed, for more than a few “the constant conflict, tension, or fear of conflict were very difficult to endure.”

One of the young adults interviewed spoke with particular candor about the “constant tension” of growing up in a stepfamily: “I mean, just like the fact that being a kid and decisions you make are going to hurt your mom or it’s going to hurt your Stepdad or it’s going to hurt your real dad, you know. I mean … my decisions affected all these grown people.… [T]hat’s a lot of responsibility for a young person.”

Another of the young adults interviewed spoke forcefully of how hard it was “to juggle relationships” between a stepfamily and a non-custodial parent’s family: “I can’t ever have all of the people I love in one place at one time.…I have even thought over the years, ‘My God, if I get married I have to have those two families, at the same place at the same time, and that is a frightening thought to me.”

Young people who have been raised in stepfamilies typically “feel loyalty to both families but feel disloyal to the biological family not living in the home.” In this atmosphere of divided loyalties, many stepchildren “feel resentment or anger when a stepparent comes into the family and immediately tries to take over a parent role.”

Not a few of the young adults interviewed in this study openly “mourned the loss of the nuclear family unit.” One of those interviewed confessed: “I always wish that I had a different family because when I see people I think, ‘That person has a great family,’ or it’s like, ‘Their parents are still together.’” Another of those interviewed used even more terse language: “It’s not feeling like we have a complete family, not feeling like I really belong in any family.…[T]here’s always something wrong.”

(Source: Bridget Freisthler, Gloria Messick Svare, and Sydney Harrison-Jay, “It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times: Young Adult Stepchildren Talk About Growing Up in a Stepfamily,” Journal of Divorce & Remarriage 38.3/4 [2003]: 83-102.)

Just a scant twenty-five years ago, Louise Brown made her entrée into the world, and ushered in the modern age of “assisted,” or artificial — that is, technological — reproduction. In the intervening quarter-century, in vitro fertilization, and its corollary technologies, have been responsible for thousands of bouncing baby boys and girls received into waiting parents’ arms. But at what costs?

In addition to birthing technological babies, in vitro fertilization also tends to produce a number of frozen embryos, either for use as a “back-up,” or later implantation. As the authors of the current study patently state: “During ART clinical procedures, the number of human embryos produced is often in excess of the number that can be prudently transferred to the patient at one time.”

For years, these frozen children have been cryopreserved in medical offices and storage facilities. But just how many are there? This is exactly what the seven researchers who authored this study, appearing in Fertility and Sterility, sought to discover: “Previous estimates of the number of human embryos in storage have ranged from as few as 30,000 to as many as 100,000 to 200,000,” in the United States alone.

Using SART (The Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology) and Rand Corporation resources, the researchers quickly found that they had grossly underestimated. Two hundred ninety of 340 assisted reproductive facilities in the United States that did cryopreservation responded to the initial survey. “Responding clinics reported a total of 391,661 embryos in storage at clinic facilities at the time of the survey;” with almost another five thousand “stored” off-site. To the authors’ amazement, they found, “[t]ogether, these two sources, using the more conservative off-site estimate, reveal a total of 396,526 embryos in storage as of April 11, 2002” — two times the highest previous estimate.

From their survey, the researchers tell us that the overwhelming majority — 88.2 percent — of embryos is being stored for future patient treatment, with less than 3 percent being donated for research, just over two percent awaiting destruction and “an equal percentage is in storage awaiting donation to another patient.” The final fraction is in storage for “use in quality assurance activities.”

These researchers continue: “the number of stored embryos available for research was a very small fraction of the total, 2.8%. … Only about 11,000 embryos have actually been designated for research. … Although 11,000 embryos is a seemingly large number, these embryos may not have the highest developmental potential.…”

Assisted reproduction has followed an inexorable progression, it seems. From simple artificial insemination to in vitro fertilization; to more and more massaged versions of IVF, such as ICSI and GIFT — each technological step has increased the likelihood of producing a child, and of vitiating the family and ethical bonds that hold humankind together. Will the next steps down the technological reproduction path — cloning and human embryonic stem cell research — unravel them altogether?

(Source: David I. Hoffman, Gail L. Zellman, C. Christine Fair, Jacob F. Mayer, Joyce G. Zeitz, William E. Gibbons, and Thomas G. Turner, Jr., “Cryopreserved embryos in the United States and their availability for research,” Fertility and Sterility, Vol. 79, No. 5, May 2003, 1063-1069.)