The “maternal brain” debate has spiked again with the release of a study showing increased grey matter in the brains of mothers who have recently given birth.

I am catching up with slightly old news, here, and although there were only 19 women involved in the (US) study it is an interesting counter to periodic reports that “women’s minds turn to mush during pregnancy and birth”, as the Telegraph puts it.

Researchers scanned the brains of 19 women -- 10 of whom gave birth to boys and nine to girls -- at two to four weeks after birth and again at three to four months. The increase in grey matter in parts of the brain was small, but usually it does not grow in adults without significant learning or a major (adverse) event.

Areas of the brain affected in the mothers were those involved with motivation, reward and emotion… click here to read whole article and make comments

How responsible can you expect a four-year-old to be? A lawsuit in Manhattan has raised that question after a judge ruled that a young girl accused of running down an elderly woman while racing a bicycle with training wheels on a sidewalk can be sued for negligence.

Sound tough? Well, in these days when pre-schoolers may have cut their teeth on Baby Einstein videos, started sex education and sport a mobile phone, it may be more difficult to argue that they cannot be held accountable for how they ride a bike.

Actually, the negligence suit is against two children and their mothers, but only one mother and child pair (Dana and Juliet Breitman) sought to dismiss the case against them:

The suit that Justice Wooten allowed to proceed claims that in April 2009, Juliet Breitman and Jacob Kohn, who were both 4, were racing their bicycles, under the… click here to read whole article and make comments

One challenge of teaching social policy is that students—social work students anyway—too often mistake advocacy for analysis, opinion for fact.  It makes it hard to conduct a serious analysis of a problem and the best ways to address it if you smuggle your preferred solution into the way you define the problem.  The problem is lack of resources or services, the intervention is to provide more, and the criterion for evaluating success is whether more were provided—omitting the rather key question of whether the resources or services made any difference to whatever social problem they were supposed to address.  Too often the inquiry becomes pro forma because the “analyst” has decided on the preferred policy approach before doing any analysis.  (This problem, unfortunately is by no means limited to students.)

Mary Eberstadt's essay on “Bacchanalia Unbound” in the current issue of First Things is refreshing in this respect.  Not… click here to read whole article and make comments

A husband and wife research team has discovered that, even though some people start life with greater potential to be violent than the ordinary run of human beings, this potential will not manifest itself if they are well brought up.

Isn’t that a revelation? But wait till you hear the reward they got for their trouble: one million dollars from a Swiss charity, the Jacobs Foundation. That’s right, a million bucks for telling us that people can overcome their defects. If only ordinary mums and dads, who do most of the heavy lifting in this area, could get their hands on some of that loot.

What parents might not have guessed is the odds some of them seem to be up against. According to the researchers, neuropsychologists Terrie Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi, certain genes are linked to… click here to read whole article and make comments

With the Chilean copper miners who were trapped deep below ground for more than two months providing an ongoing object lesson in coping with adversity, the role of adverse experiences in our lives is of global interest.

A newly published study of 2398 Americans suggests that, in the long run, whatever does not kill us makes us stronger.

[Psychology professor Mark] Seery, senior author of the study, says previous research indicates that exposure to adverse life events typically predicts negative effects on mental health and well-being, such that more adversity predicts worse outcomes.

But in this study of a national survey panel of 2,398 subjects assessed repeatedly from 2001 to 2004, Seery and co-researchers found those exposed to some adverse events reported better mental health and well-being outcomes than people with a high history of adversity or those with no history of adversity.

In other… click here to read whole article and make comments

An American political candidate has raised the alarm in the US about sharia law, claiming that two districts were already effectively under the Islamic legal system. Exaggeration aside, what kind of threat, if any, does this system pose to American or Western values if it is tolerated?

In the first place we can rule out stonings for adultery and the cutting off of hands for theft; they would simply not be tolerated in any Western democracy. Again, religion based financial and commercial practices such as not charging interest, seem attractive rather than offensive. The Economist suggests that the real problems relate to family law, given the inferior position of Muslim women:

The real difficulty with Islamic law in the West comes where it pertains to family matters: the maintenance of dependants, divorce settlements and so on. There are two main concerns. First, aspects of Islamic family law are… click here to read whole article and make comments

My local newspaper, The New Zealand Herald, recently published an opinion piece whose purpose was to discredit religion and show that people not only do not behave worse without it, but actually behave better. His ammunition was a couple of articles by a US researcher called Gregory Paul, who had discovered the following:

"In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, venereal disease, teen pregnancy, and abortion."

I immediately smelled a rat, because it contradicts every bit of research I had ever read about the effects of religious practice (practice, not nominal belief). And, funnily enough, this week Pat Fagan sent out a research brief from the Heritage Foundation, confirming my impressions.

Using data from the US National Survey of Family Growth (2002) Dr Fagan compared women who had… click here to read whole article and make comments

An Australian study has set the traditional-role-division cat among the gender equality pigeons: the tide of opinion seems to have swung against the feminist ideal of an equal division of domestic and market work between husbands and wives.

Janeen Baxter, a professor of sociology at the University of Queensland, asked Australians (in general, apparently, not just those who have dependent children) five times between 1986 and 2005 five questions about gender equality. She found that men and women became more egalitarian in their views until the mid-1990s.

Since then support has stalled for the proposition that ''ideally there should be as many women as men in important positions in government and business''; as has support for the proposition that ''there should be satisfactory childcare facilities so that women can take jobs outside the home.''

Increasing numbers have taken the conservative position on whether a working mother… click here to read whole article and make comments

The following press release, dated October 7, comes from the National Marriage Project, based at the University of Virginia, which has been following the marriage gap trend for some time:

(Charlottesville, VA)--The nation is witnessing a growing "marriage gap" between college-educated and less-educated adults, according to a report released today by the Pew Research Center. In a reversal of historic marriage trends, less-educated Americans are now less likely to be married than their college-educated fellow citizens.

”The nation's growing marriage gap leaves poor and working-class Americans doubly disadvantaged," said Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project. "Given recent increases in economic inequality and family instability among poor and working-class Americans, adults and children in these communities now not only have fewer economic resources but they are also less likely to benefit from the social and economic benefits delivered by… click here to read whole article and make comments

I was inclined not to read a press release about new research on the sexual behaviour of Americans until my eye fell on the word “adolescents” and then “abstaining”, so I skipped to that part.

Just so you know where it comes from:

The National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior (NSSHB) was conducted by researchers from the Center for Sexual Health Promotion (CSHP) in Indiana University's School of Health, Physical Education, and Recreation (HPER).

The NSSHB is one of the most comprehensive studies on these topics in almost two decades and documents the sexual experiences and condom-use behaviors of 5,865 adolescents and adults ages 14 to 94.

A unique feature of the study was the inclusion of adolescent men and women. Dennis Fortenberry, M.D., professor of pediatrics in the IU School of Medicine, led the adolescent aspects of the study.

It appears… click here to read whole article and make comments