Tuesday, June 02, 2009

Family Instability Hurts Boys in School

Sarah McLanahan reported from her continuing study of "fragile families" at the Furstenberg conference. She had some interesting new things to say about the effects of family instability - especially boyfriends passing in and out of the household.

One major effect is that instability increases the mother's mental health problems, especially depression and anxiety.

Another major finding is that instability hurts boys more than girls.

This led me to a thought about why girls out-perform boys in school, when the reverse used to be true: girls may be passing boys because instability hurts boys more, and family instability is increasing.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Who cares about boys.It's time for girls to thrive.

TallCoolOne said...

Dead on, mate, dead on.

And as for the previous post: it's pretty clear that "girls" don't much care about boys, since they grow up into women with cheating hearts and no shame. Society is in big trouble when "girls" "thrive" -- read "go wild" -- in such manners.