Tuesday, September 22, 1998

Keeping kids out of jail

Much of the happy talk about "nontraditional families" turns out to be blather.

Boys who grow up in homes without fathers are twice as likely to go to jail, say two sociologists from the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton who tracked 6,000 young males over 14 years, and the findings remained constant even when race, place of residence and income level were factored in.

Researchers Cynthia Harper and Sara McLanahan also found that divorce was traumatic for the boys and remarriage even more so. Boys whose families broke up during their adolescence were one and a half times as like to go to jail and boys with stepfathers three times as likely.

It seems there is a good reason "traditional families" are a tradition. They work.