Word: sayings
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...cost-conscious. (Wouldn't you be if your disposable income came from babysitting twice a week?) But Internet entrepreneurs and marketers are attracted to the potential of the teen consumer: teens control or influence $457.9 billion in consumer spending a year, and 81% of those ages 13 to 18 say they have used the Internet, making teens the most wired generation ever...
Tragic stories like these fill the nation's newspapers. But do they have any relevance to stepfamilies as a whole? Yes, say Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, two Canadian psychology professors at McMaster University in Ontario. In their slender new book, The Truth About Cinderella: A Darwinian View of Parental Love (Yale University Press), the duo argue that having a stepparent is the most powerful risk factor for severe child abuse. In fact, they say, an American child living with one genetic parent and one stepparent is 100 times as likely to suffer fatal abuse as a child living with...
...were sufficient to fully engage the evolved psychology of parental feeling," they write. "And it is not sufficient. Stepparents do not, on average, feel the same child-specific love and commitment as genetic parents, and therefore do not reap the same emotional rewards from unreciprocated 'parental' investment." Violence, they say, is just one, albeit dramatic, consequence...
Similarly, there are animals that turn on their predecessor's offspring, the authors say. "How do [male tigers] respond to the cubs sired by their predecessors? The grisly answer is that they systematically search them out and kill them." The Darwinian reason, say Daly and Wilson, is that all animals, including humans, prefer to promote their own "genetic posterity." Unrelated youngsters don't necessarily fit into that scheme...
Violence is not the only negative trait that runs in some stepfamilies, say experts. "We know that there's less of a sexual taboo in stepfamilies because you don't have the biological connection," says Dr. James H. Bray, author of Stepfamilies: Love, Marriage and Parenting in the First Decade. As a result, says Bray, "if a woman is about to remarry, she really ought to get to know her spouse and know some of her potential spouse's family history, because we know that sexual and physical abuse tends to run in families...