Since 1974, about 1 million children per year have seen their parents divorce -- and children who are exposed to divorce are two to three times more likely than their peers in intact marriages to suffer from serious social or psychological pathologies. In their book Growing Up with a Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps, sociologists Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur found that 31% of adolescents with divorced parents dropped out of high school, compared to 13% of children from intact families. They also concluded that 33% of adolescent girls whose parents divorced became teen mothers, compared to 11% of girls from continuously married families. And McLanahan and her colleagues have found that 11% of boys who come from divorced families end up spending time in prison before the age of 32, compared to 5% of boys who come from intact homes. ...
Sociologist Paul Amato estimates that if the United States enjoyed the same level of family stability today as it did in 1960, the nation would have 750,000 fewer children repeating grades, 1.2 million fewer school suspensions, approximately 500,000 fewer acts of teenage delinquency, about 600,000 fewer kids receiving therapy, and approximately 70,000 fewer suicides every year.
shawna ford on 19 Feb 14Music as a health patterning modality for preterm infants in the NICU Neal, Diana Odland . University of Minnesota, ProQuest, UMI Dissertations Publishing, 2008. 3330515. Turn on hit highlighting for speaking browsers Hide highlighting Abstract (summary) Translate Abstract Preterm birth is on the rise causing neonatal mortality and is a major determinant of early childhood mortality and morbidity in the United States. Numerous preterm infants suffer from neurological disability including cerebral palsy; visual and hearing impairments; learning difficulties; and, psychological, behavioral, and social problems. This increasing incidence of prematurity, prevalence of significant morbidity, and burden to society, both personal and cost-related, make it imperative to identify developmental care strategies such as music that might reduce this burden . This study integrates the work of music therapy, neuroscience, audiology, and medicine with nursing to address the uncertainty regarding the effect of music as a holistic health patterning modality and discover if preterm infant physiological and neurobehavioral state responses to music and ambient noise are different. The goal of this study was to establish a foundation for further research related to the use of music with preterm infants and to address the issue of safety in providing music as a health patterning modality for this population. Forty-one clinically stable, non-ventilated, appropriate-for-gestational-age (AGA) preterm infants from 32 to 35 weeks gestation in a large, urban Midwest Children's Hospital NICU were included in this study. An interrupted time-series design with repeated measures was used to explore the health patterning responses of preterm infants to an intentionally designed music intervention of recorded piano music. The effect of the music was measured every 30-seconds before, during, and after the sound condition of music or ambient noise by observi
