Tag: family

  • Siblings Split

    Theories about how siblings develop such different personalities (NPR). “Children in the same family are more similar than children taken at random from the population,” Plomin says, “but not much more.”  In fact, in terms of personality, we are similar to our siblings only about 20 percent of the time.

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  • Sisters and Happiness

    Deborah Tannen looks at why having a sister makes people happier. My own recent research about sisters suggests a more subtle dynamic. I interviewed more than 100 women about their sisters, but if they also had brothers, I asked them to compare. Most said they talked to their sisters more often, at greater length and,…

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  • American Family

    NYT:  Family Relations: An International Comparison It’s not just you.  Compared with elderly parents and adult children in five other industrialized nations, Americans are twice as likely to have “disharmonious” relationships, a new multinational study has found. And we’re correspondingly less likely to have “amicable” relationships marked by strong affection and relatively free of conflict.

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  • Focus on the Family

    A massive anthropological study of American family life is complete.  Cameras on 32 families; 1,540 hours of video. “This is the richest, most detailed, most complete database of middle-class family living in the world…What it does is hold up a mirror to people. They laugh. They cringe. It shows us life as it is actually…

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  • “My Kid Wouldn’t Do That”

    A study shows parents tend to have a skewed views of their teen’s behavior. “Parents…had a very hard time thinking about their own teen children as sexually desiring subjects…At the same time…parents view their teens’ peers as highly sexual, even sexually predatory.”

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