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Here are some notes about the things that struck me when attending the Divorce Corp. Family Law Reform conference, November 15-16 in Washington, D.C.

Joe Sorge opened the conference by framing some of the issues (slides). In his view, setting up a litigated winner/loser system is harmful to children because (1) it takes a long time, (2) tends to inflame tensions between parents, and (3) drains parental financial resources. Additional harm is done by having a single human being, the trial court judge, make all of the decisions regarding a child’s future (as a practical matter, because these are decisions of “fact,” a divorce court judge’s decisions are not reviewable by an appeals court). Why is the end of a short-term American marriage a mad litigated grab for kids, cash, and long-term financial support for apparently healthy working-age adults? Sorge, whose own former partner collected assets worth about $14 million from him in her first lawsuit against him, had to keep defending additional actions (seeking more money) for a 12-year period. He noted that Federal Law, via Title IV-D of the Social Security Act, provides financial incentives for states to establish a “dominant” parent and entering child support awards to be paid by the secondary parent to that primary parent. Necessarily there were explicit disincentives therefore for states to award shared parenting. Sorge thought that the divorce industry was an anachronism that persisted due to its use of some of its $50 billion in annual revenue for lobbying. He pointed out that in the 1970s only 30 percent of mothers worked while today approximately 70 percent of mothers do. “Women age 25-34 make 88 percent of what men earn,” Sorge pointed out. There is thus a system built on the assumption that women cannot or will not work embedded in a society where women, at least those who are not alimony and child support recipients, do generally work.

Sorge pointed to Sweden as a model. Divorce is generally an administrative procedure, akin to working with the IRS on taxes in the U.S. Only about 1-2 percent of divorcing couples end up embroiled in the legal system there. You can’t get rich having a child with a high-income co-parent. Child support is fixed, according to Sorge, at roughly 1/2 the cost of feeding and clothing a child. Each parent is responsible for half of this amount (currently about $4000 per year total, which means $2000 per parent per year). Although litigation is much cheaper in Sweden than in the U.S., it is discouraged by the country’s practice of making each parent pay his or her own fees, unlike in many U.S. states (such as Sorge’s California) where a $200,000/year plaintiff can get a $300,000/year defendant ordered, as a matter of routine, to pay the fees on both sides of the lawsuit (thus removing any incentive for the plaintiff to settle).

The first formal presentation was by Malin Bergstrom, a Swedish epidemiologist who used data from a national survey of 172,000 children aged 12-15 (slides). Due to the lack of financial incentive to seek sole parenting in Sweden, approximately 40 percent of Swedish children of separated parents live in a 50/50 arrangement. This plus the fact that she used a comprehensive national survey means that Professor Bergstrom worked from better data than any previous researcher on the every-other-weekend versus shared parenting question. Her results? An intact family is best for kids, but a 50/50 arrangement is pretty close in terms of the child’s mental and physical health. Children who lived primarily with their mother did substantially worse and children who lived primarily with their father were even more disadvantaged. Bergstrom noted that when a mother has pulled back to every-other-weekend (or less) in Sweden it is usually due to mental health or substance abuse problems.

The U.S. is unusual internationally due to the following factors: (1) there is no official custody presumption (i.e., children are up for grabs), (2) obtaining custody of children can be more profitable than going to college and working, and (3) litigation is the default process for a divorce or a custody and child support determination. No society in the history of humanity has ever devoted as high a proportion of its resources to custody litigation and wealth transfers via child support. I talked with Bergstrom a couple of times privately during the conference. She said that she hadn’t known anything about the U.S. system before coming to speak and was amazed that a society would set things up the way that we had. In response to the clinical psychologists who said that they wanted to be involved (paid) in every custody lawsuit to determine which parent had a narcissistic or borderline personality disorder, she said “Don’t you need to have a system for normal loving parents as well?”

One area that has been mystifying is why American parents fight so hard over custody and parenting time schedules that affect child support revenue. The fight plainly makes financial sense when $200,000 per year in tax-free cash is at stake (e.g., when suing a radiologist or dermatologist), but why when the numbers are closer to the USDA-estimated costs of child-rearing? And if kids are really as expensive as state child support guidelines suggest, why don’t married parents put most or all of their children up for adoption? For our forthcoming book on divorce, custody, and child support laws in the 51 jurisdictions nationwide we interviewed policy makers in a variety of states. An Illinois family law drafter (and also a working divorce litigator, as seems to be the typical arrangement nationwide (i.e., the litigators write the laws)) was presented with a hypothetical scenario of two physicians, each of whom earned $200,000 per year after taxes, with two children together. Assuming a 60/40 parenting time split, the loser would pay the winner $56,000 per year in tax-free cash. Assuming young children, therefore, the wealth difference for these two equal earners would be approximately $2 million by the time the kids aged out. The policy maker responded that the parents would not be motivated by this $2 million to seek to become the 60-percent parent as opposed to the 40-percent parent. “Child support does not compensate the parents for having children,” she said, taking the position that $56,000 was not nearly enough to pay the expenses of two children.

William Comanor, a professor of economics at UCLA, shed some light on the issue (slides). Economists have identified two main flaws in the typical state’s child support guideline numbers. The first is that the non-custodial parent, e.g., the one who takes care of a child 40 percent of the time in the above example, is considered to have zero expenses for housing, food, clothing, transportation, etc. The system as designed, therefore, gives the primary parent’s household a much higher share of the combined parental income than the secondary parent’s household even when the children spend a substantial percentage of their time with the secondary parent. Comanor did not address this issue, which has been previously covered by economists (see this 2013 report to the Massachusetts commission).

Comanor’s talk, and a forthcoming journal article, related to how people figure the actual cost of children in intact families, which is the starting point for many child support calculations (“Put yourself in the child’s diaper,” one California attorney said, saying that the relevant question for the judge is “How much would have been spent on the child if these two people, instead of just meeting for one night in a bar, had gotten married and stayed together until the child turned 18?”). Big components are food, housing, and transportation. How much does a married couple with one child spend on transportation for the child? The conventional approach has been to take what they spend on transportation and divide by three. Comanor used the same U.S. Census Bureau data regarding consumer expenditures that the USDA uses and found that the actual number is pretty close to $0: married couples with and without children (except low-income families with three or more children) spend about the same on transportation. Similarly for housing. Some approaches take the cost of a house or apartment and divide by the number of people occupying it. Other conventional approaches have been to estimate the housing cost of a child by looking at the marginal cost of a two-bedroom apartment compared to a one-bedroom apartment. Professor Comanor looked at what American couples, with and without children, actually do spend. It turns out that on average a married couple with no children will spend the same as a married couple with one child. Maybe a guest bedroom or den turns into a nursery but the actual dollars spent doesn’t change until the second child comes along. Similarly, spending on food is about the same before and after the first child arrives. Comanor finds that the basic cost of a child in an American household with less than $56,000 per year in pre-tax income is about $4300 per year, i.e., not very different from the Sweden child support number and about the same as what some Western states use as the starting point for child support (adding in an extra amount for luxuries if the parents’ income is larger than $15,000 per year or so). Comanor’s number is somewhat lower than foster care reimbursements in most states ($6000 to $8000 per year per child). That’s about 10 percent of the top of the Massachusetts child support guidelines (suing a $250,000/year earner yields $40,000 per year in tax-free child support), which means that a Massachusetts plaintiff could expect a 90-percent profit on child support revenue, assuming that the child’s clothes are purchased at Target.

[A smaller issue with child support guidelines is that spending by single-parent households may be overstated. Since child support is not “income” a single parent with a $50,000-per-year job who collects $50,000 per year in tax-free child support may fall into the “$50,000 per year” income category, though he or she would have a spending power closer to that of a person with $135,000 per year in taxable income. There would still be a lack of comparability if the example single parent were considered to have a “pre-tax income” of $100,000 per year because a married couple with $100,000 in income would pay taxes on all of it. Comanor wasn’t sure which conventional approaches, if any, were adjusted for these factors. His own analysis shows higher spending on children in “single households” than “married households” with the same “income”.]

Using OECD data on the amount of hands-on time put into child care by working parents (about one hour per day, averaging weekends and weekdays) and Comanor’s analysis of the Census data, obtaining custody of a child and collecting child support should be worth about $150 per hour at the top of the Massachusetts guidelines, for example (assumes two-thirds/one-third parenting time split and a $250,000-per-year income for the loser parent). The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that a “private nonfarm” worker in American earns an average wage of less than $25 per hour. Given that child support is tax-free and wages are taxable, a thoughtful custody and child support plaintiff should be able to earn at least 8X per hour compared to a W-2 employee.

Attorneys whom we interviewed both before and at the conference told us that allegations of child abuse are common whenever profitable custody of children is being sought. Dr. Joyanna Silberg (web site), in a panel discussion, noted that children are not being protected from actual abuse: “Family court looks at children as property for one side or the other.” What does this experienced therapist say about the custody evaluation or guardian ad litem process engaged in by psychologists nationwide? “It’s a game of chance whether a custody evaluator gets it right,” she said. Silberg noted that the divorce industry misleads with precise-sounding terms that are meaningless to psychology professionals.

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The Tax Foundation says that New York collects a higher percentage of residents’ income than any other state. How does the money get spent? The New York Times has an article on a new $4 billion train station for lower Manhattan. If it does not slip further it will have taken 11 years to complete (when it opens in 2015).

What can $4 billion buy in terms of passenger train infrastructure? Wikipedia says that was roughly the cost of the Zhengxi PDL high-speed rail line in China (built starting in 2005 when the exchange rate was different). For a return on their $billions, the Chinese waited five years rather than 11. Instead of 1 train station they got 10 train stations plus a 284-mile-long railroad connecting them. Trains travel along the line at roughly 220 mph. As part of this package, the Chinese also got the longest bridge in the world at the time and an assortment of tunnels, some more than five miles long.

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Five years ago I posted a list of things for which I was grateful.

I’m still grateful for all of the stuff that I was grateful for in 2009. What since then, though?

Here’s my list (mostly small items because the big ones are on the earlier list)…

• the two wonderful women in our house
• our healthy baby, born 2013
• that my former aviation students have enjoyed five more years of safe flying
• that my friends who fly have similarly kept themselves and their passengers safe
• a former co-worker who relocated to Boston and has become the best possible friend
• old friends who proved their durability during some trying times
• Mindy the Crippler, PC
• finding a new way to teach database programming that is fun for both students and teachers (see the January 2015 course announcement)
• the continued expansion of the Internet*
• practical tablet computers, notably the Apple iPad, which delight both children and adults
• smart phones big enough to serve as tablet computers
• Dropbox and Google Drive, which mean that I can almost always find everything that I need
• the new (2010) Art of the Americas wing at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, which keeps a favorite five-year-old of mine entertained
• Uber
• Sonos
• that we got to visit Antarctica (my report)
• Sony A6000 mirrorless camera system (and its predecessor, the NEX-6)

*Internet success story: Contractor and plumber installed a new washer/dryer in the house. I am pretty sure that they didn’t read the instructions before test running it. When I opened up the washer after it had walked itself 1.5 feet across the floor due to being unbalanced I found the (ruined) manual inside, along with the hoses and some other little bits. I then went to the Samsung web site and found the manual, which said “remove the transit bolts before running or the machine will become unbalanced.”

What about readers? What are you all grateful for, beyond the basic friends, family, health, food, and shelter stuff?

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… a photo from a pre-Thanksgiving trip to Target:

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Having run out of books on CD I was reduced to listening to NPR new this morning. The top story regarded the grand jury’s decision not to indict a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri for shooting Michael Brown (Wikipedia) and how black versus white Americans perceive this result.

I remember watching the O.J. Simpson verdict on television at Hearst Corporation back in 1995. One member of our group was black. He laughed when the “not guilty” decision was announced and seemed cheered at the idea that Simpson had apparently beaten the system. The whites were astonished that the evidence had not persuaded the jury of Simpson’s guilt.

In interviewing people for our book on divorce, custody, and child support laws in the 51 jurisdictions nationwide we’ve also found a black/white divide. Jill Carter, a legislator in Maryland, told us how her (mostly black) constituents in Baltimore experience the system:

What if one doesn’t want to wait three or four months [for a temporary order awarding the house, kids, and cashflow to a divorce plaintiff]? As in other states, Maryland operates a parallel domestic violence prevention system that will grant de facto divorces instantly. Delegate Carter explains “There is an organization called the House of Ruth. They represent the woman for free and get her an automatic ex parte order barring the man from the house, the kids, and her place of work. He can come back five days later to challenge the order.” Then the House of Ruth lawyer and his lawyer argue about whether it was a legitimate order to have granted? “No,” says Carter. “A lot of my constituents can’t afford lawyers and this is a civil proceeding, not a criminal one. So he is not entitled to a public defender. Thus she is represented by an attorney and he is not.” Then what? “The Court asks ‘Would you like to sign this consent form?’ and the man is usually intimidated by the situation and doesn’t want to appear argumentative in front of the judge. He’s smart enough to know that if he were to display any anger at having been accused of abuse that would only make things worse. So he agrees to stay away from the home, the kids, her job for a year. Meanwhile the House of Ruth is also working on a divorce lawsuit for her. When that comes to trial in about a year they can say ‘He hasn’t been around the kids for a year. He’s been out of the children’s lives.’ A factor that the judge is supposed to consider is what a child is accustomed to. So the court reduces the father to a support payor. If he has visitation it will be limited and supervised.” What about the idea that judges are wise and fair and that they have enough discretion to do what is best for a child? “These fathers are not getting due process,” responded Carter. “The rules of evidence are often ignored. I have seen judges in district court let the House of Ruth lawyers testify.”

Unlike in some other states, a Maryland plaintiff cannot wait until a child is 17 years 11 months old and file for 18 years of retroactive child support. Generally child support liability starts when a lawsuit is filed. As in other states, a plaintiff can use a state agency to have a taxpayer-funded attorney get a child support order for her but the defendant cannot get a taxpayer-funded attorney either to defend the child support lawsuit or to ask for parenting time. “A woman can pop up and find the father after seven years,” says Delegate Carter. “The father never knew about the child and says ‘That’s great news. When do I get to see the child?’ DHR responds ‘We don’t need you for that.’ In the eyes of the state fathers have no value except to pay.”

The Maryland Child Support Enforcement Administration publishes a web page regarding their paternity litigation services:
Paternity Establishment is Important!
Your child deserves all of the advantages in life that two parents can give. There are some special reasons to establish paternity.
Benefits For Your Child: Your child may be eligible for some benefits because you have established paternity. These benefits may include Social Security, veteran’s benefits, health insurance, life insurance and inheritance. Establishing paternity ensures you can provide for your child even when the unexpected occurs.
Family Medical History: Knowing the family’s full history of diseases, illnesses and birth defects will help your doctor if your child becomes sick. It’s important to know the father’s medical history for this reason.
Child Support: Your child needs and deserves both emotional and financial support from both parents. You may think that you can get by on your own and live without any help from your child’s father. But you may change your mind some day. A court can’t order child support without legal proof of paternity. It’s easier to get that proof today than to wait.

Confirming Delegate Carter’s perspective, “your child can spend time with Dad” is not one of the benefits described by the state agency.

The lower income men represented by Delegate Carter seemed to fare the worst. “A lot of men fall into arrearages and have to live in the shadows,” she told us. “They can’t drive, can’t work without their entire paycheck being garnished, and are sometimes imprisoned. Even if a man is well-intentioned, unless he wins the lottery he can’t get out of it.”

In most states where we interviewed legislators they described a system in which high-end divorce litigators representing white litigants in cases where at least one party had money (and the other one wanted it!) were the drafters of the rules (statutes) under which divorce lawsuits would be conducted. The resulting laws tended to maximize the amount of judicial discretion and therefore the scope for attorney argument to try to persuade judges. The drafted-by-working-litigator laws also tend to maximize the amount of cash that could be obtained via alimony or child support (5-1000X what could be obtained from a similar income defendant in Scandinavia, for example), a result that falls particularly hard on low-income men.

Attorneys told us that black men are reluctant to hire them for a legal defense to a divorce, custody, or child support lawsuit. “They don’t believe that they’re going to get Justice with a capital J,” said one lawyer, “unlike white guys who will spend $500,000 or more before learning the same lesson. A black defendant’s first impulse is to run away before the family court can get hold of him. Black guys are more street-smart than white guys. They don’t believe what they were taught by a social studies teacher back in high school.”

Circling back to the Ferguson issue, I do think that it is important to remember that poor black Americans live under a system of laws that were developed by rich (mostly white) Americans and the politicians and attorneys who represent those rich people. So it isn’t surprising that there will be conflict over whether those laws are fair. As long as we retain our current system of drafting legislation I don’t see a way around this. Perhaps one improvement would be to prevent lobbying by lawyers and also to prevent practicing attorneys serving as legislators from drafting legislation that would affect their personal practice (in Maryland, for example, the head of the committee drafting family law is herself a high-end divorce litigator representing rich white people in Montgomery County). Judges and states agencies whose funding grows in response to new laws and procedures would be similarly prevented from lobbying. Then at least there aren’t people who benefit financially from sweeping up poor black citizens into the judicial system deciding the terms under which poor black citizens are swept up.

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I listened to NPR news this morning while stuck in Boston traffic and heard three different reporters speak about how “the U.S. economy grew 3.9 percent in the third quarter [of 2014].” That’s an awesome 16.5 percent annual growth rate (like you might get if you implemented congestion pricing so that Americans didn’t get stuck in traffic and have to listen to NPR news after running out of books on CD…). However it turns out that the real number is closer to 1 percent and 3.9 percent is the annualized rate (BEA press release). As someone who has been reading about America’s educational system a bit lately (see my review of Higher Education?, also Academically Adrift, and the American schools section of The Smartest Kids in the World), I’m kind of curious about how people who spend the time to put together a story to be broadcast nationally could have missed the difference between 3.9 percent and 16.5 percent.

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Folks:

In setting up our new suburban paradise I would like to extend WiFi coverage to a garage that is a separate building. The signal must get through about 75′ of air and about five walls. The base station is an ActionTec router supplied by Verizon FiOS (i.e., an omnidirectional antenna). Measured with a Samsung Note 3 there is either 0 or 1 bar of WiFi strength in the location where I want WiFi. Since it is almost working between two omnidirectional antennae (ActionTec and phone) I am thinking that what would work is a repeater box with a directional antenna pointing at the ActionTec. Has anyone tried this? The locations have separate electric feeds from the pole so it would not be possible to use a powerline-based system.

Thanks in advance for any help!

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My latest read: Do Fathers Matter?: What Science Is Telling Us About the Parent We’ve Overlooked. The author is an MIT graduate who has worked for decades as a science writer (Paul Raeburn background) and he does a great job summarizing the research frontier.

In most U.S. states the divorce system has an implicit presumption that a child’s interaction with the father should be cut back to an every-other-weekend experience (and in fact some states offer mothers a multi-million dollar cash incentive to become an official “primary parent”). For many children, especially if the mother decides to move to another state with the kids, this tends to dwindle down to no contact at all with the father. Raeburn gives some stats:

In 1960, only 11 percent of U.S. children lived apart from their fathers. By 2010, that figure had climbed to 27 percent. … Fewer fathers are living with or are in touch with their children now than at any time since the United States began keeping relatively reliable statistics. Those fathers who are separated, divorced, or never married—but who see their children regularly—are not likely to be involved in monitoring them or setting and enforcing rules, meaning they are not really playing a parental role.

Raeburn’s book is not about divorce, custody, or child support litigation, but it still is relevant to answering the question of “Is this a good idea for kids?”

It turns out that with most mammals, the answer would be “yes.” Other species evolved so that the fathers tended to wander off after contributing some genetic material. Why not in humans?

But they are among the most committed mammalian fathers of any species on Earth. There is no example of a human society in which fathers do not help raise the children. Admittedly, some fathers are better at this than others. Some abandon their families for other mates, and some for reasons we can never be quite sure of. But most human males, at the very least, put food on the table. It would be exciting to trace the evolution of fatherhood over the past few million years to find out whether men were always as invested in their children as they are now, or how that contribution might have changed over time. Did our earliest male ancestors put time, energy, and resources into offspring who would be heavily dependent on parental care for years to come? Or did they swiftly resume the search for other willing females, to multiply again and again, increasing the chance that some of their offspring would survive? And if so, when did that change, and why? Those are questions we will probably never answer. We’re not even sure exactly when, in the course of human evolution, males and females began to forge relationships with one another. But we have some hints, sifted from prehistoric remains examined by archaeologists and paleontologists. They tell us that among australopithecines—the earliest members of the human family, who lived 4 million to 1 million years ago—mates were involved enough for males to have provided food and care for infants and protection from predators. Long-term male-female relationships likely began with the appearance of Homo erectus about 1.5 million years ago. Fathers, mothers, and children slept together, so children could watch and learn from their fathers, and their fathers could protect them. In the Late Pleistocene period, about 120,000 years ago, men hunted for large game and often had multiple wives. They spent a lot of time in camp between hunts, and were often available to their children.

Note that we humans are never as unusual as we believe:

Experiments have shown that even in species in which fathers have little or nothing to do with their young, males can be coaxed to rise to the challenge of fatherhood. Stephen J. Suomi of the National Institutes of Health has spent his career working with rhesus monkeys. “They are probably one of the worst species to study the effects of fathers,” Suomi says. “The females won’t let them get near their kids. They chase them away. But even these monkeys can be good fathers when the opportunity arises. To make the point, Suomi points to a forty-year-old study by William K. Redican at the California Primate Research Center of the University of California, Davis. Redican removed infant rhesus monkeys from their mothers and left them with their fathers. Because fathers can’t nurse, Redican hand-fed the infants. He collected data on the fathers and infants for seven months, in the absence of mothers and peers. When they were no longer being chased away by the mothers, the males became remarkably good fathers. They did almost everything the females would do with two exceptions. One, of course, was that the fathers couldn’t nurse the infants. The other was that they played with the kids much more than females do. “Mothers don’t do much of that,” Suomi says.

Thus the modern experiment in producing fatherless children is in fact an experiment. We don’t have any guide from history as to what kind of a society we’ll end up with.

Raeburn reports on research showing that fathers are more important than mothers to children’s language development. Fathers interact with children in a different way:

“Fathers often use objects in an incongruous way,” writes Daniel Paquette of the University of Montreal. During rough-and-tumble play like this, fathers tend to use playful teasing to “destabilize children both emotionally and cognitively,” which children like—despite the seemingly ominous implications of the word “destabilizing.” It might not sound like a good idea, but this destabilization could have a critical function. It could be helping our children confront one of their principal challenges: the need to learn how to deal with unexpected events. Children’s need to be “stimulated, pushed and encouraged to take risks is as great as their need for stability and security,” says Paquette. He describes fathers as having an “activation relationship” with their children that “fosters children’s opening to the world.” Fathers’ unpredictability helps children learn to be brave in difficult situations or when meeting new people. In one study of one-year-olds taken to swimming class, researchers observed that fathers were more likely to stand behind their children, so that the children faced the water, while mothers tended to stand in front of the children, the better to make eye contact.

There are some practical tips for us dads:

Ross Parke thinks the way a father plays is the key to healthy development in kids. He says that when fathers exert too much control over the play, instead of responding to their children’s cues, their sons can have more difficulty with their peers. Daughters who were the most popular likewise enjoyed playing with their fathers and had the most “nondirective” fathers. The children of these fathers also tended to have easier transitions into elementary school. Children whose fathers took turns being the one to suggest activities and showed an interest in the child’s suggestions grew up to be less aggressive, more competent, and better liked. These were fathers who played actively with their children, but were not authoritarian; father and child engaged in give-and-take.

Why do fatherless daughters turn out the way that researchers have found? (see Father-Daughter Relationships by Professor Linda Nielsen for a good summary). Raeburn explains a theory from evolutionary biology:

For Hill and DelPriore, that was a tipoff that something entirely different was going on. “Researchers have revealed a robust association between father absence—both physical and psychological—and accelerated reproductive development and sexual risk-taking in daughters,” they wrote. You might expect sexual maturation to be deeply inscribed in teenagers’ genes, and not likely affected by something as arbitrary and unpredictable as whether or not they live in the same house as their fathers. But the association is quite clear. The problem comes in trying to explain it. How could a change in a girl’s environment—the departure of her father—influence something as central to biology as her reproductive development? I put that question to Hill. “When dad is absent,” she explained, “it basically provides young girls with a cue about what the future holds in terms of the mating system they are born into.” When a girl’s family is disrupted, and her father leaves or isn’t close to her, she gets the message that men don’t stay for long, and her partner might not stick around, either. So finding a man requires quick action. The sooner she’s ready to have children, the better. She can’t consciously decide to enter puberty earlier, but her biology takes over, subconsciously. She enters puberty earlier, gets pregnant sooner, and has more children quickly. “This would help facilitate what we call, in evolutionary sciences, a faster reproductive strategy,” Hill said.

Ellis quickly discovered that there was something about fathers that gave them a unique role in regulating their daughters’ development—especially their sexual development—around the time of puberty. In a series of studies beginning in 1999, he found that when girls had a warm relationship with their fathers and spent a lot of time with them in the first five to seven years of their lives, they had a reduced risk of early puberty, early initiation of sex, and teen pregnancy.

What about making the salad versus firing up the grill?

Speculation about the social behavior of humans before recorded history is difficult to prove or disprove; we might never know what happened. Yet division of labor according to gender “is a human universal,” true in all cultures, says the Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham. That means it would have appeared at least sixty thousand years ago, before humans began to spread around the world and diversify into those different cultures. … Women generally provide the staples and men the delicacies. One of the other notable features of their lives is that they pool their resources and share everything. … Researchers have looked for exceptions to this division of labor, but they haven’t found many. A study published in the 1970s looked at cooking and other family activities in 185 different cultures. It found that women did the cooking in 98 percent of those societies. … Even in the rare communities in which women did not do all the cooking, men cooked only for the community; women still cooked household meals. And the authors found one small exception in some of the groups: men often liked to cook meat.

How about child-rearing versus working?

It continued with the arrival of farming, some 10,000 years ago. Men tended the fields and women prepared the food. Women likewise provided most of the child care. The division of labor survived the establishment of the first nation-states about 5,000 years ago. … In that long prehistoric era, fathers taught their children how to work. Their children watched them work and often worked with them. … We no longer judge fathers exclusively on their ability to protect and educate their children, because we’ve turned those jobs over to the state. Instead, we judge fathers on their economic contributions to their families and on their caregiving. Fathers now earn the money they need to have someone else teach their children.

What do fathers do differently at home with the kids?

Annette Lareau, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, … found that fathers were not only important in family life, they dominated their families. “Fathers added color, fun, informality and ‘accent’ to family life. Mothers were likely to worry, chastise, and punish. Fathers were playful … We were repeatedly struck by the ways in which the fathers who participated in our study enlivened and lightened the tone of family life.”

Conclusion: A very readable summary of some interesting research with some practical implications for current fathers of children under the age of 18.

More: Read the book.

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I’m trying to move into a new house in suburban Boston this weekend, in time to host a gaggle of cousins for Thanksgiving. There is a big stack of IKEA furniture in the garage, waiting to be assembled. It occurred to me that I could offer the assembly project as a corporate team-building exercise, charging $1000 per person per day so that four-worker teams could put together tables and chairs, enjoy a wonderful catered lunch, and then talk about (a) what they learned, (b) the value of diversity, (c) what went well, (d) what still needs work, (e) what strengths did each member bring, (f) what helped in accomplishing goals, etc.

Brilliant or stupid?

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What’s visually different about cities compared to the natural world? Reflections and artificial light are two big ones. What’s different about photography and painting? Depth of field is one big difference. Everything in an oil painting can be equally sharp.

The Richard Estes show at the Smithsonian American Art Museum is an excellent place to explore the above differences. Highly recommended based on my visit today.

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