Posted on 08/25/2017 3:55:42 PM PDT by PROCON
The absence of a father — due to incarceration, death, separation or divorce — has adverse physical and behavioral consequences for a growing child. But little is known about the biological processes that underlie this link between father loss and child well-being.
In a study (link is external) published July 18 in the journal Pediatrics, a team of FFCWS researchers report that the loss of a father has a significant adverse effect on telomeres, the protective nucleoprotein end caps of chromosomes. At 9 years of age, children who had lost their father had significantly shorter telomeres — 14 percent shorter on average — than children who had not. Death had the largest association, and the effects were greater for boys than girls.
Telomeres are thought to reflect cell aging and overall health — their role is to help maintain the DNA ends of chromosomes following cell division. Each time a cell divides, its telomeres shorten; once telomeres are too short, cell replication stops. Previous research has suggested that shortened telomeres are associated with a wide range of diseases in adults, including cardiovascular disease and cancer.
(Excerpt) Read more at fragilefamilies.princeton.edu ...
Fathers, (and of course Mothers too), are a critical part of a child's overall psychological and physical well-being.
Further study links at article source.
Ping
Yet we are now “haters” if we oppose the deliberate creation of a fatherless family. Or a motherless family.
The obvious dichotomy is that this study was published at a predominately liberal, social justice type university.
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