Where’s Poppa? Absent dads linked to early sex by daughters
By Bruce Bower
Teenage girls in the United States and New Zealand show a particularly strong tendency to engage in sexual activity and to get pregnant if they grew up in families without a father present, a new long-term study finds.
“These findings may support social policies that encourage fathers to form and remain in families with their children, unless the marriage is highly [conflicted] or violent,” conclude psychologist Bruce J. Ellis of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and his coworkers in the May/June Child Development.