A de novo pathogenic variant identified in a boy with Poland syndrome.

Poland syndrome is a rare developmental disorder characterized by unilateral, complete or partial, absence of the pectoralis major (and often minor) muscle, accompanied with ipsilateral hand malformations. To date, no clear genetic cause has been associated with Poland syndrome, although familial cases have been reported. We report the employment of trio exome investigation and the identification of a heterozygous de novo pathogenic variant in the gene, a transcription factor associated with transcriptional repression during development, in a 14-yr-old boy with Poland syndrome.

Who supports whom? Do adult children living at home share their incomes with their parents?

Across the developed world, young adults are now more likely to live with their parents than they were two or three decades ago. This is typically viewed, both in the media and in scholarly research, as an economic burden on parents. This article investigates, for the first time, the extent to which financial support is also given in the opposite direction, with young people contributing to their households' living costs.

Dimensions of the Parent-Child Relationship: Effects on Substance Use in Adolescence and Adulthood.

Background: Several studies have uncovered a relationship between parenting styles and the likelihood that adolescents use tobacco, alcohol or illegal drugs.

Objectives: This paper extends existing research in two ways. First, we consider a longer time-frame, investigating the relationship between parenting in adolescence and substance use in adulthood.

Housework share between partners: Experimental evidence on gender-specific preferences.

This paper uses a novel vignette-based experimental design to investigate the reasons underlying the gendered division of housework. We are particularly interested in the role of gender-specific preferences: are there differences in the utility that men and women derive from housework, and might these be responsible for the fact that women continue to do more housework than men? It is difficult to address these questions with conventional survey data, because of inherent problems with endogeneity and ex-post rationalization; our experimental design circumvents these problems. We find remarkably little evidence of any systematic gender differences in preferences, and a general inclination towards an equal distribution of housework; this suggests that the reasons for the gendered division of housework do not derive from gender differences in preferences, and must lie elsewhere.

New evidence on breastfeeding and postpartum depression: the importance of understanding women's intentions.

This study aimed to identify the causal effect of breastfeeding on postpartum depression (PPD), using data on mothers from a British survey, the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children. Multivariate linear and logistic regressions were performed to investigate the effects of breastfeeding on mothers' mental health measured at 8 weeks, 8, 21 and 32 months postpartum. The estimated effect of breastfeeding on PPD differed according to whether women had planned to breastfeed their babies, and by whether they had shown signs of depression during pregnancy.

Infant feeding: the effects of scheduled vs. on-demand feeding on mothers' wellbeing and children's cognitive development.

Background: Many popular childcare books recommend feeding babies to a schedule, but no large-scale study has ever examined the effects of schedule-feeding. Here, we examine the relationship between feeding infants to a schedule and two sets of outcomes: mothers' wellbeing, and children's longer-term cognitive and academic development.

Methods: We used a sample of 10,419 children from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, a cohort study of children born in the 1990 s in Bristol, UK.

Yearning, learning, and conceding: reasons men and women change their childbearing intentions.

People's childbearing intentions change over the course of their reproductive lives. These changes have been conceptualized as occurring in response to the realization that an individual is unlikely to achieve his or her intended fertility, because of constraints such as the "biological clock" or lack of a partner. In this article, we find that changes to child-bearing plans are influenced by a much wider range of factors than this.