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You may have recently heard or seen the news coverage (in theNew York Daily NewsorCBS news online, among others; you may have even seen the lead author, James K. McNulty of the University of Tennessee, discuss it on theTodayshow) of a study, published in theJournal of Family Psychology, that showed that couples in which the woman is physically more attractive than the man are happier than couples in which the man is physically more attractive than the woman. Why is this? Why is it better for the couple if the woman is physically more attractive than the man?

If you have been keeping score at home, the findings of this study should have come as no surprise to you. There are two different reasons why couples in which the woman is more attractive than the man are more successful and happier than couples in which the man is more attractive than the woman.

First, as we elaborate in Chapter 4 of our bookWhy Beautiful People Have More Daughters(“Go Together Like a Horse and Carriage? The Evolutionary Psychology of Marriage”), handsome men on average make bad husbands. Men can maximize their reproductive success by pursuing one of two different strategies: Seek a long-term mate, stay with her, and invest in their joint offspring (the “dad” strategy); or seek a large number of short-term mates without investing in any of the resulting offspring (the “cad” strategy).

All men may want to pursue the cad strategy; however, their choice of the mating strategy is constrained by female choice. Men do not get to decide with whom to have sex; women do. And women disproportionately seek out handsome men for their short-term mates for their good genes. Even women who are already married benefit from short-term mating with handsome men if they could successfully fool their husbands into investing in the resulting offspring. The women then get the best of both worlds: Their children carry the high-quality genes of their handsome lover and receive the parental investment of their unknowingly cuckolded but resourceful husband. (In order to help the women accomplish this, evolution has designed women to be more likely tohave sex with their lovers when they are ovulating and therefore fertile, and have sex with their husbands when they are not.)

Thus, handsome men get a disproportionate number of opportunities for short-term mating and are therefore able to engage in the cad strategy. Ugly men have no choice. Since women do not choose them as short-term mates, their only option for achieving any reproductive success is to find one long-term mate and invest heavily in their children -- the dad strategy.

Consistent with this logic, studies show that more attractive men have a larger number of extra-pair sex partners (sex partners other than their long-term mates). Interestingly, more attractive men have more short-term mates than long-term mates, whereas more attractive women have more long-term mates than short-term mates. Most importantly for our current purposes, handsome men invest less in their exclusive relationships than ugly men do. They are less honest with and less attentive to their partners. McNulty’s new study of newlyweds confirms this. Their data show that the more physically attractive the husbands are, the less supportive they are of their wives in their interactions.

I hasten to add that “good” and “bad” (as in the title of this post “Why handsome men makebadhusbands”) are value judgments that scientists do not make. However, empirical datado demonstrate clearly that handsome men have more extra-marital affairs and are not as committed to their marriages, which many wives would undoubtedly consider undesirable. In this sense, handsome men make better lovers than husbands.

In my nextpost, I will discuss the second reason why couples in which the woman is more attractive than the man are happier than couples in which the man is more attractive than the woman. If you have been keeping score at home, it will come as no surprise.

Is having one child better than having two or four? It's a question that couples ponder as they begin to grow a family. Many have strong opinions based on experiences within their own family; others make child-bearing choices based on age-old stereotypes.

I have a singleton, one sibling, and raised four stepchildren in a first marriage so I'm objective when it comes to family size issues. However, when I had my singleton, family, friends, and random outsiders asked,"When are you having another?" The implication, whether stated or not, was that there is something wrong with only children or with parents who stop after having one child. I decided to find out what, and have spent more than 20 years studying only children and their parents.

This blog will explore everything only child-the decision to have, raise, and be an only child and what it means for parents, and only children as children and as adults. I thought a good place to begin was with a look at how many children people say they want and how many they actually have.

Only three percent of those polled by Gallup last year feel one child is ideal. Yet, according to the U.S. Census, the single child family is the fastest growing family unit. Why have singletons grown in popularity even when, on the surface, the prevailing preference is for more children?

Gallup has been asking people what they believe to be the best family size since 1936. From the mid-30s through 1967 between 61 and 77 percent of people preferred a family with three or more children. By 1973 the ideal family size dropped to two or fewer children. Today and since 1974 when the Gallup poll asked,"What is the ideal number of children for a family to have?" more than half of Americans, say a two-child family is best.

The explanation: Many people still believe that children without siblings are at a disadvantage. Yet the numbers (and facts) tell a different story. Just as during the Depression when the percentage of only children rose to 30, major metropolitan cities like New York are experiencing a similar upsurge. In the last 20 years the number of singletons has more than doubled to between 23 and 25 percent depending on where you live, one-child families often outnumbering families with two children.

The nuclear family with two children, a mom and dad is evaporating and having a singleton is increasingly common. Is one child the new traditional family? It's beginning to look that way in spite of the fact that so many cling to the belief that it's unfair to have one child. The advantages for a single child outweigh the few disadvantages. But, those feeling insecure about their decision wonder about the benefits and worry about all the negative traits with which singletons have been labeled for more than 100 years.

Scientific journals are rife with studies of the negative consequences of father absence. But the flip side-the importance of having a father around-has been widely ignored. That disparity surprised Dr. Anna Sarkadi, a physician at Uppsala University in Sweden.

She is the lead author of a newly publishedreviewof 24 studies of fathers, which finds that fathers have an important positive influence on their kids: When fathers are engaged with their children, boys have fewer behavior problems, girls have fewer psychological problems, and both show enhanced cognitive development.

Sarkadi was prompted to do the review when, as a postdoc, her adviser assigned her to do a study of children based on mothers'responses to a questionnaire. She suggested that they give the questionnaire to fathers, too."Why?"her adviser asked."Are they important as well?"

To answer him, she searched the scientific literature for a review of studies on fathers'contributions to their kids. She couldn't find one. Her new study, which appears in the current edition of Acta Paediatrica, fills that gap. (Her adviser, now persuaded that fathers are important, worked on it with her.)

Sarkadi found that the mere presence of a father in the home reduced aggressive behavior in the kids. But it was active and regular engagement with the kids that reduced the risks of behavioral and psychological problems and boosted cognitive development.

"Father engagement really seems to have an effect where it's most needed,"she told me."What's the most common problem among teenage girls? Depression. And boys? You have delinquents."Those are precisely the problems that father engagement helps reduce.

"Father engagement"was defined differently in various studies. So Sarkadi and her colleagues cannot say exactly what kind of engagement is important. But any kind of engagement seems to be beneficial.

Conservatives have jumped on findings, which they say support their views on the sanctity of traditional marriage between a man and a woman. But Sarkadi says that distorts her findings.

"An engaged father is important for the health and welfare of the child-not marriage per se,"she said. What the study does support is more flexible paternal leave, so that fathers can be home for sick days or school events without risking their jobs.

And it has a lesson for physicians and other health professionals, Sarkadi said."Put some focus on the father. Seek out his opinions."And stop interpreting"parent"to mean"mother."

"Too many notices to parents,"Sarkadi said,"are written on pink paper."

We know that girls are less likely to go into math and"hard science" careers than boys. There are lots of reactions people have to this news. Some, like Lawrence Summers (who became the former president of Harvard in large part because this remark in 2005) suggested that women may not have the same innate abilities in math as men. Others suggest that the school system is somehow failing girls in school. Still others are concerned about social pressure that girls might feel to shy away from looking smart when there are boys around

These last two ideas have some traction in popular and political culture. There has been movement to create all-girls'schools to give girls an environment to thrive. Indeed, my home town of Austin Texas has a public all-girls school (named after former Texas governor Ann Richards). I think there is much to like about the idea about an all-girls school for middle-schoolers. One question we should ask, though, is whether the mass exodus of girls from math (and to some degree hard sciences) is being caused by a failure of the educational system.

Psychologist Jacquelynne Eccles has studied this question extensively. One of her more surprising findings is that girls tend to attach less value to math than boys. There are a few sources of the difference in value that boys and girls place on math.

For one, parents may give their children beliefs about how important math ought to be to them. Eccles'evidence suggests that girls are less likely to value math and to take advanced math courses when their parents do not believe that math is as important for girls as it is for boys. So, girls are internalizing the beliefs of their parents.

For another, there is a pervasive stereotype that mathematicians lead a lonely existence. When we think about mathematicians, we imagine the lone genius hunched over a desk writing incomprehensible formulas that have lots of Greek letters in them. On occasion, these lonely figures may emerge from their cramped messy dens to shout Eureka and post the solution to a problem that five people in the world care about on a blackboard in a university hallway.

Girls find this prospect much less appealing than boys. Girls are much more likely than boys to state that want a career that has lots of social interaction as a part of it. When girls start making decisions about the classes they are going to take, they are much more likely to gravitate toward sciences like biology and psychology than toward math, chemistry or physics. Biology usually leads to pre-medical study in college, and the medical professions are seen as very social. Likewise, psychology, social work, and other helping professions are seen as social.

This research suggests that one big reason why girls are less likely to stick with math than boys is a difference in life goals.

The big question, then, is whether the stereotype about math and the hard sciences is true. In fact, much of modern science is highly collaborative. Scientists must find ways to work together to solve difficult problems. The myth of the lone scientist is just that-a myth. And that means that science has a public relations job to do. If we want more girls to go into math and science professions, we are going to need to do more work letting girls know what those careers will really involve.

I do want to be clear about one thing, though. There are lots of reasons to think that some girls will be more likely to succeed in a school environment without boys. So, I am not suggesting that we close all-girl schools. I am suggesting that the reason to open such schools is not because our current schools are failing to give a good math and science education to girls. However, we might use venues like all-girl schools to start the process of teaching girls more about what careers are possible with a good math and science education.

Talk about great timing. On September 18, during the Children& Nature Network's 2008 National Grassroots Gathering in Nebraska, mobile phones in the room lit up with good news: The U.S. House of Representatives had just voted to approve the No Child Left Inside Act of 2008. This was an extraordinary moment – symbolizing just how far the children and nature movement has come in just a few short years.

Sponsored by John P. Sarbanes (D-MD), with sixty-four co-sponsors, HR 3036 was approved by a bi-partisan vote of 293 to 109, would require K-12 school systems to build environmental literacy, strengthen teacher training and provide federal grants to help schools pay for outdoor education. Representing the No Child Left Inside Coalition that supported the bill, Don Baugh said it was “designed to help states provide high-quality outdoor and environmental instruction.” The Sierra Club, one of the 745 supporting organizations, lauded the legislation: “Hands-on outdoor environmental education offers an opportunity to improve academic performance in our schools and provides a solution for reversing the trends of childhood obesity and ‘nature deficit disorder’ that are afflicting a generation.”

In coming months and years (whether or not the Senate version of the bill is approved) educators will be encouraged to return nature to the classroom – but also to take students beyond the classroom, into the rich environments of nearby nature: parks, farms, the woods and creeks and canyons adjacent to schools.

This would be a far cry from the current realities in most schools. In recent years, too many school districts have turned inward, building windowless schools, banishing live animals from classrooms, and even dropping recess and field trips.

As passage of the No Child Left Behind Act illustrates, new progress is taking place nationally, and also among state legislatures, schools and businesses, civic organizations and government agencies. In March 2007, the New Mexico state legislature approved the Outdoor Classrooms Initiative, an effort to increase outdoor education in the state. Then on April 21, John Muir’s birthday, Washington Governor Christine Gregoire signed into law the Leave No Child Inside initiative, legislation that allocates $1.5 million a year to outdoor programs working with underserved children. More legislation is on the way. Additionally, C&NN is tracking and encouraging more than fifty regional campaigns in the U.S. and Canada, which are bringing together educators, health care professionals, business people, conservationists and others.

These campaigns, often focused on children’s health and ability to learn, are offering added power to a nascent, overdue movement for what might be called natural school reform.

In recent decades, this educational approach has gone by many names: community-oriented schooling, bioregional education, experiential education and, most recently, place-based or environment-based education. The basic idea is to use the surrounding community, including nature, as the preferred classroom. For more than one reason, the time may have come for place-based education. When polled about the future of education, Americans seem to have lost faith in education reform; they express interest and hope only when education is placed in the context of family and community — and steeped in place.

When it comes to reading skills, “the Holy Grail of education reform,” says researcher and educator David Sobel, place-based education should be considered “one of the knights in shining armor.” (Sobel’s most recent book is “Childhood and Nature: Design Principles for Educators.”) Students in these programs typically outperform their peers in traditional classrooms. A 1998 study documented the enhanced school achievement of youth who experience school curricula in which the environment is the principal organizer. Two related studies followed, conducted by the U.S.’s State Education and Environment Roundtable, both of which produced results consistent with the original study. More recently, factoring out other variables, studies of students in California and nationwide showed that schools that used outdoor classrooms and other forms of nature-based experiential education were associated with significant student gains in social studies, science, language arts, and math. One study found that students in outdoor science programs improved their science testing scores by 27 percent.

Why do kids learn so much better when they have a chance to get outdoors? Nature experiences reduce many barriers to learning, including stress and attention deficit, while encouraging the full use of the senses.

Andrea Faber Taylor and Francis Kuo, researchers at the University of Illinois have shown that the greener a child’s everyday environment, the more manageable their symptoms of attention-deficit disorder, and in a report published in August, 2008, described how children concentrate better after a simple walk in the park. Many other studies suggest that children who spend more time in nature are healthier, happier and smarter. Teachers, too, can benefit from natural education reform. In Canada, researchers found that teachers expressed renewed enthusiasm for teaching when they had time outdoors. In an era of increased teacher burnout, the impact of green schools and outdoor education on teachers should not be underestimated. These are just a few of the gifts of nature that educators and parents are discovering – or rediscovering.

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Richard Louv is chairman of the Children and Nature Network. He is the author of “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder.”

More resources:

• The Children& Nature Network Synthesis of Research and Studies

• House Approves No Child Left Inside Act

• No Child Left Inside Coalition

• “Last Child in the Woods,” Second Edition, with 100 actions for educators, parents and communities