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Political scientists have taken up behavior genetics (BG) at a momentous time in the science of genetics. Momentous, because the science of genetics is undergoing a paradigm shift [Petronis, A. (2010). Epigenetics as a unifying principle in the aetiology of complex traits and diseases. Nature, 465(7299), 721–727]. This shifting paradigm poses a significant challenge to both the prevailing methodologies of behavior genetics – twin, family, adoption studies – and one of the most noteworthy findings to emerge from such studies, that is, which we can call the principle of minimal parental effects. This is the supposition that the effect of the shared parental rearing environment on the behavioral phenotypes of offspring is statistically equivalent to zero (Plomin & Daniels, 1987). It is not uncommon nowadays to find twin, adoption, and family studies utilized in the study of political behavior (e.g., Alford, J., Funk, C. L., & Hibbing, J. R. (2005). Are political orientations genetically transmitted? American Political Science Review, 99(2), 153–167.); likewise, the principle of minimal parental effects is frequently invoked in such studies (e.g., Mondak, J. J., Hibbing, M. V., Canache, D., Seligson, M. A., & Anderson, M. A. (2010). Personality and civic engagement: An integrative framework for the study of trait effects on political behavior. American Political Science Review, 104(1), 85–110.). As we shall see, the challenge comes from recent discoveries in genetics that are radically transforming our understanding of the genome and its relationship to environment.

This paper examines variable selection among various factors related to motor vehicle fatality rates using a rich set of panel data. Four Bayesian methods are used. These include Extreme Bounds Analysis (EBA), Stochastic Search Variable Selection (SSVS), Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA), and Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (BART). The first three of these employ parameter estimation, the last, BART, involves no parameter estimation. Nonetheless, it also has implications for variable selection. The variables examined in the models include traditional motor vehicle and socioeconomic factors along with important policy-related variables. Policy recommendations are suggested with respect to cell phone use, modernization of the fleet, alcohol use, and diminishing suicidal behavior.

This chapter reviews qualitative research on parenting children with disabilities published over the last 50 years to explore whether shifts in academic discourse and changes in professional training have affected research on parenting and/or the experiences of parents who are the subject of such research.

An extensive literature search was conducted, and 78 peer-reviewed, qualitative studies on the experience of parenting a child with a disability were included in the sample. Themes were extracted from the reviewed literature and compared across decades.

The findings of the present review suggest that some aspects of the parenting experience have changed very little. In particular, parents continue to experience negative reactions such as stress and anomie, especially early in their children’s lives, and socially imposed barriers such as unhelpful professionals, and a lack of needed services continue to create problems and inspire an entrepreneurial response. In addition, stigmatizing encounters with others continue to be a common occurrence. In contrast to earlier decades, studies conducted in more recent years have begun to use the social model of disability as an analytic frame and also increasingly report that parents are questioning and challenging the concept of “normal” itself.

Additional improvements are needed in professional education and services to reduce the negative reactions experienced by parents of children with disabilities.

The findings of this meta-analysis can serve as a guide to future research on parenting children with disabilities.

Children experience trauma more often than many early childhood educators realize. As many as 26% of children experience multiple trauma events such as abuse, neglect, parental substance abuse, parental incarceration, and so forth. Trauma impacts brain development in many negative ways that may have serious consequences on the child’s ability to learn, grow socially and emotionally, and develop physically. These brain changes also change how the child will play in the early childhood classroom, and information is given to help recognize the signs of trauma in children. The early childhood educator can make trauma-sensitive modifications in the classroom to assist the traumatized child’s ability to play out the problem. School counselors can be a resource for assisting early childhood teachers when working with traumatized children. A brief description of the importance of play therapy as a developmentally appropriate method to help traumatized young children is provided.

This article examines the dialectics of wrongful life and wrongful birth claims in Israel from 1986 until 2012. In May 2012 Israeli Supreme Court declared that while wrongful birth claims were still permitted, wrongful life claims were no longer accepted in a court of law. The article examines the conditions that allowed for and supported the expansion of wrongful life/birth claims until 2012. The article identifies two parallel dynamics of expansion: a broadening of the scope of negligent conduct and a view of milder forms of disabilities as damage that merits compensation. The article further suggests four explanations for such doctrinal evolution, two of which emanate from doctrinal ambiguities and the other two are rooted in social factors that have shaped the meaning of disability as a tragedy and state of inferiority. While recent developments seem promising, the article concludes with a word of caution. Such changes may reproduce past injustices mainly because the compensation mechanism has remained an individual-torts based one, which may run counter to the broader struggle for social change for disabled people.