That children are best reared in a home with two loving and understanding parents is so obvious as to need no statement" Dorothy Barclay (1959) has commented, typifying current opinion. This viewpoint is so prevalent that it comes close to heresy to question it. Although William Goode (19S6), in his comprehensive study of divorce, points to the almost total lack of research on the effects of divorce on children, he concludes:At every developmental phase of childhood, the child needs the father (who is usually the absent parent) as an object of love, security, or identification, or even as a figure against whom to rebel safely. ... It would be surprising if the absence of the father had no effect on the child.

An extension of the Sears' studies of lower class families based on a 5-year period of direct home observation of the family group. The aggressive children were more closely supervised by parents, had dominant mothers, were exposed to inconsistent methods of discipline, and had parents who were punitive but placed low demands on the children. From Psyc Abstracts 36:01:3FG79M.

The Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study was founded in 1935 with the double purpose of preventing delinquency and providing research in the area of delinquency prevention. 325 boys were selected to receive preventive treatment, and a carefully matched group of 325 boys were provided as a control group. The treatment program utilized many of the practices prevalent in welfare work: family guidance, medical and academic assistance, co-ordination of community agencies, and supplementary entertainment for the boys. This article traces into adulthood the lives of 253 of the "treatment" boys and their 253 matched mates in the control group. Although the boys were counseled for an average of five years, whatever benefits they may have received were not reflected in their criminal rates: As many treated boys as control boys had been convicted of crimes; they had committed approximately equal numbers of crimes and did not differ significantly in the ages when such crimes were committed. Nevertheless, evidence gleaned from this program suggests that early treatment and intensive contact with the boy may be an effective means toward crime prevention.

Thomson et al. (1997) proposed that the extant Elseya from the Nicholson-Gregory drainages in northwestern Queensland was conspecific with the holotype of Elseya lavarackorum, which comprised a fossil carapace and associated plastron excavated from the late Pleistocene Terrace Site at Riversleigh. Analysis of additional fossil material, and examination of a suite of 16 scute characters (eight for each of the carapace and plastron) by Joseph-Ouni et al. (2020) concluded that the two species were distinct and represented separate Elseya lineages and proposed the new name Elseya oneiros for the extant lineage. Recently, the Turtle Taxonomy Working Group (TTWG) in their 9th edition Checklist of Turtles of the World (TTWG 2021) questioned the status of E. oneiros and placed it in the synonymy of E. lavarackorum, making the claim, amongst others, that the skeletal characters of Thomson et al. (1997) were not addressed. Here we fully address the claims made and evaluate those skeletal characters. We also assess an additional nine thoracic skeletal characters of the pertinent Elseya species, including E. dentata sensu stricto. The results again do not support the conclusions of Thomson et al. (1997) of the holotype of Elseya lavarackorum being conspecific with the extant Elseya from the Nicholson-Gregory Rivers, reaffirms the proposal offered by Joseph-Ouni et al. (2020) for the placement of E. lavarackorum in the subgenus Elseya, and the status of E. oneiros in the Nicholson-Gregory drainages as a distinct species.

No abstract