A high school student writing a paper on single parents and their children was stunned and hurt by the many sweeping and scientifically-unfounded criticisms she discovered during the course of her research. She is a child of a single mother, and wanted to know what was behind all of the stereotyping and stigmatizing.

There’s a lot of baby angst going around these days. The concern is that women no longer feel compelled to have kids, and growing numbers are deciding not to. The purveyors of panic believe that America is doomed if this continues. That’s not my exaggerated gloss. They really do say that women’s decisions not to procreate “may spell disaster for the country.”

Previously, I pointed to the critics who used data to show that the sky is not actually falling. Then I dissected the approaches the panic-perpetrators used to try to coax women to do their baby-making duty. (Mocking, shaming, threatening, and bribing were the primary tactics.)

Here I want to address a different question that seems to have gotten lost in all of the discussion of the so-called fertility crisis that is part of a global post-familialism. Supposed those who are urging women to go forth and multiply actually succeed?

Before I became so passionate about studying and writing about single life (and not just practicing it), my primary area of expertise was the psychology of lying and detecting lies. I still write a bit about that topic now and then, and have published a few books on the topic.

With Lance Armstrong and Manti Te’o making so many headlines lately, I’ve been asked many questions by people in the media. So with your indulgence, I thought I’d step away from my usual single-at-heart themes for a moment and share with you the answer to a question I was asked recently: How do men and women differ as liars?

Just before Thanksgiving, NPR posted a question on its website asking people to weigh in about spending holidays alone. Are they doing so themselves and why?

NPR got a flood of answers. From my perch as a practitioner and scholar of single life, what I found most intriguing was the range of responses. My guess is that if NPR had posed this question three or four decades ago, the reactions would have been overwhelmingly negative – people appalled at the idea of spending a holiday alone, or pitying those who do. People who were planning to be alone perhaps would have been reluctant to say so.

Jeffrey Eugenides’ Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel, The Marriage Plot, is not a book I intended to read. The story of a college grad torn between two lovers seemed too likely to be matrimaniacal. But then a friend passed along her copy, and well, it did win the Pulitzer Prize, so I figured I’d at least start it. (Spoiler alert: I’m going to reveal the ending.)

Madeleine is an English major who is smitten by the great British novels, even though it is deconstructionism that is all the rage at Brown University in the 80s, when the story takes place. The two men vying for her affections are Mitchell, a spiritual type, and Leonard, a brilliant and quirky biologist who turns out to be a “manic-depressive” (as he is called in the novel).

The book is a coming-of-age story about the three recent grads, with a focus on the romantic triangle. The tremendously talented Madeleine attends mostly to the needs of Leonard, putting her own aspirations on hold. She marries very young (early 20s) and wonders whether she should have chosen Mitchell instead. All that is the ho-hum part.

Write a story or publish an article about how women just can’t have it all and so they are rushing back into the arms of their kids, or about how women just really want to stay home with their kids no matter how many fancy degrees and elitist jobs they might have, and you will be an instant media sensation.

Funny, though, about the kinds of stories, including the results of scientific studies, that just don’t get that kind of ink. The one I want to tell you about today has been available online since February of 2012 (and in print soon after), but I have yet to see any attention paid to it in the popular press.

Maybe that’s because the study suggests that very few women express regrets about prioritizing their careers instead of their families.

Recently I saw the movie, The Five-Year Engagement. I know, I should have known better. It was pretty funny at times, but honestly, with all the talent and creativity on offer, does Hollywood really have to produce the exact same ending every single time?

I hadn’t read anything about the movie before I went, so I was surprised to discover that my very own field of social psychology had a role. Emily Blunt, playing Violet, heads to the University of Michigan to join a lab group that apparently designs experiments by generating totally silly ideas that have no relationship whatsoever to psychological theory or anything else. All a big game. Also, there is no script for the experiment. The professor and the various students mill around behind the one-way mirror taunting one another about who is going to go into the room with the participants and actually run the study.

I cringed all the way through those scenes.

From what I’ve read about her, Amanda Dougherty seemed to be a traditional high school student. She’s a 17-year old at a Catholic high school who was so excited about her junior prom that she bought her dress months in advance. She had also bought her ticket to the prom and her shoes and other accessories.

Amanda and her girlfriends started a Facebook page, closed to the guys, so they could share pictures of their prom dresses to make sure no two of them would show up in the same gown.

Then, about a week or so before the prom, her lout of a prom date backed out. Now this is what I love about Amanda: She did not let that deter her. She was going to go to the prom solo.

If you are a young single person, look out! Your parents and grandparents, along with others their age, may think of you as self-centered slackers who need to grow up already. They think you are narcissists, the “me generation.” Actually, they are wrong. Here’s why their perceptions are so distorted.

“Kids these days!” When people of a certain age express that exasperation, they are not talking about children. They are rolling their eyes and tut-tutting about those who have graduated from high school and should be on their way toward a conventional path though adult life. The problem is, the older generations are judging the younger ones by the standards of their own times, and the young adult years have changed dramatically in a short time.