ANN ARBOR, Mich.---It doesn't take a village to raise a child after all, according to University of Michigan research. "In the African villages that I study in Mali, children fare as well in nuclear families as they do in extended families," said U-M researcher Beverly Strassmann, professor of anthropology and faculty associate at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR). "There's a naïve belief that villages raise children communally, when in reality children are raised by their own families and their survival depends critically on the survival of their mothers." Strassmann's recently published studies provide the first empirical data on...