That's the message of a new study that says young children of churchgoing parents fare better behaviorally, emotionally and cognitively than do children of parents who never attend church. In fact, the more often the parents attend, the better off the kids are.

The study by sociologist John P. Bartkowski and a team of researchers at Mississippi State University examined data from the nationwide Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, which evaluated first-graders by interviewing parents and teachers. In the data Bartkowski used, some 9,500 parents and 8,800 teachers were interviewed. The ECLS study was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics. ...