Polygyny and Child Health Revisited

Until recently, the United Nations, development practitioners, and academics unanimously labeled polygyny a harmful cultural practice for child health. Lawson et al. (1) reassess the association between polygyny and child health using data from 56 Tanzanian villages. Their study suggests that children coresiding with their polygynous father tend to be better off in terms of weight-for-height, a measure of wasting, compared with children of monogamous fathers.
The study’s claim that child health is positively or not correlated with polygyny is not fully supported by the data for four main reasons: [...]