For doctors, everything causes cancer. For psychologists, it's shaping up to be that everything about the family makes you, or your children, dysfunctional. A new study finds parents with psychiatric problems are twice as likely to have autistic children. Another one says trying to adopt children won't necessarily help either because adoption increases a child's risk of developing behavioural problems, such as attention deficiency, hyperactivity, defiance, depression and separation anxiety, in their teenage years.

The first study, by researchers at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, examined the family records of 1,227 children in Sweden with autism between 1977 and 2003, and compared them with families of 31,000 'normal' children. They found parents of autistic children are far more likely to have experienced mental illnesses.

In the second study, University of Minnesota scientists found adopted children have higher odds of having behavioural and emotional problems as teenagers in the United States. They reached this conclusion after comparing the behavioural history of 540 adolescents who were natural born, 178 who were adopted within the US and 514 adopted from outside the US. Those who were adopted were twice as likely to have consulted mental health professionals, even if they did not develop full-fledged mental or behavioural problems. The greatest TV programme of all times, The Simpsons (pictured), has captured something eternal about the nuclear family.