Good debt and bad debt are real—and they have a big impact on families.

Quoted: There is such a thing as good and bad debt—and the bad kind might be making us fear all of it, even when we shouldn’t. In a paper published in the most recent edition of the medical journal Pediatrics, Lawrence Berger, the director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, and Jason Houle, a sociology professor at Dartmouth College, suggest that when it comes to the youngest members of a household, not only does the nature of the debt matter a great deal, but certain types of debt are associated with better-adjusted kids.