Single Parent Homes And Education

Home life is critical to school performance. Research has shown that a stable, traditional two-parent home produces students who are far more likely to do well in school...and conversely, that students who come from single-parent homes are at a significant disadvantage, and more likely to underperform. Thus, an increase in divorce rates and the incidence of unmarried parents (such as the upswing experienced in the United States in the past several decades) can be shown to contribute strongly to a decrease in overall academic performance.

The problems faced by children of single parents are well-documented. The National Center for Education Statistics confirms that:

“Children living in single-parent households are, on average, less successful in school and experience more behavior problems than children living in two-parent households (McLanahan and Sandefur, 1994).”

The NCES further states that:

“In two-parent households, children are more likely to do well academically, to participate in extracurricular activities, and to enjoy school and are less likely to have ever repeated a grade or to have been suspended or expelled if their fathers have high as opposed to low involvement in their schools.” ^[1]

It is also important to note that many (perhaps most) single-parent households are run by the mother; however, the available data shows that children do better when their fathers are directly involved in their education.^[2] Thus, children from single-mother households are at a double disadvantage, facing the problems common to single-parent households and also the problems inherent when the father is not involved.

Although it is tempting to ascribe all of a student’s failure to perform in class to less-than-ideal family conditions, this is an oversimplification unsupported by data. A study by Penn State in 2001 found that, while there was a performance gap between students from single-parent and two-parent households in a majority of industrialized countries, the United States ranked at the bottom of the list.

"For both academic subjects — math and science — the largest performance gap between children from single-parent homes and those from two-parent families is found in the U.S.," Pong and Hampden-Thompson told attendees at the American Sociological Association meeting today (Aug 21) in Anaheim. "In other words, the U.S. ranks bottom among the 11 developed countries in terms of the equality of school performance between children from these two types of families." ^[3]

Clearly, then, there are factors inherent to the American public educational system which exacerbate the problems experienced by children of single parents.

References[edit]

1. ↑ http://nces.ed.gov/pubs98/web/98121.asp
2. ↑ http://nces.ed.gov/pubs98/web/98121.asp
3. ↑ http://www.psu.edu/ur/2001/singleparentmath.html