Family Type and Children's Growth in Reading and Math Over the Primary Grades

Abstract

In a random sample of Baltimore school children over the first 2 years of school, there are no direct effects of parent configuration on marks or test score gains in reading and math with one exception: African American children in singlemother families where other adults are present got higher marks in reading at the beginning of Ist grade than did their counterparts in motheronly or mother-father families. Irrespective of family type, however, children whose families had more economic resources and whose parents had higher expectations for their school performance consistently outperformed other children in reading and math. These findings suggest that the effects of parents' psychological and economic resources that are correlated with family type go far toward explaining previous reports of schooling deficits for children from single-parent homes, especially in the early grades. Key Words: early schooling, family type, father influence. FAMILY STRUCTURE AND CHILDREN'S COGNITIVE GROWTH IN PRIMARY GRADES The new American dilemma-limited life chances and outlook for the large number of children living in families with single parents-perplexes policymakers and public alike (Garfinkel & McLanahan, 1986; Kamerman & Kahn, 1988). Increasingly, a major factor limiting the prospects of children from single-parent families is their poor school performance, and, as the number of single parents continues to rise, this problem becomes more pressing. Between 1970 and 1991, the proportion of children maintained by the mother jumped from 11% to 22% (U.S. Department of Commerce, 1992). More than 25 million children were living in families that did not contain two parents in 1988, and estimates are that nearly half of all children will spend some part of their childhood in a single-mother household (Castro-Martin & Bumpass, 1989). For African Americans, single parenting is the modal pattern; in 1992 only 38% of African American children lived with two parents (U.S. Department of Commerce,1992). There is reason for serious concern. Children from single-parent homes repeat grades more often, drop out of school earlier, and generally do not perform as well in school as their counterparts who come from two-parent families (see Garfinkel & McLanahan, 1986; Hetherington, Camara, & Featherman, 1983; McLanahan & Sandefur, 1994). For example, the risk for grade repetition in 1988 was between 40% and 75% higher for children of single mothers than for children living with both biological parents (Dawson, 1991). Educational problems are especially severe for children of single mothers who are poor. A child of a single parent living in poverty is from 11% to 26% more likely to be behind in school than a child of the same sex and ethnicity who resides in a husband-wife family with income above the poverty level (Bianchi, 1984). The various aspects of the school performance of children from single-parent homes are not thought to be equally problematic, however. In the past, children of single parents were reported to do almost as well as others on standardized tests, whether IQ or achievement (see Hetherington et al., 1983), but not as well as others in terms of the more subjective aspects of students' role performance. For example, children from single-parent homes get lower marks across the board than do children from two-parent homes (Shinn, 1978), and deportment marks seem especially problematic (Thompson, Alexander, & Entwisle, 1988). There are several reasons why single parenting could have negative effects on children's schooling, chief among them the relative dearth of economic resources in single-parent homes (Entwisle & Alexander, 1995). McLanahan and her colleagues (Garfinkel & McLanahan, 1986; McLanahan & Sandefur, 1994) estimate that about half of the single-parent effect on schooling stems from economic deprivation. A second reason is the absence of the father. …