Parents’ provision of social capital, in turn, is positively associated with children’s school success. Second, parents are important sources of social capital and provide many resources to children, including emotional support, encouragement, everyday assistance, and help with homework. Family income, in turn, is a good predictor of children’s school grades and test scores. First, children in single-parent households have a lower standard of living than do children in two-parent households. Several good reasons exist for assuming that the number of parents in a household affects children’s academic achievement (for reviews, see Amato, 2010 Brown 2010 McLanahan and Percheski 2008). Nevertheless, the rise in child poverty associated with single parenthood since the 1960s may have had negative consequences for children’s educational outcomes. Given that single parents (usually mothers) are more likely than married mothers to be poor, this result is not surprising. Several studies have shown that the rise in the percentage of children living with single parents since the 1960s was related to an increase in child poverty in the U.S., although the strength of this association varies with the particular years studied ( Eggebeen and Lichter, 1991 Iceland, 2003 Martin, 2006 Thomas and Sawhill, 2005). None of these studies, however, used longitudinal data to see if increases in single parenthood are accompanied by declines in the aggregate level of student performance. These four studies are useful in showing that single parenthood and academic performance are associated within schools and countries. Moreover, the gap in achievement between children with one rather than two parents was smaller in countries with more supportive social policies, such as family and child allowances and parental leave. In a cross-national study, Pong, Dronkers, and Hampden-Thompson (2003) found that single-parent family status was negatively associated with math and science achievement scores in nine out of 11 countries. Bankston and Caldas (1998) obtained comparable results with aggregate data on general academic achievement from students in Louisiana. students performed more poorly on math and reading achievement tests in schools with high proportions of children from single-parent families, even after controlling for school socioeconomic status and other school characteristics. Using multilevel modeling, Pong (1997, 1998) found that U.S. This in turn is damaging the country economically by making us less hospitable to innovation while also making millions of Americans less competitive in an increasingly demanding worldwide marketplaceĪ small number of studies have suggested that single parenthood has problematic consequences for children’s school performance at the aggregate or societal level. Very high rates of family fragmentation in the United States are subtracting from what very large numbers of students are learning in school and holding them back in other ways. Some observers have claimed that the rise of single-parent families (as reflected in high rates of divorce and nonmarital childbearing) is the primary cause of school failure and related problems of delinquency, drug use, teenage pregnancies, poverty, and welfare dependency in American society ( Blankenhorn, 1995 Fagan, 1999 Pearlstein, 2011 Popenoe, 2009 Whitehead, 1997). The combination of these two observations suggests that the rise in single parenthood has lowered (or slowed improvements in) the educational achievement of children in the United States. Second, research shows that children in single-parent households score below children in two-parent households, on average, on measures of educational achievement ( Amato, 2005 Brown, 2010 McLanahan and Sandefur, 1994). Given current trends, about of half of all children will spend some time living with single parents before reaching adulthood ( McLanahan and Percheski, 2008). Only 9 percent of children lived with single parents in the 1960s-a figure that increased to 28 percent in 2012 ( Child Trends, 2013). First, the percentage of children living with single parents increased substantially in the United States during the second half of the 20 th century. Two well-known facts provide a rationale for the current study.
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