Though many of America’s single parents do a great job raising their kids and getting them off to an excellent start in school and in life, research has long demonstrated that, in general, children tend to do better in two-parent, married families. A new research brief from the Institute for Family Studies offers yet more evidence of this basic fact.
Analysts Nicholas Zill and W. Bradford Wilcox are aggressively binary in their work: Traditional families consisting of two married parents and their biological children are compared against all other family structures, including single-parent, stepparent, and families built by adoption. They used data from two federal National Household Education Surveys nearly twenty-five years apart: the first dates from 1996, and surveyed the parents of more than 17,500 elementary and secondary students; the second was in 2019 and interviewed the parents of just under 16,000 students. The authors focused on four negative academic outcomes of interest: if a child repeated one or more grades, if a child had been suspended or expelled, if parents were contacted about their child’s schoolwork, and if parents were contacted about their child’s behavior in school. They then examined the frequency of occurrences over time and in each family type, and compared the numbers based on factors such as parent education level, race and ethnicity, and the ages and genders of students in both family structures.
Overall, the incidence of all four outcomes was lower in 2019 compared to 1996. Reports of suspensions and grade repetition were down by half or more, likely reflecting systemic efforts by schools to move away from such practices. The incidence of schools reaching out to parents about student behavior and schoolwork was also modestly lower. In both surveys, however, students from non-traditional families were still more likely to experience these outcomes than their peers from traditional ones.
Zill and Wilcox note that the proportion of U.S. students living in single-parent, step-parent, and other non-traditional families increased a bit between the 1996 and 2019 surveys—from 41 percent to 43.5 of the total. This jibes with other data showing that the previous explosive growth of family units such as those headed by single parents has slowed in recent years and may even be leveling off. The proportion of students from non-traditional families who were suspended or expelled from school fell by 39 percent, the proportion who repeated a grade declined by 47 percent, and the proportion whose parents were contacted due to their child’s difficulties with schoolwork and classroom behavior both went down by 16 percent. Despite all this, their relative risk for these negative outcomes (compared to two-parent family peers) increased or remained the same. In fact, the data indicate that family structure is at least as strong a predictor of school suspensions, grade repetition, and student misbehavior as race.
The data do not allow for examination of the mechanisms responsible for the stark division in outcomes nor for possible differentiation among two-parent versus single-parent non-traditional families. The analysts thus conclude that no matter how or how much the American school climate has changed over the years, the educational advantages of being raised “by one’s own married parents” have stayed steady.
SOURCE: Nicholas Zill and W. Bradford Wilcox, “Strong Families, Better Student Performance: The More Things Change, the More They Remain the Same,” Institute for Family Studies (August 2022).
