Kids who grow up with poor single mothers are less likely to expect to go to college and more likely to get into trouble in school and to perform poorly academically, according to a study by a Rice University sociologist.
The impact of both a family's limited economic resources and a parent's lack of educational aspirations for their children is most evident in single-mother homes, said Holly Heard, assistant professor of sociology, who will present the results of her study Aug. 17 at the American Sociological Association's annual meeting in San Francisco.
She analyzed data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health – a nationally representative study of 20,000 adolescents in grades 7 through 12 interviewed in 1995; follow-up interviews were conducted a year later with 14,000 of the participants. That national study was designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman and Kathleen Mullan Harris with a grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and cooperative funding from 17 other agencies.
Heard examined four types of family and parental resources that might help explain the relationship between family structure and adolescent educational achievement: economic resources, parental social control, parents' conveyance of their educational expectations to their children, and family stress created by frequent moving.
"My goal was to consider inequality in family and parental resources as possible mechanisms that explain the negative effects of non-intact family structure on three measures of adolescents' interest in school: grade point average, college expectations and school discipline," Heard said. "The results show that the level of economic resources within families had a strong and positive relationship with all three school outcomes and consistently explained the deficits faced by children living with single mothers."
Adolescents living with both biological or adoptive parents have the highest grades, are more likely to have high expectations of going to college and are least likely to have been suspended or expelled from school. In contrast, adolescents living with single fathers and with nonbiological parents/relatives have the lowest levels of academic achievement, are least likely to have high expectations of attending college and are most likely to have faced school discipline.