Family structure and academic outcomes

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.

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