Divorce, Family Structure, and the Academic Success of Children

William Jeynes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136398117
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

Trace the influence of family factors on children's emotional and educational well-being! The effect of family changes on children's academic success is a new subject for study. Divorce, Family Structure, and the Academic Success of Children is a comprehensive volume that brings research on this hotly debated topic up to date. With clear tables and incisive arguments, it is a single-volume reference on this vexing sociocultural problem. Divorce, Family Structure, and the Academic Success of Children offers a close look at the historical background and current theory of this field of study. But it is more than a compendium of known facts and completed studies. It examines issues of appropriate methodology and points out concerns for planning future research. Divorce, Family Structure, and the Academic Success of Children summarizes current knowledge of the effects of various influences on children's emotional and educational well-being, including:

• divorce and remarriage
• single-parent families
• nontraditional family structures
• race
• socioeconomic status
• mobility

Educators, theorists, sociologists, and psychologists will find this volume an essential resource. With hundreds of useful references and clear organization, it presents new ideas in an easy-to-use format that makes it an ideal textbook as well.

Chapter 1

Historical Background of the Study

The research studies presented in this book attempt to examine the effects of family structure, and especially parental divorce, on the academic achievement of adolescents from a number of different perspectives. This book traces the development of the study of the effects of parental family structure from its incipiency. It will examine the major debates and controversies that surround this field of study. The research presented in this book will investigate the effects of divorce and remarriage using a variety of approaches. It will also examine how other, less common, parental family structures impact the academic outcomes of children. Through it all, one needs to remember that by examining this research, the purpose of this book is not merely to engage in some intellectual exercise. These studies involve the lives of real students and real families. As social scientists examine such issues, it is hoped that the products of all the work in the last century, this century, and beyond, will strengthen students, parents, families, teachers, our nation, and the world.

Chronological Highlights

The study of the relationship between family structure and academic achievement started many years ago. H.E.G. Sutherland (1930) undertook the first such study, in which he found a difference in the IQ between one- and two-parent children. Sutherland did not distinguish between the kinds of one-parent families. Hence, it is difficult to distinguish how much his results measured the effects of any specific family structure on academic achievement. Nevertheless, Sutherland’s work launched the study of the relationship between family configuration and academic achievement. Fortes (1933) conducted some of the first research on stepfamilies at about the same time. He examined the relationship between “stepparenthood and juvenile delinquency” (p. 153). Fortes uncovered differences in the likelihood of stepchildren versus children from intact families committing delinquent acts. Nevertheless, the differences Fortes discovered were smaller than in previous studies. Although these major research inquiries took place during the first half of the 1930s, educators and social scientists initiated few studies on single parenthood and remarriage until just after World War II. The dearth of studies prior to World War II probably finds its roots in the fact that single parenthood occurred only on rare occasions prior to World War II.

After World War II sociologists and educators expressed new interest in the effects of single parenthood and remarriage. Because the departure of many young men into military service temporarily created many single-parent homes, World War II played a large role in the birth of this area of study. In addition, because of the pressures of extended wartime marital separation, there arose a temporary surge in the divorce rate. As a result, “father absence” studies emerged in increasing frequency during the first twenty years following this period.

William Smith (1945) wrote on the unique psychological adjustments facing the stepchild. Ivan Nye (1952) undertook an often-quoted study that took into consideration the interplay of other variables relevant to single-parenthood. He examined such factors as gender, sibling number, and whether the mother worked as intervening variables. Although Nye’s study focused on “adjustment” rather than “achievement,” his study produced two especially noteworthy results. First, Nye’s results demonstrated “a significant association . . . with broken homes, on the average, showing poorer adolescent-parent adjustment” (p. 330). Nye noted, however, that the differences did not appear as great as some believed. Second, contrary to what many Americans believe, Nye found that children from “mother only” families “showed better adjustment than those with a ‘stepfather’” (p. 330). Although Nye’s work represented the most ambitious of the immediate post-World War II period, Nye, like so many of his contemporaries, lumped all the broken homes into one category. Therefore, we have no way of knowing how much of the effect stems from one-parent families in which one parent has passed away, and families in which divorce or other factors were at work. This distinction carried particular importance, because the ratio of each of these two causes of single-parent status were considerably different in 1952 than they are today.

Carlsmith (1964,1973) conducted a study which sought to measure the effect of parental absence on academic achievement in college students. In these cases all the instances of parental absence resulted from World War II military duty. Carlsmith found that students who experienced father absence suffered in academic achievement only if the military service necessitated an extended absence. Although many studies on divorce cite the Carlsmith study, some questions exist as to the extent that findings from temporary father-absence studies are applicable to the divorce and remarriage scenario. Salzman (1987), for example, conducted a meta-analysis in which she found that divorce had a major effect on educational achievement, but that father absence due to military service had none.

With the rising divorce rates of the 1960s and 1970s, researchers redoubled their efforts to further understand the effects of divorce on academic achievement. E. Mavis Hetherington and Judith Wallerstein contributed a great deal to the groundwork for research in divorce. Hetherington initiated several studies during the 1970s-1990s indicating that children from one-parent families trail children from intact homes in achievement and psychological adjustment (Hetherington 1972, 1973, 1989; Shok and Jurich, 1992). Hetherington also contributed a great deal to the knowledge of the effect of divorce on girls, discovering that adolescent girls from one-parent homes tend to exhibit more forms of “provocative” behavior with males than girls from intact homes (Hetherington 1972, 1973). Hetherington (1989) also found that a child’s adjustment to divorce depends, in part, on the child’s temperament.

Judith Wallerstein and colleagues conducted a longitudinal study on sixty volunteer families and 131 children ranging in age from three to eighteen. Wallerstein studied these families “intensively during a six-week period near the time of marital separation” and then again during follow-up studies after eighteen months, five years, ten years, and twenty-five years following the separation (Wallerstein and Lewis, 1998, p. 370). Numerous researchers applauded Wallerstein’s longitudinal study as one of the most significant contributions to the body of research on divorce (Collins, 1981; Corsica, 1980; Heyman, 1992). Wallerstein found divorce’s impact on educational achievement remained substantial even five to ten years after the initial separation (Wallerstein and Blakeslee, 1989; Wallerstein and Kelly, 1980). Wallerstein estimated that 40 percent of the children in her study were “underachievers” (Wallerstein, 1987; Wallerstein and Lewis, 1998).

Despite its many strengths, the Wallerstein longitudinal study contains two weaknesses: (1) since the researchers used volunteers, one cannot easily ascertain whether the results are generalizable; and (2) since Wallerstein and her colleagues offered counseling advice to those that participated in the study, they acknowledged that this weakness could have somewhat weakened the effects of divorce in their study (Wallerstein and Kelly, 1980; Wallerstein and Lewis, 1998). In other words, the existence of counseling may have reduced the effects for divorce to a smaller level than might have otherwise been the case. But beyond this, the question of the extent that their volunteers constituted a representative sample leads one to conclude that there exists a need to make certain that future studies of this kind are representative.

The extent to which a sample is determined randomly poses even more of a problem on research into stepfamilies than it does one-parent families. Ganong and Coleman (1984) found that only 15 to 16 percent of the studies on stepfamilies used a random sample. Bernard’s (1942) study, comparing personality differences among children from intact and reconstituted families, also used purely volunteers. Ironically, Bernard’s work is one of the most cited works on remarriage in all of the research literature. Yet by the 1980s, several researchers started to point out that all of Bernard’s subjects were either friends of his or acquaintances of those friends (Collins, 1981; Corsica, 1980).

Throughout the period that researchers have investigated divorce and remarriage, three types of subject pools generally used were: (1) volunteers; (2) random samples; and (3) a clinical population. Not surprisingly, a meta-analysis by Amato and Keith (1991) indicated thatclinical populations generally yielded the largest effects, volunteers the smallest effects, and random samples moderate effects. The reasoning behind Amato’s results is quite intuitive. If one examines a clinical population, he or she is more likely to find the most extreme cases of the detrimental effects of divorce. These clinical studies may only accurately tell us that the worst case scenarios in one-parent families are more severe than the worst case scenarios in intact families. Studies using volunteers present almost the reverse problem. The volunteers used are often college students and acquaintances of the researcher who tend to be well-adjusted and almost by definition have overcome some of the obstacles normally associated with divorce and remarriage. With these facts in mind, the need for representative samples appears obvious.

In the 1980s and 1990s, researchers redoubled their attempts to make sure their samples were more representative of the general population. Researchers availed themselves of the results of national surveys in order to obtain a more representative and larger sample of students.

Sally Banks Zakariya (1982) summarized the results of one of the first of these studies. This study, cosponsored by the National Association of Elementary School Principals (NAESP), and the Institute of Development of Educational Activities, found that children from one-parent homes showed “lower school achievement in school than their two-parent classmates” (Zakariya, 1982, p. 36). Zakariya also noted that children in stepfamilies achieved at a level between these two groups, but not significantly different from either one. Guidubaldi et al., (1983) conducted a nationwide NAESP study using a vast array of achievement measures and reported statistically significant differences in achievement between students from one- and two-parent families, even when controlling for family income level. McLanahan and Sandefur (1994) also found significant differences for academic achievement between one- and two-parent families. They investigated a few additional areas that Guidubaldi and colleagues did not examine. First, McLanahan and Sandefur did distinctly investigate the achievement of children from reconstituted families. They noted that children from these families achieved at the same level as children from single-parent families. But McLanahan and Sandefur generally failed to distinguish among the different types of stepfamilies. Second, McLanahan and Sandefur controlled for socioeconomic status (SES) in a more sophisticated way than Guidubaldi and colleagues. Although Guidubaldi and colleagues merely controlled for SES, McLanahan and Sandefur sought to determine divorce’s impact on the SES level. In addition, McLanahan and Sandefur’s study looked at SES as more than merely a certain level of income.

Overall, the examination of divorce and remarriage still represents a young science. It constitutes a discipline that still suffers from a high incidence of methodological problems and questions. Researchers are just now coming to grips with how to best measure those things that are easiest to quantify. Yet the progress in using more precise methodology, especially within the past few years, is undeniable. Given this trend, more progress seems likely in the coming years.

Historical and Contemporary Facts Regarding Family Structure

Facts Regarding Divorce

Being familiar with both the historical and contemporary facts about divorce carries importance for a number of reasons: (1) it helps us converse about divorce and remarriage in an intelligent and objective manner; (2) it helps us understand how widespread divorce is in its influence; and (3) it helps us understand some of unique challenges that confront our society that did not face us in past generations.

Historical Background

Until the early 1960s, Americans maintained a very different attitude toward divorce than is found today. Until this time, the vast majority of Americans believed that in order to keep the children from being hurt, divorce should be avoided in all but the most extreme circumstances. Psychologists and ministers alike taught that marital differences could be worked out if a married couple made a sufficient effort. Frequently, those who initiated divorce were considered selfish, placing their own needs ahead of their family (Furstenberg and Cherlin, 1991).

In 1900 only 3 percent of all couples divorced (Cherlin, 1978). In fact, until the 1930s most remarriages were due to the death of a spouse (Cherlin, 1978). Even including those children who had lost a parent due to death, the percentage of children in single-parent homes remained in the single digits until the early 1960s (Ahlburg and DeVita, 1992; Fitzpatrick, 1993). But beginning in 1962-1963, the percentage began to soar, rising to about 50 percent by 1970 and almost tripling from a rate of about 2.1 per 1,000 population to about 5.5 per thousand by 1991 (Ahlburg and DeVita, 1992). Currently, about 25 percent of children live in single-parent homes and roughly 50 to 60 percent will live in single-parent homes at some time in their childhood (Ahlburg and DeVita, 1992; Heyman, 1992). The statistics are even more sobering for African Americans. In 1960, 67 percent of African-American children lived in intact families. By 1980, this percentage declined to 42 percent, and by 1991, only 36 percent of these children lived in intact families (Ahlburg and DeVita, 1992; Bumpass, Sweet, and Martin, 1990).

Several prominent theories attempt to explain the dramatic rise in the number of couples filing for divorce. Most of these theories focus on one or two major themes. First, adults, prior to the 1960s, placed a higher priority on the welfare of their family (and especially their children) than they do today. Second, the industrial revolution created a societal structure conducive to higher rates of divorce.

A considerable amount of evidence supports both of these statements, although some facts remain unexplained. Historical studies, for example, surveying the history of fatherhood in America have been especially useful in understanding the changing attitudes that Americans have toward the family. These historical studies indicate, for example, that fathers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century committed a level of time and energy in the raising of their children that would be unfathomable in most American families today (Furstenberg, 1988). The rising percentage of mothers with young children in the workforce indicates that a declining number of mothers believe that child rearing represents a full-time job and that it may be more difficult than in the past for some families to live on one income. Even as late as 1940, only one in seven married women worked outside the home, and the ratio stood considerably lower for women married with young children (Furstenberg and Cherlin, 1991). The priorities of American fathers and mothers have changed and are still changing.

Evidence also suggests that industrialization has played a role in rising divorce rates, although the evidence is less persuasive. Generally speaking, when a nation becomes industrialized, its divorce rate tends to rise (Goode, 1992). Many European nations, for example, have experienced significant increases in their rates of divorce since World War II (McLanahan and Sandefur, 1994). Surely, increased interaction with the opposite sex and greater financial independence among women tend to accompany industrialization. Each of these trends would appear to increase the likelihood of divorce.

Nevertheless, there exist some shortcomings to theories that rely strongly on the link between divorce and industrialization. First, between the years 1890 and the late 1970s, two nations enjoyed greater levels of economic growth and industrialization than any other: Japan and the United States. Yet the divorce rates of both of these nations went in entirely different directions. While the divorce rate of the United States rose substantially, the divorce rate in Japan actually fell during this time (Goode, 1992). In addition, while other European nations did experience a rise in their divorce rates, the U.S. rate rose dramatically since 1962 (Hobbs and Lippman, 1990). Between 1960 and 1990, the U.S. divorce rate rose 12 percentage points. The divorce rate increases of the major European nations ranged from between 1 and 10 percentage points, with the average resting roughly halfway in between (McLanahan and Sandefur, 1994). Today, the United States holds the highest divorce rate in the world, with a rate 64 percent higher than second place Great Britain (Hobbs and Lippman, 1990). Therefore, while industrialization played some role in the increase of divorce rates, other factors help explain why the United States stands as the divorce capital of the world.

Interesting Facts

The near 50 percent divorce rate that exists in America today is of concern to many psychologists and researchers because of the many people affected by it. In a Harris poll adults were asked, “What is most important in life?” Ninety-six percent of those surveyed responded “to have a good family life” (Stinnett and DeFrain, 1985, pp. 3-4). In a similar Gallup poll, “eight of every ten people” called family “one of the most important or the most important facet of their lives” (Stinnett and DeFrain, 1985, pp. 3-4). Surely, divorce causes grand disappointment and hurt in an area so important to many people.

Fifty percent of the marriages that took place in 1970 will likely end in divorce (Block, Block, and Gjerde, 1986). This figure is a direct consequence of rising divorce rates. From 1970 to 1990, while marriage rates declined 30 percent, divorce rates surged ahead 40 percent (Ahlburg and DeVita, 1992). From 1980 onward, the number of divorces per year generally fluctuated between 1.1 to 1.5 million (Fitzpatrick, 1993; Zill, 1994). During that time, the divorce rate finally appeared to stabilize, after years of dramatic growth (Cherlin, 1988). Yet simply examining the rise in divorce rates starting in the 1960s does not communicate the extent to which children have suffered during this time. In 1950, only 46 percent of the divorces that took place involved children (Cherlin, 1978). By 1974, this figure rose to 60 percent (Cherlin, 1978). Estimates are that in the future, 70 percent of the divorces taking place may involve children under the age of eighteen (Block, Block, and Gjerde, 1986). Hence, not only have divorce rates risen in the past few decades, but so has the propensity for a divorce to involve children. Many of these children are young children. The average duration of a marriage that ends in divorce stands at only about 6.5 to 7 years (Chadwick and Heaton, 1992).

The result of these trends is that there has been a significant demographic change in the percentage of American children living with both natural parents. The percentage of children who eventually live with single par...