Family Achievement

Family Qualities and Achievement Levels Family Demographic Correlates

For more than 30 years, Nick Stinnett, John DeFrain, Sylvia Asay, and several of their colleagues have studied more than 24,000 family members in the United States and 27 other countries around the world to find out which family characteristics make for a strong family unit and happy, successful family members. From completing such extensive work, they have learned that although demographic variables sometimes correlate with family well-being, family strengths largely have to do with the ways families function and not the internal structure of the family. Included in the strong families these researchers have worked with are two-parent families, single-parent families, stepfamilies, extended families, families with gay and lesbian members, families who have faced crises, parents who grew up in happy families, and parents who grew up in troubled families, among other demographic compositions. The authors also note that although each family has distinctive strengths and each culture has unique family strengths, considerable similarities exist between families and between cultures when it comes to family strengths and their development.

In their studies of happy families, Barbara Kerr and her colleagues have found likewise and have stated that no religion, class, or race holds a monopoly on family happiness. Though results from their work with happy family members indicate these families tend to have more members than the average U.S. family and that they tend to have both a father and mother present in the home, the families from the study were quite diverse. Of the 27 participating families, 4 had experienced divorce, 2 had endured an affair and a temporary separation, 1 included a mother with terminal cancer, 1 included an openly gay father who shared the household with the mother, and 1 had both a stepfather and father living in the same house with the mother and children.

However, although nearly any family structure can have strong and successful family members, [Page 351]educational researchers also have expressed concern that children of single parents in the United States, on average, have lower achievement levels than do children of dual-parent families. Suet-Ling Pong, Jaap Dronkers, and Gillian Hampden-Thompson hypothesized that this finding may result more from national family policy than from an inherent problem with raising children in single-parent families. In 2003, Pong and colleagues completed a study to find out whether the achievement gap between children who live with both of their biological or adoptive parents, versus children who live in one-parent homes, varies from country to country according to the type of family policy each nation has. They looked at math and science achievement scores for children from 11 countries—Australia, Austria, Canada, England, Ireland, Iceland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Scotland, and the United States—to test their hypothesis. As predicted, their results suggested that the correlation between children's math and science achievement scores and the number of parents in the home is stronger when countries have less substantial welfare policies. The authors noted that in their study, samples from New Zealand and the United States had the strongest correlations, whereas in Austria and Iceland, the correlations were not significant and the achievement gap appeared to be nonexistent.

...