The family is an essential factor for a human’s whole-being. Everything about a man, his background, attitude, all of his achievements, his honor and dignity, relies on the structure of the family a man lives with. A family is composed of a father a mother and their offspring, bonded by their love for each other.
Here in the modern age a family could be two things: complete or broken. A broken family is believed to cause a child to be misled in life. Some people give it as the main reason of the rebellious and unclear acts of children. School is another factor which melds us to become successful, but how will it make us successful if we cannot focus, we cannot learn like others because we mind the problems we encounter in our homes?
Many articles support the issue that broken families affect the child’s performance, attitude, and self-esteem. They show statistics that broken families affect much of the child’s emotional and spiritual being, and that it greatly distresses the child’s education.
When it comes to educational achievement children living with their own married parents do significantly better than other children. It is found that children from non-intact families (children living in a situation other than with their own married father and mother) have significantly higher rates of difficulty with all levels of education, from pre-kindergarten through to primary, secondary, and college levels.
Each year a child spends with a single mother or stepparent reduces that child’s overall educational attainment by approximately one-half year.
A comprehensive review of recent academic research on the relationship between family structures and children’s academic performance compared education outcomes from children growing up with their own married parents to children in non-intact family structures, such as divorced, single, remarried or cohabiting parents.
Family structure was consistently found to be the deciding factor in a wide range of child behaviors that directly influence academic performance, including emotional and psychological distress, attention disorders, social misbehavior, substance abuse, sexual activity and teen pregnancy. Children from non-intact homes had higher rates of stress, depression, anxiety and low self-esteem, particularly as teenagers.
The study found that preschool children from broken homes were three times more likely to suffer from attention deficit disorders than children from intact homes. Children from single-parent homes suffered from more physical health problems as well. Pre-school children from single-parent homes were also less likely to read to or given help with letter-recognition. During elementary school, children from non-intact families scored consistently lower on reading comprehension and math, and had more difficulty maintaining their grade levels overall. Children from married parents had much lower rates of behavioral problems in the classroom than children who did not live with married parents. In particular, boys from broken marriages showed a higher rate of classroom misbehavior.
For teenagers, students from broken homes were 30 percent more likely to miss school, be late, or cut class than students from intact homes, in part because single parents had more difficulty monitoring their children. These children were also at higher risk for smoking, using drugs and consuming alcohol.
Teenagers from non-intact families were more likely to be sexually active and had higher rates of pregnancy. Girls from divorced single-mother homes were at greatest risk for teenage pregnancy.
The study also found that children who were in a single-parent or stepparent home by the time they were 10 were more than twice as likely to be arrested by age 14. Children who never lived with their own father had the highest likelihood of being arrested.
By Benjamin Fallet
