How Family Structure Leads to Academic Success

In 1965, the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote: “The role of the family in shaping character and ability is so pervasive as to be easily overlooked. The family is the basic social unit of American life; it is the basic socializing unit. By and large, adult conduct in society is learned as a child.”

Sixty years later, Moynihan’s words still ring true, as evidenced in a new report by Nicholas Zill of the Institute for Family Studies.

While Zill examines the phenomenon of “grade inflation”—with more students in elementary, middle, and secondary schools receiving A grades (and in many cases undeserved in order to keep parents and administrators happy), he also found that those students raised in intact, married homes were more likely to receive A’s than those raised in single-parent, stepparent, cohabitating, or in some cases relative or nonrelative guardian homes.

This is not surprising, as Moynihan pointed out so eloquently, because family structure is perhaps the most important factor in a child’s success, or lack of success, in life.

Without such structure, children suffer. Even Rahm Emanuel, the liberal former mayor of Chicago, understands this. After a particularly violent weekend in his city, he said:

This may not be politically correct, but I know the power of what faith and family can do … Our kids need that structure.

But unfortunately, politicians, activists, and social commentators leave out the critical role married parents play in helping their children succeed in school and in life. The breakdown of the nuclear family in American society is, in fact, the primary reason the gulf between the “haves” and “have-nots” has widened over the past 50 years.

Robert Rector of The Heritage Foundation pointed this out when he wrote in 2010 that the breakdown in marriage and the rise of out-of-wedlock births resulted in a society of castes. He found that in the top half of society, married, college-educated couples raise children, while in the bottom half are children raised by single mothers with a high school degree or less.

And as Zill discovered, that gap is continuing to widen. From 1996 to 2019, the odds of a child from an intact family doing better academically than one from a fragmented family increased from 1.45 to 1.68—a “statistically significant change”—with 60% of children from married families receiving “mostly A” grades compared to 47% of those in non-intact families.

Better grades result in better opportunities——whether it be getting into college or seeking employment. On the other hand, lower grades tend to continue the cycle of economic and societal despair that negatively impacts so many young people today.

For instance, harkening back to Moynihan’s prophetic words that the family is the basic socializing unit of American life and affects adult conduct, Zill found that students from non-intact homes tend to have more disciplinary issues than those from married homes.

He reports that parents or guardians of students raised in unmarried or fragmented families were more likely to get emails sent to them about schoolwork and conduct concerns than those from married families.

And fragmented homes tend to lessen the overall effectiveness of schools. George Will perhaps put it best when he wrote: “The best predictor of a school’s performance is the quality of the family life which the children came.”

He states that this includes the quality and quantity of reading material children have access to in the home, the amount of electronic entertainment children are subjected to, the amount of homework performed there, and, in his words, “most important—the number of parents in the home.”

He concludes, “Family disintegration is the stubborn fact that severely limits the efficacy of even the best education policies.”

Married parents tend to be more involved in their child’s education and overall lives. and when parents are involved, children are more likely to succeed.

Children cannot benefit from their parents’ involvement in their education if there is no parent capable of being involved—either because the parent is absent or because a single parent is struggling to keep the house functioning on a basic level and does not have the time or mental space to be highly engaged in their child’s education.

Children need structure—the structure married families provide. If we want all children to succeed, and not just those from married, functioning families, we will need a rejuvenated national commitment to the renewal, preservation, and strengthening of families and parenting.

That is how upward, rather than downward, mobility will occur and create productive citizens, along with better and more effective schools, in the future.

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