The conservative think-tank Alabama Policy Institute has studied single parent families and doesn’t like what it sees. In its just-released study Family Matters – Family Structure and Child Outcomes, API finds that “children in non-intact families are at an educational and social disadvantage comjpared to children in traditional families.”
The report states that parents in single-parent families are less likely to hiave high expectations for their children and less likely to participate in school activities like volunteering at school and attending parent-teacher conferences.
The report implies that single-parents can employ some specific strategies to mediate the impact of the family structure on their child’s success. These strategies would include:
Perhaps the most important strategy, however, would be avoiding cohabitating. The study found that cohabitating relationships and foster care were particularly damaging to children’s success in school.