The Effects of Family Background on Children’s Academic Performance

A family helps mold each person into who they eventually will become. The family is a guide for the success of a child's future. The stability of family creates a building block for how the child will progress throughout life. When parents divorce, the children are left with no stability causing them to lose basic concepts of childhood that may carry with them throughout life. Children of divorced parents have less success and happiness creating less productive citizens in our nation.

Nontraditional family structures have become more common and accepted throughout today’s society than in the past. This shift in family structure could have great implications for children and their future success. I chose to research whether children raised in traditional families tend to achieve more academically than those raised in nontraditional families. Traditional families can have various meanings, even just within the American culture. It can be very complicated to distinguish which structures are best because there are so many, some of which are single

Although the family is the primary field in which a child gains cultural capital, Bourdieu claimed that this becomes institutionalized in the education system. When evaluating educational capital, he explains that it is not simply a result of schooling, but states that “academic capital is in fact the guaranteed product of the combined effects of cultural transmission by the family ad cultural transmission by the school (the efficiency of which depends on the amount of cultural capital directly inherited from the family).” (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 23). In addition, Bourdieu pointed out that although schools claim to be meritocratic institutions that judge based on individual aptitudes, they are actually duplicating social stratification by basing rewards on cultural capital and hereditary privileges. In this way, the education system is unfair because it duplicates existing social

Families are the direct and primary socializing influence for their children. Not only do they provide food, shelter, and a source of income, families are also a source of educational values to help children interact in society. Families pave the road for future success as all their actions are directly effective toward the future of their

Students abilities strongly correlate with the family’s socioeconomic status i.e. it depends on a combination of variables, including occupation, education, income, wealth, and place of residence. The statement mentions that children whose parents have the good educational qualification and income, can have the good impact on child's performance. Above average

The socioeconomic status of an individual’s parents has always been one of the clear-cut forecasters of the individual’s academic success and educational accomplishment. The correlation between family socioeconomic uniqueness and student accomplishment is one of the most forceful patterns in educational scholarship; however the reasons and means

One of the realities that exist, is that the social class a family is in, has a huge impact on the education of achievement amongst their children. In the article, Gregory Mantsio cites the idea of Richard De Lone, by providing scores from the college board to examine the correlation between family income,

It is not hard to understand then how disadvantaged children may not aspire to complete school or attend University due to the unfamiliarity of the concept and lower family expectations. Economic disparity plays a large role in school outcomes wherein greater affluence can provide families with a wider range of education choices and activities to enhance curriculum understandings. In the scenario it is noted that Dexter’s parents want him to do well in school however they are constrained by economic realities. Poor families have less choice in their lifestyle and education selections which can impact on outcomes. Decreased access to resources such as books, educational materials, high quality early education and learning opportunities diminish their ability to start school on an equal footing with more affluent children. As well the poorest families struggle to find good schooling opportunities and have to accept what is offered to them (Ewing, 2013, p. 84). These factors are not so easily addressed at the school level and will require serious changes at the State and Federal levels to negate the influence of

Cultural capital factors into the levels of achievement for an upwardly-mobile student because schools tend to “legitimize certain forms of knowledge” and students whose families have a weak connection to the dominant cultural capital are disadvantaged (Giroux, 268) High social status and value are assigned to those activities done by the dominant class which means that the working-class student will not be bestowed with this privileged form of cultural capital from their

As discussed above, the extensive research conducted has demonstrated that parental involvement has positive effects on student achievement (Allen, 2005; Epstein et al., 2002; Mapp & Henderson, 2002). A large portion of the research conducted has been influenced by Dr. Joyce Epstein. Dr. Epstein is the director of the Center for School, Family, and Community

Education and schooling in the United States is an interesting concept. I have always suspected that there are disparities between the quality of education a student receives, and the outside influences that act upon the student in both positive and negative ways. I was fortunate enough during my academic career that I had parents and a social situation that allowed some of the best opportunities for a good education. In the course of events I was afforded the opportunity to attend a private school, get money for a college education via the Army, and always had parents that were involved with my education, ensuring that I meet their expectations. As I look at the education system as a whole in our country, a commonality is seen the socioeconomic (SES) status of a student and the quality of education they receive. I saw this in my own perspective knowing that by attending a private school, I was being offered an education that other peers might not have. However, I also believe that a person’s individual drive and family involvement play a vital role in the education system as well. I know many students that attended the same school as I did, but without a good family structure or involvement, that failed academically in school. On the other side of the spectrum, I also know students that came from disadvantaged schools but had a good amount of family involvement and personal accountability in their own academic careers. These students succeeded, where many of

The article Reflections on “Family Structure and Child Well-Being: Economic Resources vs. Parental Socialization” analyzed importance of two correlations of parental resources, time and money in family structures and the association of the children’s outcomes in academics and socio-emotional development. The Family structures that were analyzed were as married-parent, stepparent, cohabiting parent, divorced-mother and never-married mother families, which the results showed that economic disadvantage between cohabiting parents and single parent comparing with married parent families. Also, the lack of economic resources caused more disadvantages in non-traditional family structures t than parenting comparing with married parent families. (Thomson 2012).

Only two types of parent involvement had significant effects on academic achievement in the main

The data they collected confirmed the predictive value of socioeconomic status and quality of family context on cognitive development. The quality of family context mediates the relation between socioeconomic status and cognitive development, stating that none of the variables relating to the sibling group showed a significant relationship with cognitive development, disproving the dissolution model.

Individual and families possess cultural capital and through investments and socialisation, they transmit, or pass this on to their children (7, p. 179). Bourdien emphasises that schooling is a social institution, where curriculum should be thought of as cultural capital (12, pp 4-5). Bourdien expresses three states of cultural states: embodied, that includes linguistic competence, mannerisms and cultural knowledge, objectified, that has cultural goods, pictures, books, etc, and institutionalised with educational credentials and social reproduction could be promoted in all three states (7, p.179). Symbolic capital is created by cultural capital that is acquired through formal process of institutionalised state, education and credentialing (12, p.4) students could proceed to further education and jobs by making a down- payment from the cash retrieved from the right symbolic capital (12, p.4). The children who possess by moral excellence, an awareness of who they are and where they came from, some of the cultural capital and most successful, and they acquire more through the game of schooling (12,