Outside pressures, such as finances and the influence of other kids, may have more effect on a family's success than whether both parents live in the home, a new study says.
"I don't think the family's disintegrating. I think there are many families out there that are working hard and want to do well by their children," said Nicholas Zill, a psychologist and co-author of "Running in Place: How American Fam-ilies Are Faring in a Changing Economy and an Individualistic Society." It was released Sunday by Child Trends, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization.The report examined three challenges that families face as they attempt to fulfill their assigned roles in society: making ends meet in a changing economy; combating negative peer influences on children; and maintaining parental control as children grow older.
It was co-written by demographer Christine Winquist Nord and uses new national survey data and state and local statistics to portray American families.
While family structure may affect the risk a family faces overall, how a family functions is a more important indicator of its health and well-being, Zill said.
"Another factor is parent education level, the degree of involvement and effort parents put into raising children, the environment in which kids are growing up, the kind of school they go to," Zill said in an interview. "It was the multiple-risk families that we pointed to as being more problematic."
Zill said he was surprised to discover that nearly half of all U.S. high school students have parents who don't attend PTA meetings or open school nights, don't go to class plays or science fairs or varsity football games. Yet most parents expect their children to finish high school, and a large percentage hope they'll finish college as well.
Meanwhile, the social environment in schools tends to run counter to the messages children get at home - namely, to study hard and behave in class.
Only 38 percent of U.S. students in grades 6-12 said their friends thought it was very important to put in the effort needed to achieve high marks. And only 30 percent of youngsters in this age group said their friends thought it very important to behave in class.
"Families don't operate in a vacuum and we have to ask, How are the schools and the other institutions in our society supporting families and supporting those goals?" Zill said.
Despite the authors' contention that the presence of two parents alone does not automatically mean a family is healthier, two-parent families tend to do better economically. If a child was in a two-parent family, median income was $43,578 in 1992. If a child was in a mother-only family, the median income was $12,073.
And although record numbers of women are now in the work force, families generally have not increased their standard of living in recent years. After adjusting for inflation, median incomes for families with children increased less than 6 percent from 1984 to 1992, the report found.