ABSTRACT
Nicholas Zill’s chapter (this volume, chapter 10) highlights the relationships between important dimensions of family and household structure and education-related behaviors. The chapter considers a number of outcomes, including behavioral problems exhibited by children while in school, such as suspensions, grade repeats, scores on scholastic aptitude/achievement tests, and high school dropout. Zill’s approach to family structure is to compare children raised in mother–father households to those raised in several household forms that result from divorce or childbearing outside of marriage, including children raised by never-married mothers, by formerly married mothers, and by mothers who have remarried. Using a variety of high-quality sets of nationwide data that were collected in the 1980s, he demonstrates large differences in education-related outcomes among children and teenagers raised in alternative family types. He also shows that although these differences are considerably reduced when other sociodemographic characteristics are controlled, substantial differences remain. Zill considers a number of possible interpretations of the links between family structure and educational outcomes and provides a pointed critique of recent commentaries on family structure effects that interpret the effects of family structure as being largely the result of the economic hardships experienced by children who are raised in single-parent families. The strengths of Zill’s chapter lie in its demonstration of family and household effects on schooling across a variety of high quality sets of data and in providing a balanced assessment of the existence and magnitude of these effects. Zill puts the estimated negative effects of being raised outside of a mother–father household in a sensible perspective. The estimated effects are large, statistically robust, and well worth worrying about. They are not so large, however, as to overshadow the effects of other major social determinants of educational success and failure, especially the socioeconomic characteristics of the families in which children are raised.
