Father availability and academic performance among third-grade boys.

The degree of father availability on the academic performance of young school children, particularly boys, has been of interest to educators for some time. Unfortunately most of the published studies have not controlled for such factors as socio-economic status, race, and intelligence in evalua uing the academic achievement of boys with vary inf degrees of father availability. The present study consists of 44 boys drawn from a third grade, small town school population of 297 male children. These boys were divided into four groups of eleven boys each; Group 1 consisting of boys who have been without a father in the home since age two; Group II consisting of boys who have been without a father in the home since age live; Group III mode up of boys whose mothers reported that, although the father was present in the home, he had a -very low degree of quantitative doily interaction with his son; and GroutIV made up of boys whose mothers reported a very high amount of daily fatherson interaction within the home. The four groups were closely matched for age, grade, race, socio-economic status, and intelligence. Academic performance was measured by teacher awarded grades and the scores the boys received on the Stanford Achievement Test. Intelligence was measured by the scores the boys obtained on the Otis-Lennon MentalAbility Test. Tho results indicated that those boys who had hi gh father Availability scored significantly higher on academic achievement measures than boys who had been father absent since age two. Boys father absent since age five and those boys with low father availability scored close to the population mean on the Stanford Achievement Test, but resembled the group of boys father absent since age two in having significantly lower teacher awarded grades than the hoys with high father availability. It was concluded that the presence of an actively interested father who has frequent quantitative interaction wi th his son will facilitate better than average academic performance in his child. Third grade boys who have been without a father in the home since age two will score significantly lower than the average on measures of academic performance.

[1]  H. Biller.  Father absence and the personality development of the male child. , 1970 .

[2]  H B Biller,et al.  Father absence, maternal encouragement, and sex role development in kindergarten-age boys. , 1969, Child development.

[3]  B. Sutton-Smith,et al.  Father-absence effects in families of different sibling compositions. , 1968, Child development.

[4]  Biller Hb.  A multiaspect investigation of masculine development in dindergarten age boys. , 1968 .

[5]  U. Bronfenbrenner.  The psychological costs of quality and equality in education. , 1967, Child development.

[6]  A. Barclay,et al.  Father absence, cross-sex identity, and field-dependent behavior in male adolescents. , 1967 .

[7]  Hetherington Em.  Effects of paternal absence on sex-typed behaviors in Negro and white preadolescent males , 1966 .

[8]  H. A. Witkin,et al.  FAMILY EXPERIENCES RELATED TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF DIFFERENTIATION IN CHILDREN. , 1965, Child development.

[9]  A. B. Hollingshead,et al.  Social Class and Mental Illness , 1964 .

[10]  M. Deutsch,et al.  Social Influences in Negro‐White Intelligence Differences1,2 , 1964 .

[11]  Lyn Carlsmith,et al.  Effect of Early Father Absence on Scholastic Aptitude , 1964 .

[12]  M. Johnson,et al.  Sex role learning in the nuclear family. , 1963, Child development.

[13]  I. Hurwitz,et al.  Fathers of sons with primary neurotic learning inhibitions. , 1962, The American journal of orthopsychiatry.

[14]  W. Mischel.  Father-absence and delay of gratification: crosscultural comparisons. , 1961, Journal of abnormal and social psychology.

[15]  M. C. Shaw,et al.  The onset of academic underachievement in bright children. , 1960 .

[16]  B. Kimball.  The sentence-completion technique in a study of scholastic underachievement. , 1952, Journal of consulting psychology.

[17]  H. E. Sutherland.  The Relationship Between I.Q. and Size of Family in the Case of Fatherless Children , 1930 .

[18]  B. Kintz,et al.  Computational Handbook of Statistics , 1968 .

[19]  T. Forrest.  The paternal roots of male character development. , 1967, Psychoanalytic review.

[20]  E. M. Hetherington,et al.  Effects of paternal absence on sex-typed behaviors in Negro and white preadolescent males. , 1966, Journal of personality and social psychology.