Family Life and School Achievement: Why Poor Black Children Succeed or Fail

Epps

1

The Issue

Studies of the poor American family’s role in children’s achievements have often focused on household composition, specifically the presence or absence of the father in the home, as the major factor. These studies have argued that the two-parent intact family has a positive effect on the child’s school performance, whereas the one-parent broken family has a negative effect. Those studies not emphasizing family personnel have given attention to a specific family process, such as encouragement, or to such status variables as parental income and education, as the key to children’s academic success. In the present study I will demonstrate that it is the overall quality of the family’s life-style, not the composition, or status, or some subset of family process dynamics, that determines whether children are prepared for academically competent performance in the classroom.¹

My basic contention is that the family’s main contribution to a child’s success in school is made through parents’ dispositions and interpersonal relationships with the child in the household. Children receive essential survival knowledge for competent classroom role enactment from their exposure to positive home attitudes and communication encounters. I am interested in the way in which this knowledge is organized and passed on to youths through home interaction—that is, with how activities and events are organized in the family unit to stimulate youth’s acquisition of academic and social communication skills. My argument is that a family’s ability to equip its young members with survival and success knowledge is determined by the parent’s (and other older family members’) own upbringing, the parents’ past relationships and experiences in community institutions, the parents’ current support networks, social relationships and other circumstances outside the home, and, most centrally, the parents’ current social relationships in the home, and their satisfaction with themselves and with home conditions.

I do not agree with the claims and implications of previous studies that the family unit’s personnel and role properties (number of parents in the home, parent’s marital status, family size, maternal employment status, maternal educational status, migration patterns, ethnic background, income, and so forth) are the source of children’s school behavior or learning outcomes. Rather, it is the family members’ beliefs, activities, and overall cultural style, not the family units’ composition or social status, that produces the requisite mental structures for effective and desirable behavior during classroom lessons.

This is a critical point, since much official and informal school and governmental policy toward children and their families is based on the misleading assumption that the source of many youth needs and problems is their participation in family groups with one or more of the following demographic characteristics:

divorced parents (or missing parents)

working mothers (of latch-key children)

young mothers

households functioning on limited incomes

poorly educated mothers

recently migrated to American cities

racial or ethnic minority

residing in depressed urban neighborhoods

Invariably these sociodemographic characteristics of family units provide only a thumbnail sketch of, or minimal insight into, the overall lifestyles of the children. Nevertheless, they are often portrayed as being indicative of an entire set of assumptions, often incorrect, about the mental capacities and activity patterns of the children and their parents. The ameliorative prescriptions and support programs that derive from these dubious assumptions, therefore, inevitably meet with limited success.

In my conception of life in families, parents employ one of two basic communication styles to prepare their progeny for life’s major roles. The first is a sponsored independence style,² in which parents use their influence in a predominantly authoritative way (see Baumrind, 1971). The authoritative sponsorship variation tends to facilitate children’s social competence most efficiently. It is characterized by the following behavior patterns: large amounts of parent involvement and interest in children’s home activities; consistent parental monitoring of children’s use of time and space; frequent, almost ritualistic, parent and child activities involving studying, reading, writing, conversing, and creating; regular parental explanation, advisement, and demonstration of everyday life skills to the child; consistent parental expectations and standards for responsible and restricted child behavior; regular praiseworthy sentiments expressed for the child’s talents, abilities, and achievements; generally disciplined parental role behavior modeled to the child; and regular utilization of special parent-child role etiquettes to get the child’s compliance with house rules. In contrast, the basic communication style in low achievers’ homes is an unsponsored independence style of parentchild communication. This style is characterized by predominantly permissive or authoritarian parental behavior patterns such as: limited parent involvement and interest in child’s home activities; inconsistent knowledge of child’s in-home and out-of-home activities (these first two sometimes bordering on neglect); infrequent parent-child activities involving literacy tasks such as studying, reading, writing, informationsharing and creating; limited parental teaching, advising, and demonstrating of concepts and ideas to the child; inconsistent or non-existent parental expectations and standards for responsible child behavior in home, classroom, and neighborhood settings; frequent criticism and dissatisfaction expressed to the child about his or her worth and ability; inconsistent discipline or irresponsible role behavior modeled before the child, and frequent disagreement and conflict over the legitimacy of enforcing parental authority. The particular form of the parent-child communication style in any given household is guided by those psychological orientations that parents and children developed through social encounters with relatives, friends, co-workers, colleagues and strangers. These social encounters can have a positive carryover effect or a negative carryover effect on interactions between family members.

By distinguishing these styles at the outset, I wish to draw the reader’s attention to the quality of interaction in the home. To focus our attention exclusively on family sociodemographics is to miss the essential point: psychological processes and social communication patterns of family life come closest to capturing the essence of human learning experiences in homes. Social scientists and educators who use the surface characteristics of family composition and status to explain outcomes in children’s school behavior are ignoring the essential character of the family environment. For example, although much of the explanation for Black family limitations in the marketplace has in past years been laid to family structure disorganization, there is little evidence to support this position. Blacks and other low-status minorities have little opportunity for developing aims and ambitions, this argument goes, because typically they come from disorganized and structurally inadequate families, with their matriarchs and either missing or shiftless, emasculated males.³ In the advancement of this argument, little attention is given to what actually happens in the daily lives of families. When authors do discuss the interpersonal dynamics of home life, they are very often doing little more than perpetuating ideology about a particular ethnic group or, worse, engaging in wishful thinking. The truth is, previous studies have told us little about what happens educationally in American homes. Some of our guesses and hunches have been good, but not good enough. Consequently, we are not yet prepared to offer the schools useful data on family functioning that will enable curriculum planners, teachers, administrators, or parents to construct the most effective literacy nurturing lessons for school-age children.

This book describes how communication behavior in the family works to produce children’s motivations, expectations, and social competence in student roles. The ethnographic case studies of ten Black families reveal how parents may be predisposed by their good and bad life experiences to form family relationships and activities so that children learn, or fail to learn, how to develop their intellectual skills and abilities for use in school settings. We will see how parents establish role relationships within the home, how standards for acceptable behavior are set, and how mothers and fathers manipulate affection and material resources in ways which motivate the child rather routinely to do what the parents ask of her or him.

I will contrast and compare the child development strategies used by parents of five high achieving students with the strategies used by parents of five pupils who are not as successful in classroom activities. It will become apparent that a crucial factor affecting differences in knowledge transmission in these homes is the parents’ own psychological-emotional state and coping ability. We shall see how parents’ own life experiences have had a profound influence on their current psychological-emotional state and subsequently on the communication styles they use with their children. Further, parents’ particular approaches to organizing current home learning activities will have been significantly influenced by their past and contemporary experiences in the social world. This social world includes public places such as occupational settings, school settings, church settings, and other community settings.

The Role of Home Experiences in Pupils’ Preparation for School Learning

Many parents have assumed that the primary function of the school is to make their children literate and successful. (Here I am defining literacy as the general ability to speak, write, and understand at a level sufficient to achieve communication goals in interpersonal encounters.) Yet our public schools have only rarely performed that producer function.⁴ Especially with ethnic minority groups and the poor, our schools have served as institutions that select, sort, and control; that is, the schools have tended to take most incoming ethnic students and teach them just enough to enter occupational positions that parallel the status positions of their parents. In this way, schools have functioned to reproduce the ethnic division of labor between competing groups of families.⁵

While most of us agree that the purpose of schooling is to teach skills and not just values (culture), the predominant trend has been for the school to inculcate values and attitudes. Career-related technical skills or literacy-based skills have not been imparted quite as efficiently as have the cultural orientations preferred by school boards and school personnel. Indeed, many millions of elementary and high school students do not read or write at a level commensurate with their school grade. Whenever children do develop high levels of linguistic competence, the parents have usually made the difference by guiding them in the home in academically enhancing encounters. Although no nationwide study has ever centered principally on the role of American parents in children’s school performance, there is a substantial body of evidence that children’s chances of school success throughout their educational career are significantly increased by a supportive home environment and, conversely, are significantly decreased by a neutral or nonsupportive family context.

Children spend most of the first five years of life in the home. After that, between the ages of five and seventeen, over 60 percent of the days in a child’s life are spent moving from home to school and back again. How the child comes to perceive life in the classroom will be shaped by the messages the parent provides to the child about the parent’s own experiences with school, the routine communications among parents, children, and teachers, and the academic information or experience the child acquires in the home which provides greater knowledge about various aspects of school subject matter. The most pedagogically effective instruction occurs when the role demands and cognitive functioning in the classroom are compatible with, or built upon, those in the home. To the degree that the activities and experiences in these two settings reinforce each other while facilitating mutual trust, mutual goals, and personal autonomy, the child will show a greater proficiency with the basic skills (academic knowledge and social skills) that schools are expected to teach.⁶

Most people would have no trouble agreeing that experiences in the home significantly shape their interpersonal competence (as indicated by their academic and interactive responses) in classroom settings and other out-of-home environments. After all, the home-community setting is where students first develop—or fail to develop—their social abilities to express themselves maturely and intelligently, be attentive, concentrate, volunteer, comply, engage in constructive self-directed activity, initiate work interactions, enjoy orderly social interaction, accept responsibility, carry through and complete tasks, hold positive concepts of learning, manifest leadership skills, exercise self-control, show sensitivity to the needs of others, and enjoy a sense of accomplishment about goals achieved. It is these social survival skills that are basic to high quality student performance in learning classroom lessons.⁷ The mechanisms for transmitting these skills are the preparatory tasks that take up the family members’ use of time in the home.⁸

There are at least three types of home activity that prepare children for the competent performance of school responsibilities. These are home educational-instructional activities, such as deliberate teaching in the three Rs, home recreational activities, and health maintenance activities. During these activities parents and other family members may coach, nurse, guide, protect, and teach preschool children to care for themselves hygienically, to write important information such as their name, address, and telephone number, and to carry on civil conversation with adults and other children. Later lessons involve learning how to play complex verbal and social games, perform math computation exercises, solve riddles and reasoning problems, read and interpret challenging and interesting books, newspaper articles, and magazines, do creative art projects and hobbies, write about experiences and ideas, tell stories and share ideas, analyze the motivations of others, and interact with and enjoy relationships with kin, other adults, and peers. These are the kinds of preparation the child takes to school and uses to compete during his or her school career.

Previous Research on Families as Producers of Children’s Achievement

There is virtually no disagreement among social scientists that family life plays a critical role in educational and social development. The disagreement concerns the specific family attributes considered most influential. In a content analysis that makes some general conclusions about families as educators, Trevor Williams reappraised the data sets from several sizable studies of family life in Canada, Australia, and the United States. He concluded that the three most significant inculcative functions of contemporary family life are its ability to stimulate, its reinforcement ability, and its ability to foster high expectations through encouragement.⁹

One of the major studies of the impact of American family environments on youngsters’ life chances was the Blau and Duncan research on the American occupational structure. Concerned primarily with occupational mobility among American men, this research makes racial and social class comparisons based on a large sample (N = 20,700) of men 25–64 years old. It concludes that a man’s family of origin can be a benefit or a handicap. The authors state: The family into which a man is born exerts a significant influence on his occupation in life, ascribing a status to him at birth that influences his chances for achieving any other status later in his career.¹⁰ The authors specifically argue that unskilled and semiskilled parents with low educational attainment and inferior career experiences provide a low quality of family experiences which tend to limit the skill development and life chances of their sons. Yet Blau and Duncan do not attempt to analyze how the total family environment functions to exert such an influence on the educational lives of its school-age members.

Practically all of the empirical research done to date has reported statistically significant relationships between family background and American children’s school achievement levels.¹¹ Unfortunately, none of these studies analyzes the total form and substance of family life. Rather, they tend to focus on surface status characteristics (such as parents’ occupation, education, family size, material possessions) or certain home dynamics while virtually ignoring the framework of psychological orientations and activity patterns that more closely represent the life blood of the family interpersonal experience.

The massive Coleman study, for example, used objective and subjective variables to represent family background and neighborhood life (community input): ratio of intact families in the school district, urbanism of the family, number of child’s siblings, median occupational status of the father, parents’ educational experience, parents’ interest in child’s school experiences, parents’ expectations for child’s success in school, number of reading items in the home (such as dictionary or newspaper), and other home items.¹² The home items category concerned the presence of specific material items in the home, including a television set, automobile, vacuum cleaner, refrigerator, telephone, and record player. Taken together, these variables fall far short of capturing even family input (not to mention community input) because (1) they mainly refer to surface compositional properties of the family unit and ignore the internal structural and cultural patterns of the household, and (2) they say virtually nothing about how these surface variables reflect or shape behavior in the daily lives of the family members.

The Jencks study (which uses some of Coleman’s data) claims that genes, economic background, race, and data taken from studies comparing identical twins reared together and apart gives us an estimate of the influence of family background on children’s test scores. Although he admits that this notion of family background is rather fuzzy,¹³ he uses it to make guesses about the degree to which his variables measure family background. Like the Coleman report, the Jencks study measures surface compositional variables used to represent family environment.

At the Unversity of Wisconsin, the work of William Sewell and colleagues (which produced the Wisconsin model of family socialization) set out to include social-psychological variables in its conceptual framework, for example, parental encouragement. While this work did begin to look at parent’s attitudes and values, it did not look at the internal structures and dynamics of home life at all. Indeed, none of these three major researches presents the entire set of home characteristics which tell us how home dynamics function to affect children’s cognitive and behavioral reaction to school.

Nevertheless, these large pathbreaking studies and a fair number of smaller ones have made it clear that parents’ family background (composition) and home interpersonal environment (home discourse events and psychological and cultural perspectives) play a major role—however little understood—in determining a child’s school experience. Well-designed studies of the impact of home dynamics on American children’s school performance are slowly beginning to emerge. Yet the current paucity of work in this area makes it necessary that we clarify the conceptual dimensions of family-school research through the use of empirical small-group data, small scale studies of family dynamics, and findings from exploratory research. Unfortunately, very few of the available comparative studies of American families have systematically looked at the entire family pedagogical environment in a reasonable number of homes. This I have attempted to do in the present research.

There are at least four conceptually comprehensive total family environment researches that have used smaller sample sizes in demonstrating how American family units function as agents of academic socialization. These studies are comprehensive because they try to conceptualize, measure and explain the role of the three major components of the family environment: its compositional properties (human, material, time, and space resources), social behavior patterns, and psychological patterns. Even these studies, however, do not examine how school-age children have been affected by the family environment at different stages in the life-cycle. Neither do these works say anything about intergenerational patterns of educational development in families. Of these four small-scale studies of American families as educators, three were done as parts of doctoral dissertations at the University of Chicago during the 1960s. Two of these studies, by Dave and Wolf, used the same sample (N = 60) of White junior high school youngsters. Dave identified home psychological and social patterns which measure (1) parents’ press for achievement of family members, (2) parents’ use of language models in the home, (3) degree of parents’ academic guidance, (4) the quality of family routine activities, (5) the intellectual atmosphere in the home, and (6) the division of labor in the family. His main conclusion was that the family environment affects children’s performance in certain academic subjects (e.g., arithmetic