Family Structure & Parental Education Engagement among Urban Mothers

• In Event: 2266 - Family Section Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 4. Family Structure and Education

Abstract

The study explores how household arrangement influences parental engagement on children’s education among urban mothers in the United States, using five waves of panel data from the Fragile Families and Child Welling Study (N = 2,982). The study compares the difference in educational engagement between couples (married or cohabiting) and single mothers. Logistic regression models are be utilized to examine the impacts of household arrangement on the possibility of enrolling children in tutoring, initiating a conversation with teachers, and frequent book reading with children. The preliminary results suggest compared to mothers who live with partners, single mothers who consistently live alone (wave 4 & 5) are just as likely as the couples to hire a tutor, but are less likely to initiate conversations with teachers, after controlling for household structure, financial factors, and mother’s and children’s characteristics. The results also suggest no difference in after-school tutoring enrollment or frequent book reading across household arrangements. This paper will also discuss racial disparity in certain engagement outcomes between racial minorities and white mothers. The findings of this paper will have important implication on understanding the advantages and obstacles single motherhood face in urban areas. The study also suggests new hypotheses for the study of racial gap in educational engagement.

Author

• Yiwan Ye, University of California, Davis