There has been a lot of talk on how to improve American education since the premiere of Davis Guggenheim’s film Waiting for Superman. It’s a topic almost never broached: the fact that many American children suffer academically as a result of family strife and the dysfunctional systems that govern divorce in this country. Some progress in education reform can be made by dismissing ineffective teachers and replacing them with better ones, but it is clear that much of the potential improvement in educational performance of American children cannot be fully realised without fixing the country’s broken policies, laws, and courts pertaining to families.
It’s no secret that academic achievement in the United States has been steadily declining for several decades. This reduction is correlated with the rise in divorces due to no-fault divorces, as well as the laws and court practises that foster conflict and put children in stressful and contentious custody disputes. Due to incorrect sole custody rulings and courts that support and encourage parental alienation child abuse, many of these children are cut off from most or all contact with one of their parents. Bad grades in school and a bad family life are intimately linked. This destructive spiral is fueled by government policies that have gone awry, rather than by parents’ faults on their own.
Divorce has a negative impact on students’ academic performance and graduation rates.
Divorce has been linked to worse academic achievement in children. Divorces are becoming more prevalent and more contentious, which has increased the impact of this trend. When a student was married in 1920, they lost around 3.6 months of academic advancement. When no-fault divorce became commonplace in the 1970s, it resulted in a year of lost productivity.
Dissolution of marriage has a significant impact on high school completion rates. By the age of 20, 78.4 percent of students whose parents have not divorced have completed high school. The divorce rate reduces to 60% after one. It drops to 40% if there are two or more divorces. When a parent dies, the decline in high school graduation rates is approximately the same.
Divorce can be harmful, but it can also be minimised. Children whose parents divorced and then remarried have the same high school graduation rate as those whose parents never divorced. However, the harm will be exacerbated if the parents split up again.
Children’s School Performance Is Affected by Parental Behaviors.
Authors Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman in their book NutureShock present research demonstrating the importance of even slight adjustments in the way parents praise and discipline their children.
Psychologists found that parents who laud their children’s intelligence rather than effort instil a fear of taking risks and a lack of confidence in their ability to learn new things. Students worry that if they try something new and fail, they will not be appreciated for their efforts. Because of this, they’re more open to trying new things, whether it’s a new pastime, activity or subject of study.
There’s a lot of evidence that corrective methods can have a big impact on children. Mothers’ responses to the news that their children did not perform well on a test are examined by Bronson. Florrie Ng, a psychologist in Illinois, conducted a study with American children and Chinese children in Hong Kong. According to her research, unlike Chinese mothers, American mothers do not care to help their children study after hearing that they did poorly on a test. As if to protect their children from failing, the American parents ignored reports of poor performance and spoke about anything but the test. Instead, the Chinese focus on boosting their children’s self-esteem and academic performance. The outcomes? On a retest, Chinese students performed better than their American counterparts by 33%, more than twice as much improvement. Even though the Chinese children understand that they are valued and appreciated, the American students appear to believe that their performance is irrelevant.