COLUMBUS – The amount of time children spend with parents appears to have more of an impact on their academic success than genetics, family income or the education level of the parent who devotes more of their time to their kids, according to a study from an Ohio State economics professor and researchers in Israel.
Researchers who analyzed data on children in Israel who lost a parent through death or divorce found that when it came to one measure of a child’s academic success – their performance on a demanding standardized test – the educational attainment of the surviving or custodial parent had more impact than the educational level of the parent who died or left the home, and the longer the absence of a parent, the less impact his or her education had on the child’s success and the greater the impact of the remaining parent, said Bruce Weinberg, co-author of the study and professor of economics at The Ohio State University.
“In the ongoing debate over what helps children succeed academically, we show that genetics is not the only major factor. It is also about the time that parents spend with their children,” said Weinberg, who conducted the research with Eric Gould and Avi Simhon of Hebrew University in Israel.
“Student success is not coming just from smart parents having smart kids,” Weinberg said.
The study has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Labor Economics and was published Feb. 4 on the website of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
The study involved more than 22,000 children in Israel who lost a parent before age 18, more than 77,000 whose parents divorced and more than 600,000 who did not experience parental death or divorce.
Study results rejected the argument that the parents’ income is really what helps the children of the highly educated succeed academically because Weinberg and his fellow researchers found that losing a father did not hurt children academically more than losing a mother.
Fathers tend to earn more but the loss of a mother, who tends to spend more time with her children, had a bigger impact in their study.
Results also showed that mothers’ education was more closely linked to children’s academic success in larger families, apparently because women with more children spent more time with their kids and less time working outside the home.
Overall, the effects of losing a parent were stronger on girls than on boys, the study also showed.