Family Structure, Gender, and Parental Socialization

Abstract

Data from the National Survey of Families and Households demonstrate that parental behavior varies to a limited extent by family structure and to a large extent by gender.Mothers, whether married, single, or remarried, spend more time with children and are more responsive to child behavior than are fathers.Single parents spend more time with children than do married parents, while both are equally responsive to children.It is primarily stepparents, both stepmothers and stepfathers, who report a significantly lower frequency of activities with and a fewer number of positive responses to their children.We note, however, that single parents do not spend mice as much time with their children as do married parents; therefore, from a child's point of view, there are significant differences between parental time in one-and two-parent families.We also observe important interactions between the effects of family structure and a parent's sex: male or female primary parents spend more time with children than do "secondary parents."Therefore, the most egalitarian childrearing arrangements, in terms of the discrepancy between the amount of time a husband and wife spend with their children, are likely to be found in fatherstepmother families, the least egalitarian in mother-stepfather families.We do not, however, find any significant effect. of family structure on negative responses to children or on parental control or demands.FAMILY STRUCTURE, GENDER, AND PARENTAL SOCIALIZATION Children from disrupted and never-married families appear to be disadvantaged in comparison with children raised by their original parents.'Differences are observed across a wide range of child outcomes, including educational attainment, future marital and family formation, and delinquency.(For recent reviews of this research, see McLanahan and Booth 1989; Emery 1988; Chase-Lansdale and Hetherington 1989; Demo and Acock N88.) Whereas differences in income were once thought to account for differences in child outcomes across family structures, recent research suggests that income accounts for at best only half of the difference between mother-only and original-two-parent families (McLanahan and Booth 1989).Furthermore, children in stepfamilies, which have higher incomes than mother-only families, also experience poorer outcomes than children raised by their original parents (Hetherington and Camara 1988;Peterson and Zill 1986).These findings have forced researchers over the past decade to look at other factors, such as neighborhood quality and attachment, social support from friends and extended kin, and parental socialization, that are associated with family structure and child well-being.The analyses reported herein are part of a larger project to investigate socialization explanations for the effects of divorce and family structure on children.'This paper focuses on whether and how original-two-parent families, single-parent families, and stepparent families differ in parents' socialization practices.We use new data from the 1987-88 National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH) to go beyond, in several respects, previous studies of family structure and socialization.Most important, we investigate the interaction of gender and family structure effects, measuring the extent to which differences in single-parent and stepparent families are due to single parents being predominantly mothers and stepparents being predominantly fathers.The NSFH data