A large, multiethnic Cornell study has found that single motherhood does not necessarily compromise how well prepared six- and seven-year-olds are for school.

"Although one-parent families had lower incomes, what mattered most for kids' school readiness was the mothers' ability and educational levels, and these were about the same in both of the large samples we analyzed of single- and two-parent families," says Henry Ricciuti, professor emeritus of human development at Cornell.

Previous studies have been inconsistent as to whether growing up in a single-parent home puts children at risk of poor school performance or social or behavioral problems. Most of the studies have focused on adolescents or high school students and have tended to report adverse effects, typically attributed to differences in family income. Ricciuti's study is one of the few that focuses on younger children.

Although Ricciuti found no consistent relationships between single parenthood and children's school readiness and achievement, he found strong and consistent links in white, black and Hispanic families between a mother's education and ability level and her child's math, reading and vocabulary scores, as measured in the home by survey interviewers. These links remained strong even among single-parent families with incomes below the poverty line, Ricciuti says.

In his study, published in the September 1999 issue of the Journal of Family Psychology (Vol. 13, No. 3), Ricciuti examined the effects of single motherhood on school readiness, achievement and behavior in about 1,700 six- and seven-year-old children from white, black and Hispanic families in the National Longitudinal Survey of Labor Market Experience of Youth. Single motherhood was defined as the mother having no partner or spouse living at home at the time of the survey. The average mother's age at birth of her child was 20-21 years.

Single parenthood is of grave concern to U.S. policy-makers because the number of one-parent families with children under 18 years of age skyrocketed to 24 percent from 7 percent of the nation's families between 1970 and 1990. In the same period, the percentage of children under 18 living in a single-parent household soared to 27 percent from 12 percent.

Although Ricciuti says his findings could surprise some policy-makers, he stresses that the potential adverse effects of growing up in a single-parent home might not emerge until later in childhood. He says that many children in single-parent homes might have the advantage of smaller family size and the increased likelihood of the presence of a maternal grandparent, aunt or uncle in the household.

"Our findings suggest that when maternal and household characteristics are favorable, single parenthood, in and of itself, is not necessarily a risk factor for children's school readiness," Ricciuti says. "Nevertheless, the majority of single mothers do not typically have the social, material and economic resources which support quality parenting and child care as readily as two-parent families have.

"The findings of this study, as well as others, suggest that such support for single-parent families should begin in the early childhood years, when the potential adverse effects of single parenthood have not yet emerged or become apparent as they tend to do in adolescence and young adulthood."

He stresses the need for public policy to support strategies to make such resources more readily available to single mothers, thus better enabling them to provide home and family environments more fully supportive of their children's development.

Related World Wide Web sites:

• For information on the Journal of Family Psychology: http://www.apa.org/journals/fam.html.