Maternal Education and the Unequal Significance of Family Structure for Children’s Early Achievement

The diverging destiny of US children is a modern-day phenomenon driven, in part, by the rise in women’s education and its connection to patterns in women’s union formation. In short, more educated mothers are more likely to be in stably married families, whereas less educated mothers are more likely to be in unmarried-parent families, because of either a nonmarital birth or a union dissolution, or remarried ones. This connection between education and family structure means that children of less educated mothers are often raised in homes with fewer resources to promote their well-being than children of more educated mothers. In this study, I argue that these patterns in women’s education and family structure have implications for children’s diverging destinies that also play out in a more subtle way. Specifically, unmarried or disrupted family structures will result in lower-quality parenting for less educated mothers than for more educated mothers in the same family types, producing greater negative consequences for the achievement trajectories of their children. The results of this study, based on data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (n = 1308) and a longitudinal moderated path model, provide support for this argument. In fact, I find that family structure had no connection to the parenting of more educated mothers, or to their children’s achievement. These findings provide novel insight into the advantages that maternal education confers to children, beyond the various well-documented demographic and economic correlates that are accounted for in the study.