The effect of broken homes on students depend on many factors, the most important of which are the causes of broken homes when it occurs, and it is either temporary or permanent. When there is a break in the home as a result of death and children realize that the parent will never return, they mourn the loss and transfer their affection to the parent available, hoping to regain the security they formally had. By so doing,
one will find the students forgetting they had other things to attend to like their academics. But a child who happens to have a parent pre-occupied with grief and practical problems of a broken home will in turn give rise to children that feel rebuffed and unwanted. This will however result to resentment that can seriously cause damage or affect the child’s intellectual potentialities required from him/her as a student. However, broken home can affect the child’s growth physically, socially, morally, educationally and otherwise. Children from divorced homes are not usually with their parents because they go in search of the basic needs of the child like school fees, finance to meet up the entire educational requirement and so on. Such children may involve themselves in truancy, absenteeism and anti-social behavior like drugs and sexual abuse, prostitution, stealing, robbery in the society. They may also end up as drop out from school.
Harris J.R (2013) said, children are worse hit if the marriage falls apart. The effect could bring about the death of a loved one. The children cannot relate well with their parents and behave well in the mist of other people. The children may be scattered and could not stay in one place to continue their schooling. They change from one school to another and this can affect learning development.
Also Hauwa -et-al (2005), observed that the loss of the mother in early life is more damaging to a child than the loss of a father. She stated the reason for this to be that the care of young must under the circumstances be turned over to relatives or paid housekeepers whose child training techniques may differ from those used by mothers and who rarely can give children the attention and affection they formally received from their mothers. This will in turn make the female children of the family to carry out the work of their mothers and also combined with their academics. These double duties of a child will definitely affect the performance of the students in school.
Nevertheless, Hauwa et-al (2005), observed that as children grow older, loss or separation of the father is often more serious than loss of the mother, especially for the male children in the family. The mother may have to single handedly cater for the needs of the children and at the same time, fetching finance for the family which can be very tasking. The mother due to stress may lack the time and energy to give the children the care they need and academic assistance that the parent should give to a child. In a case whereby the mother cannot provide the recreational opportunities and status or materials children’s peer have, this will add to their resentment. Lawrence Kohlberg (2010), perceived a home to be broken by divorce, such homes can be more damaging to students. There are two reasons with which she supported her point, the period of adjustment to the divorce is longer and more difficult for children than the period of adjustment of death of a parent, as children pass through series of adjustment like denial of divorce, anger which strikes out at those involved in the situation, bargaining in an attempt to bring the parents back together and depression all which must have gone a long way in deterring the academic achievement of the student who needs time to make good use of his brain to think logically as a student. Secondly, broken homes caused by divorce are serious because they tend to make children different in the eyes of peer group. When enquiry is made about the missing parent or why they have another to replace the missing parent, they become embarrassed and ashamed. Furthermore, they may feel guilty if they enjoy the time they spent with the missing parent. Hurlock (2010), stated that job of a parent can also be temporary separation for instance military operation and so on that take one away from the home, it could be for hospitalization in the case of the mother, such temporary break for a child in school could be stressful to both parents and their children and could lead to misunderstanding in a family relationship.
Single Parenthood
This refers to the state of being alone, caring and rearing children without the other essential partner. This may be out of choice or a result of divorce from a problem marriage which cannot be otherwise resolved.
Single parenthood can also be caused by the death of any of the spouses or at times by a woman’s promiscuity. A promiscuous woman may become pregnant and may not know the man that is responsible, which will in turn lead to a single parenthood. Single parenthood has some effects on the man, and the child. Psychological problems and health problems are some factors that affect the learners, hence interfering with their learning process.
Single parenthood also breeds social problems (cultism, exam malpractice, stealing, drug addiction etc.) which in turn affect the learning process of learners. Single parenthood also causes drop out in schools. It sometimes makes the children not to enroll in school. This may be pegged to the fact that single parents in the slum areas have little streams of income or no stream at all. As such, their pupils according to parents may not enroll in school.
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