Garasky Family Structure

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Garasky, S. (1995). The Effects of Family Structure on Educational Attainment: Do the Effects Vary by the Age of the Child?. American Journal of Economics & Sociology, 54(1), 89-105.
Steven Garasky, is an economist with more than 25 years of experience as an evaluator of domestic social policies and programs. He has focused his research on examining and evaluating programs such as low income families and how they affected in areas of poverty. In this journal the Garasky compares how having a high school education is essential to the decrease of poverty and dependence on welfare. He studies six different families over various periods during childhood and compares how they are related to the probability of graduating from high school. He concluded
…show more content…
Weiss explains children who grow up in a two-parent household does not have many opportunities to make decisions. They tend to have little to no influence into so called family matters. The decisions they do make are about mediocre things such as painting their rooms, picking their clothes, who their friends are going to be and also what their hobbies are going to be. Such things such as meals and household chores are not up for discussion. The main responsibility is on the parents and not the children. The difference between a single-parent household is dramatically different, because the children are able to make a decision on what their meals, vacations, and household chores. Usually the household duties are split between the parent and the child.
The theme of the article is based on how each household is structured. Weiss explains, “the premise of this theory is that the two-parent household maintains a hierarchy and echelon

structure- that the one-parent household can forgo (Weiss, 1979, 97). This theory projects that in a single-parent household the hierarchy is not available because the parent is working full time and the child is on their own for the remaining of time. During this time the child is left to mature faster and foster resentment towards the parent.
I believe that this article will help me understand how a hierarchy affects how the household is structured. While reading this article I began to gain a lot of insight to the life of a two-parent household and how much of a difference it makes in a child 's

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