Influence of single parenting on academic support of Public Junior High School Pupils in Effutu Municipality

Abstract

The study examined the influence of single parenting on the academic support of Junior High School pupils in the Effutu Municipality in the Central Region of Ghana. The study was grounded in the Epstein‘s six typologies of parental involvement in school. The cross-setional survey design was used and was aligned with positivist paradigm where 175 public junior high school pupils were chosen as a sample through the stratified random sampling technique. A Cronbach Alpha of not less than 0.70 was realized for all the various constructs. The data gathered through questionnaire were analysed using both descriptive (frequency, percentage, mean, standard deviation) and inferential (t-test) statistics with the aid of Version 22 of the Statistical Product for Service Solution (SPSS). The study revealed that the nature of single parenthood was mother dominated in-spite of their economic challenges. It was again, discovered that the factors affecting single parents‘ ability to support pupils‘ academic work had to do with limited parental formal education, limited income and financial resource and difficulty in speaking the official language of the school. Furthermore, the study showed that the main effects of single parents on academic support of pupils featured in parental difficulty in assisting with supervision and monitoring of homework and therefore fell largely on siblings for assistance. Others included poor participation in PTA and SMC meetings/activities. Besides, it was established that there is no statistically significant difference in the implications of single parenting on academic support of male and female. Therefore, it was recommended among others that the Effutu Municipal Education Directorate should collaborate with school authorities and community leaders to organize seminars and workshops for single parents to enable them monitor and supervise their children‘s learning. Teachers should be encouraged to pay attention to single parented pupils to help them adjust successfully to their academic work.