Micro-Activity # 3:Brainstorming Discourse Communities

For my discourse community, I chose my household which is a single parent family. Being raised by a single parent alone has both advantages and disadvantages. As for problems/issues that are central to being raised in a single parent family is less quality time spent with parent, scholastic struggles, and financial difficulty. 

Growing up, I struggled with school in the early years of my education. “Students with parents who are involved in their school tend to have better academic performance and fewer behavioral problems and are more likely to complete high school than students whose parents are not involve in their school” (Watt).I didn’t have such a strong supportive home environment due to my mother always working or having my younger siblings to take care of. “Researchers have adopted a variety of strategies to assess whether the links between family structure and child outcomes are causal or spurious, including the use of fixed effects models to control for unmeasured time-invariant variables.” (Amato). Solutions that have been tried regarding scholastic struggles is after school tutoring and motivation. “Children who live in single-parent families lack the community resources that other children frequently have. They are more likely to live in disadvantaged neighborhoods and to associate with peers who have negative attitudes toward school” (McLanahan). Children in single family homes require time with their parent to help with homework, read to them, and listen to how their day went in school. These actions will lower the chances of scholastic struggling. “Something must be done immediately to raise the incomes of single-mother families; men and women, parents and members of the community at large, must share the responsibility for raising children; and government assistance should be available to all families, not just single-parent families” (McLanahan). Based from this article “Growing Up with a Single Parent:  What Hurts, What Helps” by Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur is that the changes that should be made to prevent scholastic struggles would allow children from single parent homes to make a successful transition when older.  

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4508674

https://thekeep.eiu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5464&context=theses https://www.irp.wisc.edu/publications/focus/textver/16.2.a/impact.txt