From personal experience, I know that parents can become very busy in their daily lives and thus not be able to keep an eye on everything that happens in their children's lives. Being mindful of what’s going on in a child’s life can make a large difference in the way that a parent or other family member treats that family member. Things that happen at school such as bad test grades or bullying can carry back home to a family and have negative effects. The child can become distant, they can lash out in aggression, or in a worst case scenario a child could self-harm. In a report done in Finland, there was a study done on the factors that cause adolescents to self-harm. Some of these factors were whether or not their parents were together, whether they had a poor relationship with their parents, or if they had a poor relationship with their siblings. The final conclusion drawn from this study was that two-parent households where there is a poor relationship with the parents and siblings had the highest prevalence of self-harm (Hintikka 2009).

Hintikka Jukka, et al. “The Prevalence Of Self-Cutting And Other Self-Harm Among 13-   To 18-Year-Old Finnish Adolescents.” Social Psychiatry & Psychiatric Epidemiology 44.1 .2009): 23-28. Academic Search Complete. Web. 22 Apr. 2013.

School

School is a good example of how there are multiple responsibilities for children, including being at school and doing well in school. In my life, I always struggled with grades, but I knew that was due to my own laziness. Attendance on the other hand was something that I viewed as compulsory due to the way my parents taught me. While there was no correlation between the different households and the respective GPA of students in those families, attendance in school is a different story. As one study puts it, “[…] this means that the null hypothesis was rejected, with the conclusion that the number of times students were absent from school was related to the type of household in which they lived” (Ferrell 69).  The study showed that single-parent households had a lower attendance in school than two-parent households. Attendance is an important fact to consider because as opposed to GPA, where arguments of intelligence being a variable in the study can be made, attendance is a behavioral issue that can be affected by family dynamics and attitude. Thus the responsibility is on the parents to make their charges go to school regularly.

Ferrell, Ronald T. The Effects of Single-Parent Households Versus Two-Parent Households on Student Academic Success, Attendance, and Suspensions. Lindenwood University, 2009 United States -- MissouriProQuest. 15 Apr. 2013. 

Possible sources

After choosing this topic I thought I would have plenty of available studies and reports to choose from for research, but finding them has been a bit troublesome. Finding new wells of sources or information has been rare and tiresome.

Family dynamics is a popular topic, which is evident through most conversation in the media that talks about different family types and remarrying and stepchildren and mixed families and the list goes on and on. Finding interesting and relevant topics is not as easy as all of that would make it seem though. The majority of my research has therefore come from dissertations and studies I have found through databases.  I hope to find a few more to use for my final analysis paper.

Working out ways to utilize information that is not blatantly relevant will be a challenge, but I also plan to use the few sources I have found efficiently in my paper. There are a number of different dissertations in databases that could be of use if analyzed properly. The search for other blogs that pertain to my subject is ongoing however and I hope to find at least one to use as reference in my paper.