Influence Of Family Background On Academic Performance Of Secondary School Students
[A CASE STUDY OF ILORIN SOUTH LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREA KWARA STATE, NIGERIA]

Research on the relation between families and schools has tended to focus on creating an effective in-home learning environment for the child. The tendency of this line of research has been to examine familiar characteristics that may influence the child’s cognitive development and subsequent school performance (Scott-Jones, 1984). Another literature identifies how parents instill motivation and positive attitudes in their children and the subsequent effects such characteristics have on school performance (Bloom 1981). While these research traditions have focused on the development of the child’s cognitive skills and motivation they have been less concerned with the study of parental involvement in school activities.
    To effectively assist their child in his or her efforts to meet the demands of school, parents need to have knowledge about their child’s schooling and access to resources to help their child.
    (Coleman 1997) proposes that family influence can be separated into components such as economic, human, and social capital, Economic capital refers to the financial resources human capital provides parents with the knowledge resources necessary to create supportive learning environments for their children. In contrast, family social capital is defined by the relationships that develop between family members. It is through these relationships that children gain access to the economic, human, and cultural resources of their families. Similarly, (Pierre 1998) suggests social status and ethnic/racial group have differing degrees of access to those forms of cultural capital that support academic success. Within social groups, parents provide experiences that result in children developing similar tastes, preferences. Eventually, these attributes are related to social status and ethnic/racial group differences in academic and occupational outcomes. A number of theories have been developed to examine those parent-child interactions that provide children with differential access to family resources.
    Steinberg’s family model. In a set of investigating, proposes that in understanding family influences, it is important to disentangle three different aspects of parenting. These include parenting style, which provide the emotional context in which parent- child interacting occur. The goals that parents establish for their children; and the practical adopted by parents to help children attain those goals. It has been shown, for example, that a parenting style defined as authoritative is related to positive academic achievement (Darling and Stenberg 1993). Such a style creates a context in which parents encourage their children’s independence and individuality, provide opportunities for children to be involved in family decision making, expect high standards for their children, and have warm relationships with their children. (Redding 1999) indicates that in relation too academics outcomes, the potential limitations associated with poor economic circumstances can be overcomes by parents who provide stimulating, supportive, and language rich experiences for their children. It is important, however, to recognise the nature of the interrelationships between family background characteristics and more refined family Influences. In the development of a model of human development, for example, Stephen J. Cerci and his colleagues (1997) propose that the efficacy of a family Influence for academic success is determined to a large degree by a child’s family background.  They observe that parent-child interactions are the focus that leads to academic performance. In addition, they claim that academic success is achieved only if family background resources can be accessed to maximize the association between family Influences and outcomes relationships between family Influences and academic achievement need to take into account the potentially constraining or expanding or expanding opportunities provided by children’s family backgrounds. Analyses of the relations between families and academic achievement also need to consider children’s family structure. A mother does homework with her children. It is generally acknowledge that family environment is the most powerful influence in determining a child’s academic motivation and achievement. Research suggests that differences in the academic achievement of children from single-and two-parent families can be related to changes in the economic circumstances of families and to variations in the quality of parent- child interactions in the different family structure.
    Sibling structure. There has been along standing fascination with exploring associations between sibling variables, such as the number of children in a family and a child’s birth- order position in the family, typically these sibling variables have small but significant inverse associations with academic outcomes, especially verbal measures of achievement. A number of theoretical perspectives have been proposed to explain these relationships including the resources dilution hypothesis and the confluence model.
    The resources dilution hypothesis proposes that sibling variables are related to the quality and quantity of parent-child interacting in families, and that such variation in parent resource are associated with sibling difference in academic achievement. That is, the greater the number of children in a family or the later the birth- under position, the more those children has to share family resources. As a result, children have lower score on those academic outcomes affected by the diluted family influences. An alternate perspective is the confluence model which proposes that children’s academic development is affected by the number of children in the families, the age-spacing among children and whether children are only, first, or last born in families. The model claims, for examples that with short birth intervals between children, increasing birth order have related to lower academics performance in contrast, with sufficiently large intervals, the birth- order pattern may be instigated or even reversed.