Family Structure and Cognitive Effort: Examining the Influence of Living with a Single Parent on Children's Task Engagement.

Abstract

This brief report investigates the association between family structure and the cognitive effort of fifth-grade students in Madrid and Berlin. Although existing studies often link single parenthood to poorer academic outcomes, scant research has investigated its impact on children's effort. This study utilizes a novel behavioral measure of cognitive effort-rather than survey-based proxies-to fill this knowledge gap. We collected data from 1359 students across 62 classes. Effort was measured via performance on three incentivized real-effort tasks (AX continuous performance, Simon, and slider tasks). Using two-level random-intercept linear regression models and multiple imputation, we analyzed children's effortful behavior while adjusting for cognitive ability. Our findings consistently show that children from single-parent households exhibit lower cognitive effort. This negative association remained significant across all incentive conditions and even after controlling for socioeconomic factors and environmental variables. Moreover, the effort gap between single and dual-parent households was qualitatively similar in both cities. However, the estimated magnitude of this effect is rather small. In conclusion, children growing up with a single parent exhibit lower cognitive effort than children in dual-parent families. This finding may provide a pathway to better understanding of the educational disadvantage typically observed among single-parent children.