Article Analysis

Maire Woolf: Broken Homes


The key view expressed in this article is that chldren who come from what is reffered to as a 'broken home', tend to have difficulty developing in terms oif physically and mentally when it comes to starting school. To some extent I do disagree with these views as I feel it is unfair to blame children's difficulties on things such as bad parenting. The idea of a family differing from the traditional nuclear family is completely different to the family being dysfunctional. In today's society, less and less children are engaing in actvities which enhance their brains and instead are choosing to spend ther majoprty of time on the computer, phone's, etc. Even toys for younger children are becoming much more technology based, thus convential activities such as reading are being lost. Similarly with physical underdevelopment, it is wrong to assume this is as a result of families being 'broken'. Instead, it could be due to laziness - an issue prominant in the 21st century. Additionally, those families which are 'broken' may offer more care, help, support etc. for their children even more so than having a 'functional'family. For example, in a single parent family headed by the mother, she may folcus all of her time teaching her child the correct intelectual skills needed in preparation for school, even more so than a nuclear family which don't bother with such things. 
By contrast, I do also believe the type of family you are brought upp in and the background will massively influence a child's development. If their critical window of development is missed, children are at a much larger risk of falling behind before starting school, as evident in Rutter and sonufa-Barke's study on Romanian orphans.