INTRODUCTION
It is assumed that the more stable the family is the more secure the child will be in the home.
The child living in the shadow of the broken home is often bewildered by comings and goings
and by the mere fact that essential relationships are not promoted or are broken off and
disrupted at a very impressionable time. Both parents would have to be essential elements in
the growth and development of the child. This is provided by the mutual relationships and
interactions among and between parents and child to give the child a focus. The roles they have
to play are different but, at the same time complementary. Human personality is born and made,
first and foremost, in the family. Temperamentally, they are ‘born’ with the inherited
endowments of the both parents genes and they are ‘made’ through the social climate of the
family (Ene, 2005). It is because of this reason that the family is viewed as essential institution in the first place, which also produces human personalities who will be persons or things
oriented in their scholastic pursuance and eventual career preference.
The family does not only permit some safeguards for the child during its formative period of
biological immaturity, it also provides for the child’s primary socialization and initial education
(Dave, 2008). This education formal or informal is a pre parathion, a sine-qua-non, for future
performance and living depending on what appears to the family to be ideal occupation. The
style adopted by each family in its socialization efforts differs one from another due largely to
their temperament make up, since no two individuals have identical or similar temperaments.
With these differences in thought processes and actions follows differences in the level of
scholastic success and achievement from one student to another.
The size of a family is of great importance to this study because of the opinion that children
from small size families have greater propensity to academic excellence than those from large
size families. To this end, Eamon (2005) asserts that family size; large or small affects the
scholastic success of the child. Moreover, a child’s intelligence is largely determined by the
family circumstance. To him, measured intelligence does correlate with family size. He also
notes that the culture of a family and that of the school has to be in conflict since un-skilled
manual workers tend to have the largest family size despite their lowest income. He therefore,
concludes that family size and poverty adversely affect children’s educational progress.
Ihenacho (2002) on his part observes that a family that is large in size may impede learning
because the provision of adequate learning facilities may be lacking. He further affirms that
the more closely spaced the family, the lower the test intelligence of the children. Parents with
fewer children devote more attention to, and interact more with each child. Such children, he
asserts, feel more the warmth of family affection and are thus, motivated to perform better
academically. Isangedighi (2007) posits that large family is not ideal in language development
because parents may not be able to interact with many children all at once. He further notes
that, first born children receive more attention because they may be in a position to interact
well with parents before the arrival of other children. Moreover, he observes that socioeconomic status accounts for about 16 percent of the variance average on the parents of lower
socio-economic status. Parents, who were found to marry earlier than others, bear children
rapidly and continue bearing till later age. He interferes that because of such differential
reproduction rate, the intelligence might be declining as much as two or three points per
generation.
Children from smaller families tend to receive more attention from their parents than those
from larger homes. This can result in better school success ( Eamon, 2005). Nsibiet (2011) has
shown that the environment of a large family constitute a handicap to the verbal development,
consequently to general mental development. He explains that since the amount of verbal
communication with adults is limited in a large family, children from such families are
backward in language development. Moreover, that there is a strong evidence that a child who
is equipped verbally is bound to score highly on intelligence test (Van Ejick & DeGray,
1995).Similarly, Esseme (2004) found out that the size of a family could predict how students
fare or perform in school.