CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

Academic attainment is an important parameter in measuring success in students. Observations and reports have shown that success or high academic achievement has become a Herculean task to accomplish by students in recent times. Poor academic performance was recorded both at the secondary school and tertiary levels of education in Nigeria. The performance of students at all levels in educational institutions in Nigeria has attracted much criticisms from all and sundry and from time immemorial. The decline in academic performance of students in Nigeria has been observed by Soyinka (1999), when he observed that education system in Nigeria need restructuring. He went further to say that academic standard had fallen drastically and the quality of graduates being produced by the nations’ schools is questionable and subject to reexamination. Poor academic performance of students has been of great concern to educationists, guidance and counsellor in particular. Despite all guidance programmes and counselling strategies mounted in schools to improve the students’ academic performance were recorded yearly. It becomes necessary to find out the causes of such poor performance in Nigeria secondary institutions. Though these poor performances have been attributed to a lot of industries such as students’ factors, like student’s attitude to school, approach to learning and academic self concept.

Apart from students’ factors, school factors and parent’s factors, there are other indicators that cause poor performance. on the part of the parents, there are certain factors which influence children’s success, such as parents’ social class, parents’ education as well as parental input and other factors, the family size and birth order may contribute positively or negatively to students’ academic performance. Family size in this context refers to the total number of children in the child’s family in addition to the child himself, while the birth order refers to the child’s position in the birth order. However, family type that a child comes from either monogamous or polygamous family usually have impact on the child’s academic performance. It is important to note that either of the family type (monogamous or polygamous) family dictates the size of the family. Polygamous family is peculiar to Africa in general and Nigeria in particular in Oredo Local Government Area of Edo State, the data collected revealed that polygamous family is common among well educated family as well as among poorly educated families. It is equally among professional and managerial fathers of the top of the occupational hierarchy. It is the unskilled workers at the bottom of ladders that the practice of polygamy is prominent, but it is equally common among intellectually oriented families living in homes full of recent books as well as families without a single book in their houses. Information from literature depicted that children from larger families are found to do worse than children from smaller families lower down the birth order do worse than those higher up the birth order (Lacovou, 2001).

According to Adler cited in Uba (1989) first birth or the older child is usually advantaged by a good deal of attention and warmth during the early stage on age of life, which he entertains all alone. Observations and studies have shown that more attention and time are usually accorded the first born (Becker, 1980). Parental attention by parents decline as the number of children increase and later born children perform less well than their earlier born siblings. Studies carried out in the past on the relationship achievement and birth order have shown that there were negative relationships. For example Leoma (1982) on relationship of birth order and creativity, first born and configuration of oldest and only children are significantly more creative or verbal test of creativity than later born. Nwafor and Ango (1988) observed that there was more significant outstanding academic performance amongst first birth children. Tenibiaye (2002) observed that there was a significant dierence in intelligent capacity between the first and later born Spear (1982) in his study, investigated that birth order eect on intelligence with later born children revealed that later born children were less capable than earlier siblings when birth order controlled, family size was found to be negatively related to intelligence.

However, Powell and Steelman (1993) and Vanejik and Degraaf (1995) argued that children’s attainment depends on input of time and money from their parents. The more increase of children in a family the less of both inputs. These inputs are not money alone, but other essential things like time, attention, resource delusion and so on. However Booth and Kee (2006) confirmed that children from larger families have lower levels of education. Research on the effect of siblings, size and position has been based on a theory of the allocation of parental resources as presented in Becker (1981) and Spanta and Paulson (1995) confirmed that differences were found in birth order and family size of adolescent achievement in academic.