ABSTRACT 

This study examined dysfunctional family and academic performance of adolescents in public secondary schools of South South geopolitical zones of Nigeria. The states in the South South geopolitical zone of Nigeria include: Delta, Bayelsa, Rivers, Akwa Ibom, and Cross River. Seven research questions guided the study and five hypotheses were formulated and tested at 0.05 level of significance. Ex post facto research design was adopted in this study, simple random sampling was used to select the states used from the area of study and sample size. The sample size used for this study was 1379 adolescents from South South Geopolitical zone of Nigeria. The instrument used for the study was structured questionnaire of four-point rating scale and sixty achievement test questions on home economics for junior and secondary schools. The questionnaire comprised of two sections, section A which contains the demographic information and section B which contains the research questions. Descriptive statistics such as frequency and mean distribution was used to analyze the research questions while the hypothesis was analyzed with z-test distributions. The findings of the study revealed that the features of dysfunctional families include divorce of parents, separation of parents, neglect of children by their parents, poverty, and mental illness of one or both parents. The study shows clearly that some of the physical effect of dysfunctional family include inflicting of physical injury, starvation; the social effect included keeping of bad companies, peer group influence, bad environmental influence. The findings of the study also show that the economic effect of dysfunctional family include inability to afford three square means per day, and poor funding of academic needs of the adolescents. Dysfunctional family affects the emotional state of the adolescent students through absent mindedness in classroom, drug abuse and depression. The work also revealed clearly that there is no significant difference in the mean response of adolescents on extent dysfunctional family influences the academic performance of adolescents in public secondary schools in South South geopolitical zone of Nigeria. The general conclusion of the study is that there is a significant negative impact of the identified effect of dysfunctional families on the academic performance of adolescents in public secondary schools in South South Zone of Nigeria. Based on the findings of this study, the researcher made the following recommendations: parents should do all possible to make sure they stick together and raise their children and the religious bodies, non- governmental organizations and other family stakeholders should be preaching a message of peace to homes to avoid the degeneration of dysfunctional families. Also, government should create a conducive economics atmosphere to ensure adequate standard of living for families