The Director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia Brad Wilcox said the inaugural 2013 World Family Map Report he co-authored shows that two-parent family gives children an educational advantage.
"In the vast majority of the developed world, children are more likely to thrive academically when they have two parents in the home," said Dr Wilcox.
"This pattern is also found in Australia, where children from two-parent homes are more likely to excel in reading, and to avoid being held back in school, compared to children raised in single-parent families.
"Fortunately, based on The World Family Map, most children (80 per cent) in Australia are growing up in a two-parent family. On average, these Australian children are more likely to benefit from the love, attention, and financial resources that a two-parent family can deliver," he said.
Dr Wilcox said the report shows that relative child poverty, which is the share of children who live in households with household incomes that are less than half of the national median income, is 11 per cent for Australian children.
He said this is much lower than the North American countries of Canada (13 per cent), United States of America (23 per cent) and Mexico (22 per cent).
"One explanation for this is that there are higher levels of public benefits to families - such as child care support, tax breaks - than in North American countries. In fact 2.8 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in Australia is spent on these benefits compared to 1.0 to 1.4 per cent in North America," he said.
The World Congress of Families Sydney 2013 runs from 15-18th of May. It's the largest gathering of pro-family leaders in academia, education, politics, business, medicine, media, culture, religion and law. The Congress seeks to strengthen the natural family, the economy and civil society.
The World Family Map (www.worldfamilymap.org) is an initiative of Child Trends, an independent, nonpartisan research centre. The goal is to generate research that sheds light on how to strengthen families, the critical cornerstone on which our communities and economy are based. The report is sponsored by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Focus Global, and the Social Trends Institute, and a range of universities and institutions including the University of Asia and the Pacific and Seoul National University.