Families which have two parents may still be viewed as the ideal despite single parent family being on the rise today due to various reasons. The effects parents have on growing children cut across all the areas of their lives, academics and career included. The study sought to explore the influence of types of parenthoods on academic performance of public day secondary school students in Nakuru Municipality, Kenya. The study employed an ex post facto research design targeting 17 public day Secondary Schools in the municipality. Five schools were randomly sampled with two teachers sampled purposively from the five schools. The population of study comprised form three students who were 1875 in number. A total of 145 students were sampled from both parenthood types. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were employed to analyze data. The findings of this study indicated that type of parenthood does influence students' academic performance. There were also gender differences in academic performance in relation to the type of parenthood.