Children and Parents
"Don't make a baby if you can't be a father." - Urban League
In order for children to prosper and to grow up as they were intended the research is irrefutable that they need both parents involved in their lives. The biggest factor in a child's success or failure is involvement of the parents. This factor is larger than race, economics, or education. Let us be clear, the experiment of women raising children alone and the feminist belief that fathers in the lives of their children is overrated has failed and failed miserably. The evidence is clear that children being raised by single mothers are not doing as well as children being raised by both parents. Here are just a few examples of how horrific the results have been for our children.
* Children from fatherless homes are five times more likely to be poor, and ten times more likely to be extremely poor.
* Seventy percent of juveniles in reform school and long term prison inmates come from fatherless homes.
* Children from fatherless homes are twice as likely to be high school drop outs.
* Fatherless children have more emotional and behavioral problems.
* Girls from fatherless homes are three times as likely to be unwed teenage mothers. Adolescents in mother-only families are more likely to be sexually active, and daughters are more likely to become single-parent mothers.
* Boys from fatherless homes have a higher incidence of unemployment, incarceration, and noninvolvement with their own children.
* Seventy-one percent of all high school dropouts come from fatherless homes.
* Seventy-five percent of all adolescent patients in chemical abuse centers come from fatherless homes.
So as you can see by the data on girls from fatherless homes and the noninvolvement of boys in their own children’s lives; if we continue to do nothing this problem has and will continue to feed on itself. For the record this is not an indictment against single mothers or against all of the women who struggle against great odds to try and raise their children as best they can, but based on the statistics only three out of ten children raised in this environment are successful. For too long many have ignored the seven and focused primarily on the three for the advancement of their own agendas or for racist or political reasons. We must begin to reestablish and reappraise the role of fathers in the family structure. We must begin to reestablish and encourage the belief in marriage in the black community not purely for religious reasons, but for social and economic reasons as well. We cannot truly discuss the fatherless child without including a discussion on the state of marriage in the black community.
The state of marriage in the black community in particular and the larger society as a whole is under a state of siege. We should begin to strengthen and reinforce the institution of marriage in our community. We should not lose sight of the fact that marriage is not the invention of man, but the creation of our Creator to protect our children and the fabric of our society. The biggest threat to marriage today despite the rhetoric of my Conservative counterparts is not gay marriage, it is divorce and our society's undermining of the importance of marriage. Today we accept the right of women to have children outside the bonds of marriage without considering the consequences on those children or the social ramifications of those decisions. Marriage is and always will be the biggest determinate of a child's future spiritual, economic, and educational growth.
As we begin to heal the relationships between the father and their children we must also begin to heal the relationship between the male and female in the black community. It is time for all of our community institutions to come together and address the issue of the breakdown of the family. We should reintegrate the black child back into the family structure and instead of focusing on the defense of children we should be focusing on the defense of the family as a whole. For decades we have addressed the state of the black child as an entity apart from the family. We have allowed so-called experts to tell us that the nuclear family and marriage are not traditional for the African American. When did the values of personal and family responsibility become the exclusive domain of any one culture?