There are many startling facts and figures in the Children's Defense Fund State of the Americas 2011 report--for instance, that prisons nationwide are funded at 2.5x the rate of schools--but a key issue that is fundamental to all the other issues in my opinion is captured in the below chart. Take a look and see for yourself how wildly different the percentages of children who live with both parents varies by ethnicity.
Given this tremendous disparity in the number of parents typically present the resultant effects are unsurprising. Two incomes are greater than one, and having two parents available likely results in the children being supervised and supported a much greater proportion of the time. Outcomes with resultant disparities include but are by no means limited to family income (see D-6; note lower contribution of present-father income for Hispanics--higher prevalence of minimum wage jobs, perhaps?), hunger/malnutrition, health of both the mother and child before and after birth, insurance status, educational achievement (H-4), and violent crime arrest rate (J-5).
How can the huge variation in the percentage of dual-parent households be explained? The knee-jerk answer would be that "black fathers are absent because they're all in jail." Note, however, that "only" 6.7% of black children have an imprisoned parent (C-9). A difference of 4.4% from the all-ethnicities mean simply does not account for the differences in dual-parent household rates that range up to 46.3% when comparing black households to Asian households. It seems to me that this instead is a cultural phenomenon. Barack Obama's and Bill Cosby's oft-mocked invocations of responsibility seem to have fallen on deaf ears both within the community of black fathers and within the community of black women who have made single motherhood, with all its easily-enough anticipated trials and travails, their collective new norm.
All this, of course, brings up the question of what to do. For once, I'm not at a loss:
DON'T HAVE CHILDREN UNLESS YOU HAVE A STABLE FAMILY AND CAN AFFORD TO RAISE THEM.
(A corollary would be: "Don't blindly follow your neighbors' and friends' life choices without thinking through the possible consequences for your own life.")
I think this is the message we should be broadcasting far and wide as public service announcements, along with providing adequate sexual education and making birth control widely and freely available. How do I know that it's not a futile effort, not "tilting at windmills" as Shared Skittles here would put it? Look at the example of Asians… Although subsets of Asians may indeed be "good at math" inherently, I'd wager that the largest boost to their collective performance is their family structure and all that that entails in turn.
Given this tremendous disparity in the number of parents typically present the resultant effects are unsurprising. Two incomes are greater than one, and having two parents available likely results in the children being supervised and supported a much greater proportion of the time. Outcomes with resultant disparities include but are by no means limited to family income (see D-6; note lower contribution of present-father income for Hispanics--higher prevalence of minimum wage jobs, perhaps?), hunger/malnutrition, health of both the mother and child before and after birth, insurance status, educational achievement (H-4), and violent crime arrest rate (J-5).
How can the huge variation in the percentage of dual-parent households be explained? The knee-jerk answer would be that "black fathers are absent because they're all in jail." Note, however, that "only" 6.7% of black children have an imprisoned parent (C-9). A difference of 4.4% from the all-ethnicities mean simply does not account for the differences in dual-parent household rates that range up to 46.3% when comparing black households to Asian households. It seems to me that this instead is a cultural phenomenon. Barack Obama's and Bill Cosby's oft-mocked invocations of responsibility seem to have fallen on deaf ears both within the community of black fathers and within the community of black women who have made single motherhood, with all its easily-enough anticipated trials and travails, their collective new norm.
All this, of course, brings up the question of what to do. For once, I'm not at a loss:
DON'T HAVE CHILDREN UNLESS YOU HAVE A STABLE FAMILY AND CAN AFFORD TO RAISE THEM.
(A corollary would be: "Don't blindly follow your neighbors' and friends' life choices without thinking through the possible consequences for your own life.")
I think this is the message we should be broadcasting far and wide as public service announcements, along with providing adequate sexual education and making birth control widely and freely available. How do I know that it's not a futile effort, not "tilting at windmills" as Shared Skittles here would put it? Look at the example of Asians… Although subsets of Asians may indeed be "good at math" inherently, I'd wager that the largest boost to their collective performance is their family structure and all that that entails in turn.
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