Posted on 08/10/2007 7:29:53 AM PDT by Clemenza
The horrific, execution-style killing of three teens in Newark last weekend has sparked widespread outrage and promises of reform from politicians, religious leaders, and community activists, who are pledging a renewed campaign against the violence that plagues New Jersey’s largest city. But much of the reaction, though well-intentioned, misses the point. Behind Newark’s persistent violence and deep social dysfunction is a profound cultural shift that has left many of the city’s children growing up outside the two-parent family—and in particular, growing up without fathers. Decades of research tell us that such children are far likelier to fail in school and work and to fall into violence than those raised in two-parent families. In Newark, we are seeing what happens to a community when the traditional family comes close to disappearing.
According to 2005 figures from the U.S. Census Bureau, only 32 percent of Newark children are being raised by their parents in a two-adult household. The rest are distributed among families led by grandparents, foster parents, and single parents—mostly mothers. An astonishing 60 percent of the city’s kids are growing up without fathers. It isn’t that traditional families are breaking up; they aren’t even getting started. The city has one of the highest out-of-wedlock birthrates in the country, with about 65 percent of its children born to unmarried women. And 70 percent of those births are to women who are already poor, meaning that their kids are born directly into poverty.
The economic consequences of these numbers are unsettling, since single parenthood is a road to lasting poverty in America today. In Newark, single parents head 83 percent of all families living below the poverty line. If you are a child born into a single-parent family in Newark, your chances of winding up in poverty are better than one in five, but if you are born into a two-parent family, those chances drop to just one in twelve.
And the social consequences are even more disturbing. Research conducted in the 1990s found that a child born out of wedlock was three times more likely to drop out of school than the average child, and far more likely to wind up on welfare as an adult. Studies have also found that about 70 percent of the long-term prisoners in our jails, those who have committed the most violent crimes, grew up without fathers.
The starkness of these statistics makes it astonishing that our politicians and policy makers ignore the subject of single parenthood, as if it were outside the realm of civic discourse. And our religious leaders, who once preached against such behavior, now also largely avoid the issue, even as they call for prayer vigils and organize stop-the-violence campaigns in Newark. Often, in this void, the only information that our teens and young adults get on the subject of marriage, children, and family life comes through media reports about the lifestyles of our celebrity entertainers and athletes, who have increasingly shunned matrimony and traditional families. Once, such news might have been considered scandalous; today, it is reported matter-of-factly, as if these pop icons’ lives were the norm.
Faced with such a profound shift in attitudes, even well-designed, well-intentioned government programs that have worked elsewhere may have only limited success in a community like Newark. The city’s dynamic new mayor, Cory Booker, has moved quickly to import successful ideas and programs, including rigorous quality-of-life policing from New York City. Booker is advocating sensible changes to fix the city’s troubled school system, which graduates a shockingly low number of students, and he’s looking at job training programs to get fathers involved, at least economically, in their children’s lives.
But Booker has also shown frustration at the slow pace of change in Newark, and earlier this week he observed that the city’s problems didn’t start yesterday and won’t be solved tomorrow. Given that some 3,750 kids are born every year into fatherless Newark families, Booker’s prediction may be depressingly correct.
BTW: The overwhelming majority of homicides in Newark are black-on-black, although the crime mentioned in the article was a degenerate illegal killing black kids.
There are criminals and victims in Newark. And the politicians are too busy trying to get paid to do anything about it.
It’s just the result of “The Great Society,” courtesy of LBJ.
Crimmigration also has a role.
Back in the 1980’s there was a great quote:
If you come to Newark without a gun, we will issue you one.
I'm surprised it's that many. You would think that between them, a husband and a wife would have better sense and better options than to raise a family in Newark.
When I was a kid (in the Stone Age) I was allowed to travel by myself, most anywhere between Philly and Manhattan. One of the areas I was warned to avoid was Newark, and that was before the commotion.
Another Democrat success story...
I agree.
But people forget that before Sharpe James there was Kenny Gibson and before Kenny Gibson there was Hugh Addonizio.
Addonizio turned the Newark municipal government into a Mafia patronage factory.
"Disinvestment" may have accelerated after the riots, but it was proceeding apace before then, due to business owners choosing not to be shaken down by the Boiardo crew and their cronies in the NPD.
My mother-in-law lived in Irvington in 1965 and worked in Newark for PSE&G - and she was shot in the leg with a ricocheted .22 round by a wiseguy who decided to intimidate the owner of a local market by firing of rounds into the ceiling of the store.
Newark was falling apart before the riots for a number of reasons - starting right after WWII.
1) the black establishment, which never seems to see any reason except "racism" for the failure of black kids to achieve in school and get someplace in life; and
2) the liberals and libertarian-type conservatives who insist that government policies should never be formulated with marriage and family structure in mind.
Everybody acknowledges that family values is the key to creating a stable Newark, but when put into practice our government schools wants education without morality. Paraphrasing what Theodore Roosevelt once said, “if society educates a person with knowledge devoid of morality, then society will end up with an educated menance.”
Feminism has failed children and men and women.
The disintegration of the traditional family leads immediately to the disintegration of society.
WHAT is our country going to do about changing this dynamic? More welfare, and social programs are not the answer. Until people particularly from this social class begin to marry again, BEFORE they procreate, these problems will continue, and they will also continue to spread to the more upwardly mobile social classes.
It has become a way of life passed on from generation to generation, and is as NORMAL to some people as the traditional family was.
I sincerely wish the Newarks of our country well, but they keep making the same mistakes over and over. Decades of wrong values, wrong decisions, wrong politics . . it’s a never-ending circle.
Why they don’t get it is beyond me, but nothing’s going to change.
How dare you point out that this is a direct consequence of a “liberal” program! The said they meant well, and some of them actually DID mean well.
What is this guy, some kind of religious fanatic trying to force his beliefs off onto the rest of us?
/libertarian
Not to mention another example of the Atlas Shrugged principal
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