Sunday Morning Talk Show Thread 18 April 2021

I was struck by the explanation of single mothers and their difficulties raising boys successfully, because once they are bigger than she is, they are no longer able to discipline them. I had to do more than normal raising my two sons because my husband was unavailable a lot and had a short and unpredictable temper. My 50 year old son who has now spent more than 20 years in Special Forces could have turned out badly. When he was 8 and at the babysitters while I worked, his 9 year old friend encouraged him to puncture all 4 tires on a man’s car parked near the babysitter’s house. I was afraid how my husband would handle this so I talked with him very seriously when he was most receptive and then we did this with our son. We did not scream, we did not yell. I told him he had done a very bad thing, cost this man a whole day of his life restoring the tires, and $200. His friend’s mother and I had agreed to give the man $100 each, and son would not get his $2 weekly allowance for the next year to pay for our $100. A week later he asked for his allowance and I reminded him he was paying for the tires. The next week, the same, and after that he did not mention it again. Fast forward to age 15. I overheard him say most emphatically into the phone, “No, I am NOT going to do that with you guys, Bye!!.” I asked him what that was about and he said, “They wanted me to buy a ticket into the movie theater and then open the emergency door so they could all get in free.” I had rarely spanked him when small, and never felt threatened even as he grew to 6’1” to my 5’5”.

With his younger brother it was more complicated. Son 2 was dyslexic and dropped out of school in the 10th grade. His older brother was now gone in the service and he was mildly depressed and doing nothing. I finally told him, “Your brother tells me that when his friends leave school or the Army, they pay their parents $200 a month for room and board if they live at home.” My 2nd son thought for a little while, and said, “Well, I’ll move out and live with my friends.” It turned out they rented a 3 story house in poor condition for $350 a month and 5 of them were living there. It was a multi-ethnic household. I then called a young friend of mine who I had helped and said I was worried about my boy, and could he give him some work in his new business. My friend helped, and would even go to that house and drag him out of bed to get going. He met the woman he has now been married to for over 20 year who also lived in that house, and now has his own construction and repair business. I know that he is fortunate he is white because he could have gotten into trouble with the police where he was living, but with the help of friends and early discipline he too has turned out OK.

I agree there were a lot of stable neighborhoods before the 1960’s, but racial inequities were never cured after the Civil War. The business of forcing men out of the household with welfare rules was really a bad move for stability. Another bad move was major neighborhood projects. I know of areas were blocks and blocks of houses were razed and the black residents moved out and scattered like metasticizing cancer cells throughout cities. In the old stable slum and working class neighborhoods, there were social controls. Old people sat on the porches and if a kid acted up, they would tell the mother or parents about their behavior, and the child would hear about their misdeeds in a hurry. We had bought a large house cheap in a bad neighborhood where conditions were improving block by block nearby. One day the local numbers man (a black person) told me he had pulled my children out of a dumpster on the block. I thanked him profusely and you better believe I had a stern talk with the boys. Another time our house was broken into and several things stolen including some things given to my husband by his mess crew in Korea. He was talking about the loss of these mementos to several black people in the neighborhood, about how much they meant to him. A few days later the local bootlegger (also black) asked him to come over to the house and said he had been given the mementos to return to my husband. We had bought our house in 1967, and some areas were still using the old social rules. After the MLK riots in 1968, that occurred nearby, there was a noticeable change in the way people treated one another.

I do disagree about your statement that mothers are not built mentally to enforce boundaries. I will never forget the day my husband had promised to come home for a good dinner at 7 pm. I was holding up the dinner hoping he would keep his promise, and when he came in my 8 year old complained bitterly that he had not kept his promise. He pulled off his belt and took off after my son. I ran upstairs and got between the two of them. He had his belt hand raised ready to hit me, and I stared at him hard and said, “You do, and it is all over.” He was also a big man, but he knew I would take the children and leave and backed down.

As to disproportionate crime. Part of it is an enforcement issue. In one place where personal marijuana in small amounts is now legal this is what happened. It was determined that about equal numbers of blacks and whites were using MJ, but about 90% of the MJ arrests were of black people. The publicity on this unfair disparity resulted ultimately in that legalization. I also know that in that particular community, the far left candidates rarely get more than a few votes, whether from whites or blacks.

I have no desire to be a man. I enjoy being a woman with the right man. I also realize there are differences on the average between the sexes, but there are similarities at the extremes of the bell curve. There are women who are more masculine than some men, and there are men who are more feminine than some women. Also, since women have 2% more genetic material than men they are more strongly survivable than men on the average. For example, women are more verbal from years of sitting around the cave talking to women and children, while men were off tracking and hunting and mostly keeping quiet. Women also were the gatherers, and have better memories for finding things, since they had to remember where and when each food crop was likely to be growing. That is why in most pairings I have observed, the women is often better at finding lost articles than the man. I have a son in Special Forces, and I suspect he would prefer to have a 5’10’ 165 lb. athletic woman in his squad than a 5’6” 140 lb. non athletic man there. The TRUTH is that people of both sexes are very variable, and some are more suited to one activity than others, and it is not necessarily sex related. Also some women are more aggressive and courageous than a lot of men. That is why when breeding bulls for bull fighting, they always look to the females characteristics in that area. My son was in the Ranger group in his large high school’s ROTC program. All the young men in his group had very strong mothers.

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