All in the family: Why a strong, intact home life is the biggest single factor in raising good kids

CERC ^ | 10.03.05 | John Leo

[Coleus]

All in the family    JOHN LEO

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Why a strong, intact home life is the biggest single factor in raising good, successful kids.

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It took the media a while to acknowledge that most of Katrina's victims were black. Apparently, it will take longer to mention that most of the victims were women and children. I noticed three commentators who brought up the delicate subject of the mostly missing males — George Will, Gary Bauer, and Thomas Bray, a columnist for the Detroit News. Will noted that 76 percent of births to Louisiana's African-Americans are to unmarried women, and probably more than 80 percent in New Orleans, since that is the usual estimate in other inner cities. Will wrote: "That translates into a large and constantly renewed cohort of lightly parented adolescent males, and that translates into chaos, in neighborhoods and schools, come rain or come shine."

A good deal of hard evidence shows that this is so. Two decades of research produced a consensus among social scientists of both left and right that family structure has a serious impact on children, even when controlling for income, race, and other variables. In other words, we are not talking about a problem of race but about a problem of family formation or, rather, the lack of it. The best outcomes for children — whether in academic performance, avoidance of crime and drugs, or financial and economic success — are almost invariably produced by married biological parents. The worst results are by never-married women.

High crime. In a policy brief released last week, the Washington-based Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, http://www.marriagedebate.com/pdf/imapp.crimefamstructure.pdf looked at 23 recent studies dealing with family structure and youth crime. In 19 of the 20 studies that found family structure to have an effect, children from nonintact or single-parent families had a higher rate of crime or delinquency. Neighbourhoods with lots of out-of-wedlock births have lots of crime. Ominously, one study said that the more single-parent families there were in a neighborhood, the more crime there was among two-parent kids living around them. Again, these studies are controlled for race.

Among the other findings:

• Adolescents in single-parent families were almost twice as likely to have pulled a knife or a gun on someone in the past year. This was after controlling for many demographic variables, including race, gender, age, household income, and educational level of parents.
  
• In a large sample of students in 315 classrooms in 11 cities, the "single most important variable" in gang involvement was found to be family structure. In other words, the greater the number of parents at home, the lower the level of gang involvement. A study of American Indian families found that living in a two-parent family reduced gang involvement by more than 50 percent.
  

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  The upshot of these studies is that America is confronted by a form of poverty that money alone can't cure.

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• Another study concluded that out-of-wedlock childbearing had a large effect on the rate of arrests for murder, an effect that "seems to have gotten stronger over time."
  
• "Adolescents in married, two-biological-parent families generally fare better than children in any of the family types examined here," one study reported. The other family types studied were single mother, cohabiting stepfather, and married stepfather families.
  
• One study, judged most important by the institute, found that divorce rates had no relationship to violent crime rates but that out-of-wedlock births had a strong relationship to youth crime — nearly 90 percent of the increase in violent crime between 1973 and 1995 was accounted for by the rise in out-of-wedlock births.

The upshot of these studies is that America is confronted by a form of poverty that money alone can't cure. Many of us think social breakdown is a result of racism and poverty. Yes, they are factors, but study after study shows that alterations in norms and values are at the heart of economic and behavioral troubles. That's why so much research boils down to the old rule: If you want to avoid poverty, finish high school, don't have kids in your teens, and get married.

But the conventional wisdom is determined to ignore the evidence. It holds that family fragmentation — sorry, diverse family forms — is positive and here to stay. Peggy Drexler, the author of a new book, Raising Boys Without Men, says people who promote intact families are playing a "blame game" against single mothers. She thinks eating dinner regularly with your children is more important than the number or gender of adults in the home. And boys, according to Drexler, have an innate ability to become men, even without a man in the house. (But if boys can raise themselves, why should any father stick around?) The book carries blurbs from various establishment figures. Why not? Her ideas are ordinary ones among our elites.

For Further Reading:

Peggy Drexler, Ph.D., with Linden  Gross, Raising Boys without Men (Rodale, 2005). Read more of Drexler’s work, including her Gender and Psychology article, here. Read an interview with Drexler here.

Caitlin Flanagan, “Boys Will Be Boys,” Atlantic Monthly, November 2005. (Subscription required.)

Mark Early, “Junk Science,” Breakpoint , 26 October 2005 .

Mark Early, “Psychological Cheerleading,” Breakpoint , 27 October 2005 .

William Raspberry, “Poor Women’s ‘Magical Outlook,’” Washington Post, 26 September 2005 .

Glenn Sacks, “Are boys really better off without fathers?” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 6 September 2005 .

Betsy Hart, “As a single mom, I know marriage makes the best setting for raising children,” Jewish World Review, 30 August 2005 .

R. Albert Mohler Jr., “Raising Boys without Men—The New Feminist Fantasy,” Crosswalk.com, 17 October 2005 .

R. Albert Mohler Jr., “Lesbians raising sons; got a problem with that?” Baptist Press, 30 December 2004 .

BreakPoint Commentary No. 040624, “Take Your Choice: Parents or Prisons?”

Roberto Rivera , “Patriarchy: It’s All about Transmission,” BreakPoint Online, 7 July 2003 .

BreakPoint Commentary No. 040618, “Captain Obvious Strikes Again: We Do Need Dads.”

BreakPoint Commentary No. 050906, “Rebuilding the Foundations: Of Beauty and a Father’s Love.” (Free registration required.)

Christina Hoff Sommers, The War against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men (Simon and Schuster, 2000).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Leo, John. "All in the family." US News and World Report (October 3, 2005).

Reprinted by permission of John Leo.

AUTHOR

John Leo is a contributing editor for U.S.News & World Report, and his column on the state of our culture appears weekly in 140 newspapers across the country. Leo has covered the social sciences and intellectual trends for Time magazine and the New York Times. He is also the author of two books: Two Steps Ahead of the Thought Police and a book of humor, How the Russians Invented Baseball and Other Essays of Enlightenment. He lives with his wife and daughter in Manhattan.

[Clemenza]

Single motherhood has done more to destroy the American male than all the feminist propaganda in the world.

[MarMema]

Thanks for posting.

[Giant Conservative]

Daughters and sons alike need their fathers living in the same home as they do. Nothing less is enough.

[tryingtomakesenseofthis]

Note that the blame always goes to the "deadbeat" men or the absence of men, never to the idiot women who are giving birth to children they are ill-equipped to raise.

Peggy Drexler, the author of a new book, Raising Boys Without Men, says people who promote intact families are playing a "blame game" against single mothers.

You bet I am.

[caryatid]

It took the media a while to acknowledge that most of Katrina's victims were black. Apparently, it will take longer to mention that most of the victims were women and children.

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The absolutely false statements in this article are contradicted by the facts. New Orleans was nearly 70% black at the time of the Hurricane ... yet only 42% of identified corpses are black. Statistics male/female have not been reported; however, age statistics have been reported. 60% of the identified corpses were over the age of 60.

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Katrina casualties in New Orleans mostly elderly

Oct 24, 2005, 5:43 GMT

NEW ORLEANS, LA, United States (UPI) -- The elderly, many of them unable to leave or suffering from severe medical problems, were a majority of the Hurricane Katrina casualties in New Orleans.

'You had a combination of devastating flood waters and elderly and infirm populations with fewer resources,' Dr. Jullette Saussy, the city`s director of Emergency Medical Services, told the Times Picayune. 'That equals fatalities.'

A total of 1,056 bodies had been recovered in Louisiana as of Friday, 700 of them in Orleans Parish. Drowning and medical conditions aggravated by the loss of power, lack of medication or medical care and the intense heat were the major causes of death.

Sixty percent of the victims with known ages were 60 or older.

In St. Bernard Parish, where at least 123 people died, Coroner Bryan Bertucci said most were in their 60s or 70s. He said only one was a child.

The newspaper said that, at least in the city, age appears to have been the biggest factor, trumping race, income and geographical location.

Copyright 2005 by United Press International

[TAdams8591]

In the raising of good children, there is NOTHING more CRUCIAL than a strong, intact family life. NOTHING.

[TAdams8591]

"In a large sample of students in 315 classrooms in 11 cities, the "single most important variable" in gang involvement was found to be family structure."

Gangs take the place of intact families in most instances. How sad.

[nmh]

This should be common sense but TODAY we need study after study after study to confirm this. This outcome just doesn't fit the liberal - it takes a village - would view.

[little jeremiah]

Moral Absolutes Ping.

Yes, yes, and yes.

Freepmail me if you want on/off this pinglist.

[little jeremiah]

Single motherhood is the direct result of feminist propaganda. It's feminism in action.

"A woman needs a husband likes fish needs a bicycle."

[msf92497]

My wife and I were discussing this issue last night. The number one threat to our nation is the disintegration of the family.

[apackof2]

a "blame game" against single mothers.

Both single moms AND deadbeat dads are to blame, it takes two

[WasDougsLamb]

I am a single mom whose husband and baby boy were killed by a drunk driver which left me with 2 daughters to raise on my own through NO fault of mine. I have a 20 year old and a 5 year old. I am putting my daughter through college as we speak ON MY OWN. I am doing the very best I can and I believe that if life hands us a situation where our husbands are taken, we as single moms can do it. I have worked ALL my life since I graduated from college. I didn't choose to be a single mother. A drunk chose to kill my family and leave me this way.

[Chickensoup]

The lie here is that the author is discussing SINGLE mothers. There are lots of kinds of mothers who are alone.

Widowed mothers
Separated mothers
Divorced mothers
Unwed mothers

The MSM calls them all single to decrease the stigma of unwed motherhood. Yet unwed mothers stunningly terrible child statistics and widowed mothers have child statistics that are more close to the statistics of two parent families.

[Lindykim]

That we must actually work to Convince people of these things, speaks many sad and tragic things about the spiritually sick state of our nation.

[Tax-chick]

The other family types studied were single mother, cohabiting stepfather, and married stepfather families.

Am I the only one who's getting tired of seeing "stepfather" used to mean "man who was living with somebody's mother at the time the crime was committed"?

[Tax-chick]

I think they're using "victims" in a general sense, "people who suffered loss or harm," rather than the more specific category of people who died.

[WasDougsLamb]

My point was that a SINGLE mother, for whatever reason, CAN raise decent children if she tries hard enough and wants to make productive citizens for the future. My comment was directed at a staement in the article:

"In 19 of the 20 studies that found family structure to have an effect, children from nonintact or single-parent families had a higher rate of crime or delinquency"

Thanks anyway for the input.