Tag Archives: Single-Mother

Commentary

How can we win the war on poverty?

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Director Blue has a very long and informative post with tons of useful graphs. (H/T ECM)

Here’s what doesn’t work:

Director Blue explains:

After adjusting for inflation, America’s welfare expenditures are 1300% higher than in 1965. And the results have been absolutely catastrophic. But the documented failures haven’t stopped President Obama and the Democrats from charting a course for massive new spending programs, at a time when the country can least afford it.

What could be the problem? Well, think of welfare as a cash payment given to women who have have babies with men who they chose knowing that those men were not interested in becoming fathers or husbands. Women are having sex with men and having babies with men who have not married them and have no intention of marrying them. And the government is paying them to do this. The government is paying them to oppose chastity. The government is paying them to avoid courting. The government is paying them to avoid chivalry. The government is paying them to avoid marriage.

So what happens next?

Director Blue explains:

The out-of-wedlock birthrate is now 40 percent and the African-American out-of-wedlock birthrate is a shocking 72 percent. But when the “War on Poverty” began, the out-of-wedlock birthrate was just 7 percent.

Of 23 peer-reviewed U.S. studies since 2000, 20 found that family structure directly affects crime and/or delinquency. Research “strongly suggests both that young adults and teens raised in single-parent homes are far more likely to commit crimes, and that communities with high rates of family fragmentation (especially unwed childbearing) suffer higher crime rates as a result.”

Why are the Democrats paying people not to marry?

Director Blue has no hypothesis, but I think the answer is feminism. Feminists do not like the idea that men have a role in marriage as the provider and protector and moral/spiritual leader. The best way to knock men out of their perch as husbands and fathers is to have the state take over the man’s role in the family so that women do not need men. And this is exactly what has happened.

So it’s actually very ironic that the people who whine the most about the poor actually cause poverty. And the people who are strongest in defense of traditional morality, like chastity, chivalry, courting and marriage, are the ones who the most concerned about the poor. Marriage is good for the poor. Democrats aren’t concerned about the poor – they are concerned buying votes by redistributing wealth, so that they can stay in power and line their own pockets. They are willing to put politics – their opposition to marriage because of feminism – ahead of real people’s well-being and prosperity.

Read the whole post at Director Blue’s blog. It turns out that the Democrats want to continue subsidizing the feminist dream of destroying marriage and family with even more government spending on welfare. Eventually the money that the producers in this society for the Democrats to confiscate will run out – and where will we be then?

Commentary

Are boys performing poorly in schools?

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From the Charlotte Observer.

Excerpt:

In American schools, boys are underachieving and girls are excelling. This gender gap in academic achievement is evident as early as kindergarten. The longer students are in school, the wider the gap becomes.

Boys are more likely than girls to earn poor grades, be held back a grade, have a learning disability, form a negative attitude toward school, drop out or get suspended or expelled.

The education gender gap is affecting colleges, the workforce, the marriage rate and the fatherlessness rate in America.

Women outnumber men in college by 4 to 3. Four decades ago, men outnumbered women in college by 4 to 3. The tipping point occurred in the late 1970s. Not only are men less likely than women to go to college, they’re also less likely to graduate once there. Among 25-to-29-year-olds, 33 percent of women have earned at least a bachelor’s degree compared with just 23 percent of men. This is the first generation of women to be more educated than their male counterparts.

This shift means that women will increasingly get the highly paid jobs while men will experience a drop in earnings. This is already happening. Men in their 30’s are the first generation to earn significantly less than their fathers’ generation did at the same age. As jobs that require little education increasingly shrink, more and more men will become unemployed.

As the gap continues to grow, fewer college-educated women are able to find college-educated men to marry. Many of these women are choosing not to marry at all rather than marry non-college-educated men who are likely to earn significantly less than they do.

This is not to say that college-educated women and non-college-educated men never get married. But these marriages tend not to last. Marriages are more likely to end in divorce when wives earn more than their husbands.

This is increasingly becoming a problem. Thirty years ago, wives earned more than their husbands in 16 percent of marriages. Now it’s 25 percent and continuing to rise. By 2050, nearly half of the married women will earn more than their husbands.

The rise in the number of single American women has given birth to another trend: the rise in single motherhood. The non-marital birth rate rose sharply from 18 percent in 1980 to 39 percent in 2006. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, this trend is not being fueled by teenage mothers but by women in their 30s and 40s.

The National Center for Fathering found that 72 percent of Americans think that fatherlessness is the most significant social problem facing our nation. America is the world’s leader in fatherless families.

I tried to think of a “balance” for this, but I can’t think of any way that the schools discriminate against girls.

News

New study shows how fathers reduce stress in children

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Story from ultra-left-wing CNN. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

A new study presented at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association reveals that men who had positive relationships with their fathers are better equipped to deal with the stress of everyday life than men who did not remember their dads fondly.

“A big take-home message is that if there is a father present in a child’s life, he needs to know how important it is to be involved,” said Melanie Mallers of California State University, Fullerton.

Researchers interviewed 912 men and women during an eight-day period about their psychological and emotional state that day. Participants also had to answer questions about their relationships with their mothers and fathers growing up, and how much attention their parents gave them.

The major finding of the study is that men who said they had bad relationships with their fathers in childhood were more likely to be distressed by the stressful incidents of daily life.

If we as a society would like to have men who are able to love and support families, then we need to vote for policies that keep fathers in the home. We can’t just do whatever makes us feel good and impose anti-father ideologies like feminism and then expect men to just keep doing what they normally do. Men respond to these changes in policy, and the answer is not to blame them. If we want men to get married and become fathers, then we need to understand what men are like, and to have policies that help them. Policies like all-male schools, male teachers, abolition of welfare for single mothers, abolition of Title IX, abolition of no-fault divorce, etc.