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Sunday, January 21, 2007
Breakdown of family needs reversing
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In the usual Martin Luther King Jr. Day recitations of problems afflicting America — the war, education, social services, losing our soul, “rebuilding the infrastructure of America’s decaying cities” and an assortment of other ills — no mention was reported, if, indeed, one was made, of a problem that would seem to be at least as significant as water pipes and Iraq.
The unmentioned reality is that children in alarming numbers are being brought into the world without a mother and father in the home, and among minority children the problem is epidemic. In 2004, 69.3 percent of births of black children were to unmarried women. For Hispanics, it was 46.4 percent. For whites, 24.5.
This week The New York Times reported that for what is likely the first time in history, more American women are living without a husband than with one. About 70 percent of black women are living without a husband, 51 percent of Hispanic women, 45 percent of non-Hispanic whites and about 40 percent of Asian women, according to the Census Bureau. Death, divorce and temporary separations because of job or military account for some — and on the whole, choices women make are of no particular concern, except as those choices affect children.
The numbers of births to those unmarried are so huge that it has become politically incorrect even to talk about it. It is really quite extraordinary that a problem so grave — the intentional infliction of disadvantage on a child — has no prominent face or voice in this state. One may be emerging. Georgia Supreme Court Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears has begun to raise the issue, indirectly at least, through a commission on “Children, Marriage and Family Law.” It’s not a family law problem. It’s cultural, with family law impact, something she pointed out in a 2004 speech to the Atlanta Rotary Club. “Marriage, in our culture, has become optional, contingent and conditional,” she lamented.
The silence elsewhere is deafening, while the evidence of harm to children is so overwhelming that it really is quite astounding that politicians, preachers and opinion leaders look away or insist that some new education or spending program be created to salvage the children.
A white paper prepared for the Supreme Court commission quotes the findings of studies on child well-being. This, for example, is the conclusion drawn from a number of them: “The wealth of published data demonstrate that married mothers and fathers increase their children’s physical and mental health, general life happiness, academic and intellectual performance, behavioral success at school, and substantially increase the likelihood of these children graduating from college and successfully entering adulthood. These children are also more likely to build successful family relationships themselves in adulthood.”
They’re also less likely to live in poverty, suffer sexual and physical abuse, less likely to abuse drugs or alcohol, become criminals, engage in premature sexual activity and or produce children before marriage.
Do two things here. One is to mentally construct the social services and education network that would provide the safety net, or the levels of safety nets, necessary to replace the presence in a child’s life of a mother and a father. The other is to consider how truly irrelevant most of what politicians and opinion leaders identify as problems — the war in Iraq, infrastructure, class size, voter ID, discrimination, all of the standard rally-the-base commentary — is to a daddy-deprived child. Long before the child encounters an obstacle arising from public policy, the decision not to marry made by the man and woman who conceived him will already have damaged his life’s chances.
The American Cancer Society reported this week that from 2003 to 2004, cancer deaths in this country dropped by 3,014, eight times the number by which deaths declined in 2002-2003 — the first year of decline in total deaths in 70 years.
The study’s author, epidemiologist Ahmedin Jemal, credited the drop to “lifestyle changes such as cessation of smoking, more screening, faster diagnoses and better treatments.” For women, lung cancer death rates continue to rise, one expert said, because they took up smoking in the 1960s and ’70s.
Changing harmful behaviors takes time and persistent effort by government, Hollywood, opinion leaders, family, and the media and entertainment industries. It needs leaders. Now, it has few or none. It’s the subject nobody who matters talks about. In part, that’s because the numbers have gotten so large that to talk about it is to offend. It’s because, too, none of us has led a perfect life — and the fear of having our imperfect lives thrown back at us keeps us silent. Where are the voices children need?
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