Response to Mencken's Ghost -Fatherless Families

Mencken's Ghost wrote about Obama setting a goal to reduce fatherless families in America -- a Sputnik moment for families! (See full text of e-mail below in this blog)

I agree that it would help our country if we had fewer fatherless families. All kids have two grandfathers too -- where are they? I've seen the problems my NCOs had with their children while they have been deployed. Similar problems happen when fathers take jobs at remote locations -- such as oil rigs in Alaska. During those periods, if Grandma and Grandpa are very close by, the problems of not having Dad around can be mitigated. Otherwise, the problems are the same as if the father was never around! Children have short memories and live for today.

For the past 15 years the US has had a VERY aggressive program of getting father's names on birth certificates of the children born out of wedlock. I believe that now it is extremely rare when a birth certificate doesn't have "dad's" name on it. So we now know Dad's name, and he is required to financially support his offspring. I believe that is now happening in most of the country. But financial support isn't the same as having Dad in the household. I think the "welfare queen" is no longer a problem.

Yes, some of the fatherless children are the result of Dad being in prison..and Mom not wanting Dad back with the kids when he gets out of prison..probably not a bad decision on Mom's part. Sadly the majority of the fatherless children are the result of divorce.

If Obama set a national goal what would the country have to do to reach that goal:

• First of all, we would have to forbid divorce or separation when children are involved. --how would that "sell" to the country?
• Second, we would have to REQUIRE couples to marry if they have a child. Take the "shotgun" away from the Girls father, and give it to Uncle Sam? --That wouldn't sell to anyone! -- After all, now with DNA tests, there's no question about who's the daddy.
• We could probably "waive" the above two requirements, if Grandma and Grandpa agree to legally adopt the children.

I think I agree that our welfare system doesn't "discourage" out of wedlock children --and may facilitate the situation. Teens may be more responsible if they knew that if they had children, they would be forced to move into homes with Grandma and Grandpa in order to make ends meet...rather than receiving their "reward" of subsidized housing, food stamps, and medical care. But the alternative is to force a significant percentage of those children into worse situations: no home, inadequate diet, etc.

Mencken's Ghost, wrote a very good article, and clearly identified the problem.. He would like to see a goal set --but he offers no solution to reach that goal. He refers to the "Sputnik moment." In Sputnik's case, we knew there was a path using technology to solve the problem. What is a real solution to this situation? I firmly believe that we won't be able to put that genie back into the bottle. We will never be able to return to the Ozzie and Harriet days. The religious right-wing believes that if everyone went to church, and practiced abstinence or celibacy all problems would be solved. Of course to implement that they would want us to ban all sexually arousing books, photos, movies etc Maybe all women should be covered with full-length bathing suits, and maybe wear shad-ors when around men?

I believe the following is the best solution to the situation:

• Thorough and complete sex-education of children at appropriate levels at all ages.
• Keeping it secret until they grow up actually makes sex more desirable
• Convenient, inexpensive birth control for all teens who want it.
• Kids still have problems getting it. Girls need parents permission etc.
• Voluntary sterilization (free) for everyone and all teens over 13 upon request--
• Of course there should be some mandatory counseling before they have it done
• The population of the world is too large --anything we can do to reduce the growth is good.
• The cost of sterilization is more than made up in savings from not having one more child in the country.
• Convenient, easy to obtain abortions, with no stigma.
• The abortion" pill" and morning after pills are all safe and effective.
• Why should unwanted children be brought into the world?

Of course, the "organized religions" of the world continually "fight" these recommendations every way possible. Their motivations are based upon old biblical concepts developed when children were considered "wealth" and religion wanted to spread, so the more children the faster the religion would expand. The first "Christian" teaching resulted from St. Thomas Aquinas, who died in 1274 after developing the revolutionary theology that ended up banning birth control, abortion and sex education. A lot has changed in the world since the 13th century.

.

Steve Maschue
999 N Pacific #D310
Oceanside CA 92054
Phone 760-433-3271

---

Sputnik moment for saving America: cut the number of fatherless families in half

By Mencken’s Ghost

Dec. 10, 2010

President Obama announced this week that the nation needs a “Sputnik moment” of investing in science and education to be more competitive in the world economy. At about the same time, international rankings were released of student test scores in math and science, showing that Honk Kong, where the average class size in secondary schools is 30 pupils, was at the top and the United States was in the middle.

It’s not a coincidence that the rate of out-of-wedlock births is eight times higher in the USA than in Hong Kong.

Nor is it a coincidence that among Americans, Asian Americans have the highest test scores and the lowest rates of out-of-wedlock births and fatherless families. Conversely, African Americans have the lowest test scores and the highest rates of out-of-wedlock births and fatherless families.

This is more than correlation. It is cause and effect.

If Obama were the visionary, the deep thinker, the problem solver, and the non-ideologue that many people somehow still believe he is, his Sputnik moment would have sounded like this:

Today I am setting a national goal of reducing the number of fatherless families by 50 percent by 2030, which will take us back to the levels that existed 45 years ago, prior to the Great Society and War on Poverty. This in turn will result in a 25 to 50 percent reduction in crime, prison population, school dropouts and poverty. It will also raise our test scores in international rankings to the 90th percentile while cutting the size and cost of government and closing our deficit.

Of course, Obama will never say this and threaten the powerful welfare industry, although the cause-and-effect relationships between fatherless families and social pathologies and poverty are well-documented. The sobering statistics won’t be repeated here, but suffice it to say that children in fatherless families are considerably more likely to have behavioral problems, to live in poverty, to commit crimes, and to drop out of school.

The situation has become so dire that a left-leaning think tank, The Future of Children, a collaboration between the Brookings Institution and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, has developed a new term, “fragile families,” to describe the deleterious effects that generations of missing fathers have had on families and society. The full study can be found at:

http://futureofchildren.org/futureofchildren/publications/journals/article/index.xml?journalid=73&articleid=533

Unfortunately, the think tank sees the primary cause of fragile families as a lack of resources and not the welfare system. This runs counter to the findings of many other empirical studies and to what another left-liberal, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, said when he was the Assistant Labor Secretary in the Kennedy administration. In his prescient report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” he warned that misguided welfare programs would have serious negative consequences for black families by essentially rewarding women for not marrying the fathers of their children.

Moynihan did not foresee that the problem would eventually spread to other races, albeit to a lesser degree than for blacks.

Since 1964, the states and the federal government have spent about $15 trillion on anti-poverty programs (welfare), including Medicaid. Today, there are 122 federal anti-poverty, or welfare, programs, costing nearly $600 billion per year. How much would these costs be reduced if the number of fatherless families were to shrink by 50 percent? Well, considering that fatherless families are twice as likely to be in poverty, the reduction would be substantial.

In addition to a reduction in welfare costs, there would be a reduction in the prison population, which now stands at 2.3 million, with another five million people on parole or probation. The current cost of corrections of nearly $70 billion per annum would see a corresponding reduction. (Given the high number of fractured black families, it’s not surprising that over 40 percent of prisoners are black, although blacks account for only 13 percent of the USA population.)

There also would be a reduction in per-capita education spending, which has doubled in inflation-adjusted dollars over the last 45 years. An indeterminable but substantial amount of this spending goes to remedial education and smaller class sizes in response to the behavioral, disciplinary, and learning problems of children from fatherless families--as teachers and school administrators have confided to me but are afraid to say publicly.

Then there is the huge opportunity cost of fatherless families; that is, what is lost in productivity, creativity, entrepreneurship, inventions, charitable work, international competitiveness, and tax revenue from children not becoming all they would otherwise be.

So how do we cut the number of fatherless families in half? Like Obama, we begin with a Sputnik moment and set a national goal. But unlike Obama we speak honestly about the problem instead of repeating the tired Democratic mantra about higher spending and more redistribution. Then we replace perverse incentives with positive incentives and work on changing cultural norms about fatherhood.

To his credit, Obama beat the odds and overcame the handicap of living some of his formative years without his father present, an accomplishment that was due in part to having a highly educated mother and supportive grandmother, and to growing up in locales far removed from American inner-city culture, including, interestingly enough, the Asian country of Indonesia, where traditional family values prevail. To his discredit, his Sputnik moment about science and education continues the evil tradition of throwing money at the problems and making them more entrenched instead of addressing the root cause.

____________

“Mencken’s Ghost” is the nom de plume of an Arizona writer who can be reached at ccan2@aol.com.