Sen. Obama was Right on Fathers
There was a commentary in today's Inquirer complaining that Sen. Obama unfairly stereotyped black fathers when he took them to task for not being involved with their kids. The piece says "that black fathers who aren't in the home are much more likely to sustain regular contact with their children than absentee white fathers or fathers of any other ethnic group."
Read that closely because it isn't exactly the ringing endorsement the author intends it to be. Notice it never specifies the actual numbers involved. If 1% of white absentee fathers have regular contact with their kids and 2% of black absentee fathers have regular contact with their kids, his statement would be just as correct as 80% and 99% respectively. The author clearly hope you fill in the blanks with the higher figures.
The other issue left out of the piece is the percentage of out of wedlock births. Out of wedlock births among black Americans is over 70%. For whites it's under 40%.
The author also states that "the single greatest reason for the higher number of black children who live in one-parent households is poverty." The left has been trying to make this case for decades but it just doesn't stand up to scrutiny and reverses cause and effect. The reality is that the children are vastly less likely to grow up in poverty when they live in a two parent household. This holds up across demographic groups.
Think about it for a second. Living in a two parent household is just more efficient economically. There's one mortgage or rent check to write, one set of utility bills, etc.. There are many, many duplicated expenses when you live separately. That's before you get into issues like family stability, shared work load and (hopefully) more responsible behavior and long-term thinking.
All of these benefits are lacking in one-parent households and the results are predictable: kids growing up with single parents are more likely to be poor, more likely to commit crimes, more likely to have low academic achievement and drop out of school. There's nothing surprising about any of that.