continued
5:11 PM PT: Couple more thoughts:
One of the problems with the assumption that a Nuclear Family is the "best" family for raising children is the reality that not all biological parents provide the best guidance, example, or have the best of relationship with each other. Things can turn abusive, violent and sometimes deadly. Quite often the weapons used in this disputes,
is a gun.
Firearms were used to kill more than two-thirds of spouse and ex-spouse homicide victims between 1990 and 2005.2
Domestic violence assaults involving a firearm are 12 times more likely to result in death than those involving other weapons or bodily force.3
Abused women are five times more likely to be killed by their abuser if the abuser owns a firearm.4
A recent survey of female domestic violence shelter residents in California found that more than one third (36.7%) reported having been threatened or harmed with a firearm.5 In nearly two thirds (64.5%) of the households that contained a firearm, the intimate partner had used the firearm against the victim, usually threatening to shoot or kill the victim.6
So that's one reason why some moms and dads shouldn't live together.
Another factor on the "Nuclear Family" ideas is the fact that many of these studies don't take into account the impact of the extended family, grand-parents, uncles, aunts, older siblings and cousins can have on the child-rearing processes. Parenting sometimes takes more than just the actual parents themselves, particular when both of them need to work to make end-meet, and there are other day-care and babysitting issues that need to be addressed. Two out of our last three serving Presidents were raised in single-parent homes with the support of extended family, so clearly - it's not hopeless.
Lastly it strikes me that there can be inherent problems at looking at an internal proportional number, when the external proportion may be at an far larger differential. To wit: there are almost five times as many White people in America as they are Black. So if you were to take the single-parent percentages for each and multiply them against the numbers of actual children involved what you would see is this:
Hispanic Children in Single-Parent Households: 28.6% x 16.3 Million = 4.66 Million
Black Children in Single-Parent Households: 54.7% x 11.2 Million = 6.12 Million.
[Corrected] White Children in Single-Parent Households: 22.1% x 55.9 Million = 12.3 Million.
So even with an almost twice as high internal percentage of single-parent households, the external percentage is that there are still only one third
one half as many black children living in that situation as there are white, and when you add this greater quantity of white "at risk" youth to the CDC data it seems that the
quality of some of that white parenting may not be quite a strong.
But we don't really hear much about the single-parenting crisis of absent White Fathers, now do we? And we don't see our jails filled to the brim with the failed results of these millions of white single-parent households even with a 2:1 gap in actual numbers, instead we see it filled far more frequently, with
black men who afterward can't really be good, attentive Fathers anymore, now can they? And perhaps that, excessive incarceration, is the source for the internal percentage differential in the first place.
Wed May 13, 2015 at 1:26 PM PT: I've gotten some pushback on twitter claiming I have failed to "debunk" the Black Father Myth. Well, part of the point of a
myth is that it itself isn't really "proven" in the first place. For example even some of the links provided by naysayers in the comments
don't necessary make that case when describing the better outcomes that are typically associated with the children of married couples.
Is it simply because they have, on average, higher family incomes? (Two earners are better than one, and one household is cheaper to run than two.)
Or are two committed spouses better able to provide consistent parenting? Is it marriage itself that matters, or is marriage the visible expression of other factors, that are the true cause of different outcomes? And if so, which ones?
It is usually using the disparity in marriage rates among the races that people usually draw the conclusion that there is a "crisis" in black families, and that their is a deficit in black fathers. Those numbers as I previously showed in my first update are as follows:
White Single Families: 25% Hispanic Single Families: 42% Black Single Families: 67%
People usually look at these numbers alone and go "Aha,
there's your problem", but I think this is a gross oversimplification of far more complex real life situations. I showed this in the second part of that update when I noted that not being married doesn't really mean that the parent is "absent" as a good percentage of families may live together but remain unmarried.
Single Parent Living Arrangements White 22.1% Hispanic 28.6% Black 54.7%
So as you can see although the figures don't change much from married White couples with children to cohabiting but unmarried parents, it drops 14% for Hispanics and 13% for Blacks. Another issue I addressed in the 2nd update which is rarely addressed by those who fault marriages alone as being the big problem with Black child-rearing is the issue of blended families. There are many cases which the married/unmarried statistic fail to address when the mother may not be living with or married to the father, but is instead living with and/or married
to someone else.
There are no recent estimates on the percentage of children residing in blended families.
These statistics underestimate the number of U.S. blended families, because...
To date, government reporting of population figures indicate families in which the child resides. So if the child lives with a divorced, single parent and the other nonresident parent has remarried,
the child is not included in the calculations as being a member of a blended family.
Estimates suggest that many children living in a "single parent household" (as designated by the Census Bureau) are actually living with two adults. Thus, their best estimates indicate that
about 25% of current blended families are actually cohabiting couples.
And...
40% of married couples with children (i.e., families) in the US are stepcouples (at least one partner had a child from a previous relationship before marriage; this includes full and part-time residential stepfamilies and those with children under and/or over the age of 18). The percentage of all married couple households is 35%. (Karney, Garvan, & Thomas, 2003)
All of this means that the census bureau's data of "living arrangements" can be off by as much as 25% when dealing with blended families situations and even their much lower figures of Hispanic and Black single parent living arrangements could in fact be far, far lower than shown.
So the bottom line issue, once we get back to the CDC figures on how much fathers across the various races actually do the real working of
parenting rather than just being nearby or within the same house - can we definitively say that
qualitative difference proportionally overwhelms the
quantitative [but grossly incomplete] data that proponents of the "Black Fathers Suck" faction seem to espouse?
I don't know.
Frankly, because the data is incomplete and there isn't as far as I can tell a breakdown of blended families by race, I honestly can't tell. And that's why I didn't get into this subject in more detail earlier, it's a wash. But the incompleteness of the data also shows that absent Black Fathers Myth,
isn't proven either. In fact without full, complete, and accurate numbers -
it can't be proven.
However, what the CDC info does show is that
pound for pound, on a family by family average basis Black fathers are generally more attentive to their children whether the live with them or apart from them, and even using the Census Bureau numbers there are far more White Children "at risk" from their less attentive and absent fathers than there are Black. Shouldn't that be the larger concern if missing fathers truly are the "crisis" some people claim it is?