When talking of children living without mothers or without fathers things are not simple. There are many varying reasons for single-parent families from death of a spouse/partner to no spouse/partner in the first place. The consequences for individual families are also varied, and poorer finances are generally are an important consequence – though there is a world of difference between a divorced affluent woman in her late 30s and a never-married adolescent living alone with her baby.
Based on US Census Bureau figures for 2011 from the Annie E. Casey Foundation National Kids Count Program, 16,356,000 white children and 6,509,000 black/African-American children live in single-parent families. The total of single-parent children for all ethnicities is 24,718,000; and so about 66% of single-parent children are white and 26% black (of white children, 38% are non-Hispanic white and 28% are Hispanic/Latino).
Children in single-parent families by race (Number) – 2011
Data Provided by: National KIDS COUNT Program
Given the above figures you can imagine my surprise when I read in a Washington Times article about women in single-parent households that “… the lack of live-in fathers also is overwhelmingly a black problem, regardless of poverty status, census data show”. Overwhelmingly? Census data show? Certainly not true. Of course, it depends on how you look at the data, and why you look at it. Why was this article published on Christmas Day, a day with such a religious significance? Preaching to the Republican converted is routine Washington Times methodology, which might explain the purple prose and simplified view of reality employed by the writer:
In Mississippi, the state with most single-parent families, almost half of all children (47%) live in a single-parent family. Of these children, about 97,000 are white and 216,000 are black (28% of white children, and 72% of black children). In West Virginia about one in three white children (34%) live in single-parent families, with almost negligible numbers of children from other ethnicities (comes to 36%), Maine has about one in three white children (33%) in single-parent families, with negligible others (a total of 34%). And I could go on.
Based on US Census Bureau figures for 2011 from the Annie E. Casey Foundation National Kids Count Program, 16,356,000 white children and 6,509,000 black/African-American children live in single-parent families. The total of single-parent children for all ethnicities is 24,718,000; and so about 66% of single-parent children are white and 26% black (of white children, 38% are non-Hispanic white and 28% are Hispanic/Latino).
Children in single-parent families by race (Number) – 2011
Data Provided by: National KIDS COUNT Program
| Non-Hispanic White | 9,466,000 |
| Black or African American | 6,509,000 |
| American Indian | 355,000 |
| Asian and Pacific Islander | 559,000 |
| Hispanic or Latino | 6,890,000 |
| Total | 24,718,000 |
Given the above figures you can imagine my surprise when I read in a Washington Times article about women in single-parent households that “… the lack of live-in fathers also is overwhelmingly a black problem, regardless of poverty status, census data show”. Overwhelmingly? Census data show? Certainly not true. Of course, it depends on how you look at the data, and why you look at it. Why was this article published on Christmas Day, a day with such a religious significance? Preaching to the Republican converted is routine Washington Times methodology, which might explain the purple prose and simplified view of reality employed by the writer:
America is awash in poverty, crime, drugs and other problems, but more than perhaps anything else, it all comes down to this, said Vincent DiCaro, vice president of the National Fatherhood Initiative: Deal with absent fathers, and the rest follows.Of the fifty states, Utah has the lowest number of children in single-parent families. Even in Utah about one in five children (21%) lives in a family with only one parent, and most of the children are are white. That’s quite a number of absent parents (absent mothers and absent fathers) who may be absent because they are dead. As about 23% of children with single parents have single fathers in Utah then surely, following DiCaro’s reasoning, there are a good number of children in Utah who lack a responsible and involved mother – and most of the children are white.
People “look at a child in need, in poverty or failing in school, and ask, ‘What can we do to help?’ But what we do is ask, ‘Why does that child need help in the first place?’ And the answer is often it’s because [the child lacks] a responsible and involved father,” he said. — Luke Rosiak, “Fathers disappear from households across America”, Washington Times, 25 December 2012 [My purple prose emphasis]
In Mississippi, the state with most single-parent families, almost half of all children (47%) live in a single-parent family. Of these children, about 97,000 are white and 216,000 are black (28% of white children, and 72% of black children). In West Virginia about one in three white children (34%) live in single-parent families, with almost negligible numbers of children from other ethnicities (comes to 36%), Maine has about one in three white children (33%) in single-parent families, with negligible others (a total of 34%). And I could go on.
The Washington Times article was picked up on one conservative Republican web site (possibly more):
The modern welfare state and the 60s Cultural Revolution are gifts that keep on giving – if the gifts that are given are fatherlessness, particularly for low income or poverty-level black kids. … And the breakdown of the traditional family continues to rip apart the nation's social fabric. … Will America survive the damage being done to the nation's culture and society by the country's leftists? This Christmas season, we can only hope and pray so. — J Robert Smith, “America's Daddyless Black Kids”, American Thinker, 27 December 2012 [My purple prose emphasis]Smith writes approvingly of George Gilder’s 1981 book Wealth and Poverty (“now-classic”) – influential in 1980s Republican circles (see my 2002 “Of slaves and women”). Two quotes from Gilder’s book:
[Biological] differences between men and women give ample explanation for the greater willingness of men to work hard outside the home, to compete aggressively for advancement in bureaucratic hierarchies, and to make earning money a prime motive in their lives. These differences between the sexes fully explain all gaps in earning. [My emphasis: men are naturally better than women, so we shouldn’t do anything.]
The prevailing expressed opinion is that racism and discrimination still explain the low incomes of blacks. This proposition is at once false and invidious. Not only does it slander white Americans, it deceives and demoralizes blacks. [My emphasis: we need to make whites feel good, and we need to have blacks feel it’s their own fault.]What a different world some people inhabit, especially if they are conservatives. One comment on the Smith fulmination read “There is a biological reason that children have TWO parents. Women are not designed to sit at the helm.” Logic is not a conservative strongpoint, even at Christmas.
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