Why are we playing Lysenkoism with children?
Fatherless children are more likely to be poor, perform poorly in school, engage in premarital sex, become teen parents, abuse drugs, and commit crimes than children from intact families. Black children are significantly less likely than other children to be raised in intact families. In 2004, a mere 35 percent of black children were living with two parents, compared to 83 percent of Asian children, 77 percent of white children, and 65 percent of Hispanic children.
Despite decades worth of research on the damage wrought by illegitimacy, a research psychologist named Peggy Drexler attempts to argue that lesbian couples and “single by choice” mothers do a better job of raising boys than married couples in Raising Boys without Men: How Maverick Moms are Creating the Next Generation of Exceptional Men.
Drexler, a mother of two and married for 36 years, interviewed a small and limited number of lesbian couples, heterosexual women who volunteered to deprive their sons of fathers, divorced mothers, and their sons. Her “maverick moms” reject “social judgments” and stress “communication, community, and love” in their roles as mothers.
In one form or another throughout the book, Drexler sets up the strawman, “Mother love doesn’t hurt our boys.” I have never heard reasonable people make such a claim. Unlike Drexler, most people believe that “mother love” and “father love” need to balance each other, which is why intact families are best for children. Drexler often exaggerates and uses the most extreme examples throughout the book to support her biases.
Raising Boys Without Men will give aid and comfort to single mothers, but a house full of them, no matter how well off, won’t ever change the fact that boys want and need fathers. Considering the utter devastation fatherlessness has caused in black communities, it would be easy to go off on Drexler, but she makes clear that she focused on mostly white, affluent lesbians and single mothers.
Time Magazine: The data that Gartrell and Bos analyzed came from the U.S. National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study (NLLFS), begun in 1986. The authors included 154 women in 84 families who underwent artificial insemination to start a family; the parents agreed to answer questions about their children's social skills, academic performance and behavior at five follow-up times over the 17-year study period. Children in the families were interviewed by researchers at age 10 and were then asked at age 17 to complete an online questionnaire, which included queries about the teens' activities, social lives, feelings of anxiety or depression, and behavior.Why didn’t she interview black single mothers and fatherless boys in inner cities, mothers whose fatherless sons are in and out of the criminal justice system, and boys who are fathers themselves by the time they’re teenagers? Drexler writes:
Like mine, most research in this area has concerned a primarily White and privileged population. Lesbian identity among socioeconomically subordinate groups is generally less visible or less affirmed than it is among more prosperous, White, educated, urban populations. Ethnographic evidence suggests that closeted lesbian and gay people of color often value racial solidarity over sexual adhesiveness. Racial/ethnic allegiances may deter disproportionate numbers of people of color from coming out.In other words, interviewing poor or economically disadvantaged, black heterosexual or closeted lesbian mothers would not have yielded the results that Drexler, an advocate for white, affluent, lesbian-headed households, was seeking.
Incidentally, the feminist movement traditionally has been a white and affluent phenomenon, although its effects have reverberated through all levels of society. The late Betty Friedan was a suburban homemaker who likened her home life to a concentration camp. For whatever reason, she was unhappy being married and trying to raise decent human beings. It sounded like a personal problem to me, but her book, The Feminine Mystique, marked the unofficial beginning of the feminist movement and sparked a revolution.
Although women had legitimate claims, especially when it came to equal wages for equal work, feminism went much further by waging war against the last standing pillar of society: the traditional family.
Feminists argued that women should be free to work outside the home and to be sexually promiscuous (and irresponsible). Chasteness until marriage was Victorian and repressive, and marriage was stifling and demeaning. A new crop of young women became sexually available to men without the shackles of commitment. The archaic idea of marrying the woman you impregnate was thrown out with the rest of the garbage.
Women from affluent, intact families were able to bounce back from sexual irresponsibility (oh, the irony!) in ways that women from lower-classes, especially those who grew up without fathers, were not. In 1964, a year after Friedan’s book hit the streets and a year before Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan issued a report that warned of the increase of female-headed households in low-income urban areas and associated social pathologies, close to 25 percent of black babies were born to unmarried women. In 2006, the rate is 70 percent.
The irony of ironies is that despite the “independent woman” meme pushed by feminists, too many of their inner city and low-income “sisters” are not independent nor are they dependent on husbands-oppressors, either. They are dependent on the government. The state is the provider. The children grow up mired in a cycle of poverty that is passed from one generation of fatherless children to the next.
A recurring theme in Raising Boys Without Men, despite Drexler’s best efforts to downplay it, is the boys’ desire for fathers. They wanted men — masculine men — in their lives. The clear message of the book is that the boys’ hunger for fathers was trumped by the desires of their progressive “maverick moms.”
The feminist movement spawned generations of selfish women, absentee fathers, and shattered families. Some women may want to be free of husbands, but children certainly don’t want to be free of fathers. And no study will ever prove otherwise.
| So what does this prove? If you want to you can prove anything with a study! Image via Study Shows that Children of Lesbian Parents Are More Well-Adjusted Than “Normal” Kids – Zelda Lily, Feminism in a Bra @ zeldalily.com |
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