This may shock you, but there is a divide in modern America. It expresses itself in a lot of ways - right verses left, men verses women, rich verses poor - but I think at the heart it is between the two-parent family and everyone else. It is between the idea that a man and a woman together can and should provide pretty much everything they and their children need and the idea that a woman and her government can and should provide everything she and her children need. If you need evidence of this distinction, look no further than the last presidential election's polling results. Obama lead single female voters by a huge margin. Romney lead married women by a similar margin.
At some point in Western history, women rejected the concept of the husband as a partner and replaced it with the Government. At first glance, this makes me mad at my fellow members of the female sex. No matter how you break down the numbers, the best chance for avoiding poverty to follow a simple formula. Finish high school and get married before you have children and then stay married. This is true across all ethnic groups, economic classes and creeds. The best chance for a kid to succeed in school, not become a teen parent and to stay out of prison is to grow up in a married household. There are exceptions, of course, and I applaud anyone who manages to defy those odds, but as a society we are failing to get out of the way of the ice berg because we only want to talk about the part above water. For every educated, successful woman who raises a well-adjusted child by herself, there are hundreds of women who are struggling mightily and who's children are starving for the love of fathers.
Men, though, are far from blameless in this. I know more than a few women who "followed all the rules" only to find themselves with an abusive, cheating or substance-abusing husband, or a husband who failed to provide for the family. There is no shortage of stories of men who seemed too good to be true, and then turned out to be exactly that. Since dating has replaced courting, women are also giving a lot of attention (and sex) to men they know perfectly well wouldn't make good husbands, which removes a lot of the incentive for men to become husband-material. A lot of these guys imagine they would marry their girlfriend if she got pregnant, to their credit, and are shocked to discover that she would rather be a single parent than hitch herself to his star.
It's created a really horrible cycle. Fewer people get married, or stay married, because of the safety net of food stamps and ADC and childcare reimbursement and medicaid and rent assistance. Their children grow up without learning the skills it takes to make a marriage work, so they don't have successful marriages. It's harder and harder for a couple to make enough money to support themselves and their children AND support the women and children 'in the system', which makes marriage even harder. Statistically speaking, unmarried men, even with children, don't earn as much money as their married counterparts, so they don't contribute to the tax base - and the support of their children - as much as someone who is also trying to feed his own wife and kids.
There are those, particularly women, who think the answer is for single mothers to be supported to a greater degree, so they can raise their children in better neighborhoods, send them to better schools, etc. The thing is, the success of kids in married families verses the success of kids with one parent isn't money dependent. A child born to a single, independently wealthy woman will, statistically, achieve less educationally and financially, and be more likely to abuse drugs and commit crime, than the same child born to two people with the same means. On a personal note, I have never known anyone, who, lacking a parent, did not feel the loss profoundly and personally. The source of the absence- death, divorce, or even anonymity - doesn't seem to matter to the juvenile psyche. Time and again I've heard kids admit that they felt that if they were somehow better, their dad would be around. No matter what you tell them, they internalize inferiority and abandonment. Not all of them -and if you are a single parent, I strongly encourage you to fight that feeling in your own kids with whatever words and deeds you can come up with - but it is foolish to build the goals around the exceptions.
At the end of the day, there is plenty of blame to go around. Arguing about the chicken and the egg all day doesn't do anything to help the next generation of chicks. At the end of they day, women have always been the arbitrators of civilization, and men have always been exactly as good as they have to be to get laid. It's harsh, but life's not fair. So, ladies, it's time to admit that, even if we don't need men individually, we need them to be good husbands and fathers instead of half-assed boyfriends and baby-daddies. It's time to expect them to step up. It's time to stop putting out for the one's who won't. It's time to stop acting like you lost the man lottery and got stuck with the deadbeat who changes jobs to avoid child support. Do not sleep with men who you wouldn't want to be raising your kids with. The most important thing you'll ever do for your kids is to choose their father well. It's in our power to change the future.
