How Single Motherhood Affects the Children

By Rachel Miller-Bradshaw

Video interview with Cynthia Grace PHD

Conversations about the black family in the United States usually focus on the roles of single mothers and absent fathers; at times, completely ignoring the direct product of these relationships- the children. But as we move forward in our conversation, more attention should be directed to the children. No need to go into a long statistical explanation, but it is necessary to mention that according to the 2008 U.S. Census, 8 out of 10 black babies were born out of wedlock. Now that this statistic is out the way, the greater question the community should be asking is, “What are the reasons children who are products of single parenthood are more likely to have lower self-esteem, commit suicide, become criminals and drop out of high school?”  Taking these effects into consideration, black men and black women must be mindful of how children are affected when the parents are not in stable, healthy marriages.

This is not a condemnation of single motherhood rather a closer analysis on the familial structure and how it innately affects children. Some single mothers might argue that they provide all of their children's needs, even overcompensating-which is counterproductive most times, because these children can develop entitlement issues and lack of responsibility.  It is clinically proven that fathers provide protection and shape our identities.  Two very important factors missing in the majority of black children's lives growing up right now in the United States.

To understand the effects a child growing up in single parenthood experiences, one has to analyze it from the psychological standpoint.  What are these children thinking about their familial situations and their self-worth.  Children develop their first feelings of belonging and worth from their parents from whom they are a direct extension.  When part of that extension is missing a feeling of void and abandonment develops which is clinically proven as the cause of behavioral and psychological issues. Think about it this way- how many more men would know discipline, respect and right from wrong if their father was present to teach and show them.  Little girls get their self-worth from their fathers whom they use as a role model for the type of mate to choose.  But in the cases of single mother homes, these children are lacking the important essentials that assist in socializing them. Children need to see their fathers at their sports tournaments and plays.  They need to see that daddy loves them and supports them in this brutal world.

"I feel so bad. I'd rather have a dead father than a father that's living who has nothing to do with me", is one of the most gripping statements Cynthia Grace, P.H.D, participant in the documentary ON MY OWN, remembers that one of her patients said to her.  Dr. Grace also talks about feelings of abandonment, anger and hurt felt by many children living in single parent homes.

The conversation needs to shift from one of condemnation of parents to the advocacy of raising healthy, comforted children. The bottom line is this, as our community continues to date, there should be more serious conversations placed on family values, more thought placed on responsibility, and more emotion put into dating and engaging in sexual relations.  Black males and females intimate interaction is bigger than sexual gratification.  Children, in many instances, are produced from these interactions.   Relationships must be in tact because children need both parents. Our children's psychological well-being is desperately important to the Black community.

De Blasio’s “Reversing the Two New Yorks” should focus on  urban families

By Rachel Miller-Bradshaw




politicker



During newly-elected Mayor +Bill de Blasio January 17, 2014 speech on the proposed changes to the paid sick leave policy he stated that, "1 out of 4 families in New York City shelters have at least one working parent."  While campaigning last fall he referenced Charles Dickens' 1959 novel,  A Tale of Two Cities, saying New York City is the quintessential example of extreme economic disparity. Currently, New York City consists of two types of residents, the haves and have-nots.  For de Blasio to accomplish his goals for the city, he will have to make rebuilding the family structure, especially those in urban communities, a top priority. Families need a lot of support and assistance in New York City. Economic security is a mere dream to many New Yorkers.   While this new sick leave policy will help, there is a long way to go in stabilizing urban families.

According to Citydata.com, a family of four in New York City would need to earn between $91, 465 and $211, 645 for a moderate living. One can comfortably speculate that the average bureaucrat or private sector worker isn’t even making half of these numbers aforementioned.   Families are slipping further into debt and poverty, losing the fight to maintain a decent lifestyle.  The city also has one of the highest costs of living in the country, in the world for that matter, making it difficult for working parents, in a stagnant wage city, to live comfortably and escape poverty.

Under these circumstances, some families have left New York altogether seeking more affordable living in other states.  This city is in jeopardy of fully dismantling the family structures in urban communities, which will result in an even more devastating downward spiral for the communities these families reside in.  Adding to the city’s familial dilemma is the single parenthood factor. Thirty six percent of single parents live in New York City according to the +Annie E. Casey Foundation , many falling below the poverty level. It is a tough task that the mayor needs to embark on but he really has no choice. 

A +New York Times article recently highlighted that 31% percent of children 17 and younger have fell below the poverty line, indicating that poor and working class parents, especially in these urban areas, are having a very difficult time making ends meet. Job training programs should solely target the working poor and unemployed to provide them skills to rise into the working class.   De-blasio will also have to continue to fight for public assistance programs: food stamp, WIC, and Medicaid, increase funding for qualifying working parents and simplify the requirements to qualify for such programs. Continuing on with former Mayor Bloomberg’s Young Mens Initiative, to prevent young boys from premature fatherhood or help in preparing them for pending fatherhood is also productive. Childcare, another major factor and complaint for working parents, must seriously and urgently be addressed.  Working on more quality government child care facilities and providing more subsidies for working parents making under $120,000 combined will financially relieve a lot of the burden and gives these parents extra finances to save or be spent elsewhere.   De Blasio can also support lobbyist who advocate for increasing the minimum wage.  It is more pertinent in costly cities like New York City for families to live comfortably. 

New York City’s working parents living in lower socioeconomic areas shouldn’t have to fear how they are going to house, feed, clothe and properly educate their children.  This is an injustice to responsible parents who work hard and honestly to provide for their children.  Why should working parents constantly struggle to keep their heads above water while more affluent parents can effortlessly provide their children with the best housing, education and culture that the city has to offer? For this city to truly be on its path of living equality targeting families and their well being is the best way to go.  Having a family, for most human beings is inevitable, even in New York City.   This great city has succeeded because of individuals that have started families here, invested in communities and helped to uplift New York to its great worldly status.

Partnership is a necessity for the Black Community

By Rachel Miller-Bradshaw

 

mylovesdones.net

The Dwayne Wade-Gabrielle Union scandal involving Wade fathering a child outside his committed relationship with Union has sparked interesting conversations among African American women.  In the comment sections of many blogs, several black women have expressed their disgust at Wade's, and all black men's infidelity, as well as their conscious decision to live permanently along.  Some have proudly stated that they are in their late 30s and early 40s and have never been married or had children.  They mark this as success along with career and financial accomplishments, boasting that they have accomplished their heart's desire.

The blog comments observed made by these black women specifically in regards to professing these accomplishments, true or not, don’t coincide with the study released by the Insight Center for Community Economic Development.  The study found that single women of color, between the ages of 36 to 49, have a net worth of $5.  It also showed that Black and Hispanic women are drastically worse off than white women who have higher marriage rates.

Ironically, studies show that black men benefit highly from marriage.  

Discussing why marriage is important to black existence includes the message that relationships should be based on a loving and healthy premise.  Dating black men and black women must understand that relationships aren’t just based on instant feeling and 100% happiness but is also based on love- that will sometime during the marriage require sacrifice, struggle and forgiveness-a lesson maybe Gabrielle Union understands. That is just the reality of being in long-term relationships that all races and ethnic groups experience.  There are highs and lows.  

Black relationships in many instances are complex and strained stemming from an unstable premise during slavery, which has continued without being fully being addressed. There could be a subconscious disdain between the genders. Supporting this are the recent studies that have shown that black men and black women wait the longest to get married.  A detrimental move that prevents or severely extends wealth building, acquired faster, when two people are working together.    

Communities strive on healthy families that bring culture, diversity and a source of income to build, maintain and progress the neighborhood.  Western society spreads individualism ideology- “what’s mine is mine”. However, socially, the individualistic approach could never work for African Americans who endure disenfranchisement causing higher poverty rates. Most ethnic groups and Caucasians themselves understand that progress can only be made when working as a group.  Our communities, plagued with single mothers, display from the higher crime rates, decaying infrastructure and poverty that “I can do it by myself” mentality is a falsehood that black people just can’t afford to adopt.  

You could read through the words the anger, unhappiness and disappointment of these commenters, specifically the women, masked in boasting individualism and singledom. These women and men must realize that life is volatile and a partner is needed to assist in buffering the harsh realities of it.  

The black community must aggressively encourage and push the marriage agenda, the familial aspect of solidarity.  From there, our communities, personal wealth, and social positioning will accelerate.

Reality TV-Please let us get our house in order

By Rachel Miller-Bradshaw



kulturekritic.com

Watching the new season of +VH1's +Love & Hip Hop  made me realize one of two things-that there is either a concerted effort to depict the Black Family as nothing more than baby mamas, rolling stones, and Mandingos or the psychosis of our community is so entrenched in our thinking about it’s structure that we relate to and frankly are more entertained by negative representations of the Black Family.  There is a movement to repair the matriarchal structure of the Black Family reverting it back to a two-parent household where both a mother and father live together functionally to raise productive and morally upstanding children.

Networks are driven by ratings-which in turn brings in the advertising dollars.   The business of television is understood, but ratings cannot be the sole determining factor when representing the African-American community-a community by the way, that has endured denigrating images through film and later television.  Some will argue that African Americans should stop supporting these shows if we are so disgusted by how families are represented.

Watching both Peter Gunz and Stevie J impregnate various women with no marital commitment perpetuates the “rolling stone” or “buck” image that has followed black males post-slavery.  Filming these men’s antics and promiscuity, probably amplified for the cameras, is successful at proving one thing; this is empirical evidence that a percentage of black males have inherited generational behaviours of mating with women, creating families, and then removing themselves from the unit afterwards. Another show airing on the same network “Black Ink” is filled with storylines of each of the tattoo artists having children with various women, child support issues, and volatile relationships with the mothers of their children.

Network executives can continue to do better by highlighting more shows like TI & Tiny: A Family Hustle that displays the lives of a hip hop Brady Bunch.  The show is positive displaying a couple’s love for each other while successfully raising children, some from previous relationships.

Couple Chrissy Lampkin and rapper Jim Jones, original cast members of Love & Hip Hop- dissipated from the entertainment brand and now present a better familial storyline including Ms. Lampkin taking on the mother role of Jones’s son who stays with them for the summer.

Based on interactions with fathers participating in my feature documentary ON MY OWN, and also during my frequent visits to fatherhood organizations I truly believe that Peter Gunz,  Stevie J, and the Black Ink cast represent a percentage, but not the majority of black fathers in our community.  They are not the norm.  Images are powerful, and reality TV executives should keep that in mind when looking for juicy television. When you see better, you do better.

Communal Attitudes are needed in the fight against single parenthood and dysfunctional families

By Rachel Miller-Bradshaw

eurweb.com 

Very few reputable newspapers, newsmagazines and TV programs present day use their platform to tell the stories of the underrepresented or invisible individuals living and coping everyday with their impoverish circumstances.  The New York Times series "Invisible Child-Girl in the Shadows: Dasani’s Homeless Life" candidly and visually tells the story of a mature homeless young girl, living in a family of 10, who helps to care for her siblings while maintaining some sort of dignity living in a decrepit housing shelter in Brooklyn, New York.

Judging from the description aforementioned, one would immediately think that this young girl's circumstance derives from a single parenthood arrangement; however, this is not the case.  There is a father present-- though it is not the girl’s biological father, her stepfather legally married to her mother has been raising her from a very young age.

In this situation, Dasani’s parents have fallen victim to drugs, a negative influence that is all too often present and abused in poor communities.  Dasani’s mother once worked as a janitor and her stepfather was laid off from a shop where he was a barber.  Both are undergoing drug rehabilitation.

Many conservative idealists and organizations like the Heritage Foundation have diagnosed single parenthood as the sole reason many women and children suffer through poverty.  Their solution for this societal dilemma is simply for women to avoid out-of-wedlock births and opt for marriage.   Dasani’s story debunks this conservative ideology by just exposing the reality that lack of marital structures isn’t the only reason why women and children suffer socioeconomically.  Policies, racism, and the economy are also factors that play major roles as to why the Black Family in the United States and the American family structure as a whole, can be infiltrated. Marriage doesn’t always serve as an impenetrable buffer to life and society.

Past generations often talk about the days when they could knock on their neighbor’s door and borrow milk or eggs.  Not to mention, when someone’s child was out in public misbehaving any adult witnessing the bad behavior could discipline the child and then escort the child to his or her parents for further disciplining.   American society has lost its communal mindset, straying from the proverbs "it takes a village to raise a child", and "you are your brother’s keeper".  This new individualistic approach has hurt the people most in need of attention, upliftment, guidance and love, which are people that have lost their way or were disadvantaged and disenfranchised from the start.  With the continued budget cuts to social programs it is necessary that we become more intermutal for survival purposes.

Governmental dependence will not solve the familial breakdown continually damaging the structure.  Churches, more non-profits, politicians, community activists, and all Americans have to be more concerned about their fellow neighbor’s well being.  That way once another family is secure and escapes poverty their stability is invested back into community making it stronger.  Imagine going back to a time when we all knew our neighbors on a first name basis.

Movement to Repair the Black Family is on Hope Road

By Rachel Miller-Bradshaw

The statistics are bewildering: Seven out of ten Black children are born out of wedlock and live in single-parent homes; and the marriage rate for birthing African-American women is at an all time low. Complicating the matter, 70 percent of black women in the United States between the ages of 25 and 29 have never been married, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau in 2009.

Many people look at these numbers and presume that the Black Family is in such hopeless disarray that it can never be fixed, but it’s heartening to note that there is a surging movement to rectify this problem by targeting a figure absent in 90 percent of Black households, the father.

The notion that family structure for Blacks in America can ever be as stable as it is for the majority white population is justifiably debatable, in large measure because it got off to an unhealthy start.  During the slave era, a husband was easily separated from his wife and children on his owner’s whim, if he was sold, for example.  A male slave needed his owner’s permission to marry, and if his love interest was from a different plantation, her owner had to consent to the marriage, as well.  Many marriages were arranged, and not based on love or even attraction between the man and the woman.  Then there was the “bucking” process, where male slaves were used to breed with various female slaves to increase the plantation’s slave population, and the owner’s wealth in the process.

In the aftermath of emancipation, President Abraham Lincoln’s Freedom’s Bureau was quickly defunded; this eventuality, coupled with pressures from a still racially oppressive South, compelled many black men to leave their families and migrate north in hopes of finding a better life, after which they would send for their wives and children.  But what they too often found were a lack of jobs and restricted living conditions in ghettos in northern cities, which undermined their dreams of reuniting with their families.

By the 1920s, the percentage of single parent homes in Black communities had soared to about 20%, but that statistic would be dramatically eclipsed as the twentieth century wore on.  In 1965, sociologist and then Assistant U.S. Labor Secretary (and later New York Senator) Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote his landmark report “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.”  Moynihan concluded that erosion of the nuclear family among African Americans had resulted from continued racial oppression in the aftermath of slavery and Jim Crow, and warned of devastating social consequences if the federal government did not intervene.

In his 1939 book The Negro Family in the United States, sociologist Edward Franklin Frazier presaged Moynihan’s conclusions by positing essentially the same causes of absentee fathers in Black families, and suggesting that a high percentage of unemployment and high incarceration rates among Black men were additional contributing factors.  In the 1970s, the welfare system threw up yet another barrier between African American couples by discontinuing benefits to mothers if it was proven that they associated with the fathers of their children (or any other interested male suitors).  However, the roots of this devastating behavioral pattern remain traceable to plantation life and the bucking system of the slavery era (the 1970’s Temptations hit "Papa was a Rolling Stone" addressed this phenomenon).

However there is cause for optimism, and to believe that Black men will eventually reincorporate into the family structure, if for no other reasons than they are desperately needed, the Black community is struggling horribly without them, and – oh yes, it’s just the right thing to do, and they know it.  For my documentary ON MY OWN, I interviewed numerous black mothers, who spoke with angst and frustration about the difficulties of raising children without their fathers present.  The film explores the problem, its genesis, and its debilitating consequences in a quest for solutions, and I believe that some noteworthy progress is being made. 

Fatherhood organizations like the Father Knows Best program founded by legendary New York Knick basketball star Allan Houston, and the Forestdale Fatherhood Initiative, formerly headed by former pro-football player Scott Leach, are aggressively taking to the streets to teach fathers the importance of being active in the lives of their children.

On the legislative front, President Obama’s “Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood” funding initiative, as well as Mayor Bloomberg’s “Young Men’s Initiative” help shine a national spotlight on the tireless work fatherhood organizations are doing.  Other politicians are following suit.  For example, on March 29^th of this year, Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz held a “Bronx Fathers Taking Action” forum to talk about fathers and their position in the family, excerpts from which appear in the film. 

Teenage women are contributing significantly to the decline in black single motherhood.  According to the non-profit, The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy black teen pregnancy has declined by 52% among 15 to 17 year-olds and 36% among 18 to 19-year olds, a historic low, that displays great promise for the Black Family in The United States.

And for their part, men – who have often been criticized as emotionally vacant – are starting to open up about their feelings and motivations.  At the Bronx fathers’ forum, it seemed that some men sincerely wanted to be active, responsible fathers, but that their good intentions are being thwarted by social forces such as unemployment, imprisonment, disproportionately high early death rates among African American males, and psychological damage resulting from social and political disenfranchisement.  One single father said he attended the forum to get insight from other fathers and the panelists to “better parent his two sons.”

Researching and producing this film afforded me a level of confidence that this long despairing condition can be reversed, and that absent Black fathers can and will find their way back home.  For that to happen, dialogue on the subject must be continued, outreach must be expanded, and one by one, men must be welcomed back into their families to love and nurture their spouses and children.  In the opinion of this Gen-Xer, the negative stereotype of the absent Black father needs to be retired, and a positive glow of acceptance must replace it.  The future of the Black family in America depends on it, and the rest of American society will benefit from it.  It’s often said that no man is an island; no group is an island either, and African American males must be encouraged to reinsert themselves into their families’ lives.