If you’ve made it into adulthood with both parents still alive, you’re pretty lucky. If you were born into a family that is fairly well-to-do, where both parents are in the home and where church values prevail at least somewhat, you’re pretty lucky. If your family actually goes to church, or synagogue, or wherever your faith takes you to pray, you’re even more lucky. But if you’ve had a parent die overnight without any warning or any inclination that such a thing would happen, it’s a different world. If your parents are divorced or you’re born into a single-parent family that is struggling financially, it’s a different world. When all is said and done, everyone’s reality is somewhat different, and although there are certain similarities and certain patterns which tend to prevail among the different groupings, there are also certain statistical realities which go along with the group to which you belong.
The studies are pretty convincing. Children in families with both parents in the home and a middle-class income tend to fare better than those in single-parent families that struggle financially. In general, the kids in two-parent families do better than the kids in single-parent families altogether. This applies across the board. It means they do better in school, they are more likely to get post-secondary education to establish themselves as middle-class wage earners, and they tend to have less teenage pregnancy as well as a lower crime rate. When you add in going to church at least once a week, these children do even better making the achievement gap even greater. On top of all of that, their substance-abuse rate is much lower too.
Overall then, on the other hand, those kids who come from non-traditional families, no matter which way their family is non-traditional, who come from families that struggle on a daily basis just to make ends meet, where there is no father in the house and the mother is working-class with little education, tend to have much more difficult lives. Their substance-abuse rates are much higher, their high school dropout rates are much higher, their likelihood to be arrested is much higher and their likelihood to make it into the middle class is much lower. Their suicide rates are higher and their life expectancy rates are much lower.
Did you know that the nuclear family is dying? Well, not really, but did you know that nearly forty percent of all children are born to single mothers? Would it surprise you to discover that the rate is much higher or lower based upon your ethnicity? For example, whites have about a twenty-five percent rate, Hispanics about a forty percent rate and non-Hispanic blacks about a seventy percent rate. It’s a different world.
What does all this mean? Altogether, it’s nothing new. It’s nothing that’s not common knowledge. It’s nothing that can generally be disputed since it is factual, at least as presented here. Where the difficulty enters into it is in the interpretation of the facts. Pretty much no surprises there. One finds that the Democrats and the Republicans interpret these facts quite differently. One also finds that the lefties and righties depict the effects of these facts on our society differently as well. So, who’s to be believed?
Therein lies the real problem. Rather than arguing over the interpretation of facts and the effects on our society both sides should be working together to find ways to lessen the apparent gaps so that for the one and for the other it’s not such a different world.
