With Father’s Day approaching this weekend, we find it appropriate to report in this week’s paper Better Family Life’s plans for its 2012 Family Week and College Bound’s celebration of its first cohort of college graduates. Both of these St. Louis organizations lead major ongoing efforts toward positive change in our community, which faces so many challenges and disparities – perhaps none more damaging to our overall well being as a people than the absent black father.
The numbers are terrifying. According to an analysis of 2010 U.S. Census data, a stunning 66 percent of black children in the U.S. are growing up in single-parent homes. In Missouri, it’s even worse, with 72 percent (nearly three-fourths) of all black Missouri children growing up with only one parent in the home – in nearly every case, with only a mother, not a father. Nationally, this is nearly double the overall number of 34 percent of single-parent homes; in Missouri, it is more than double the overall statewide percentage, also 34 percent.
Better Family Life seeks to support and improve our families at all points. The agency does offer marriage planning and family counseling, but it’s work is more holistic and foundational than merely talking through problems. The agency runs productive vocational programs, often in partnership with St. Louis Community College and others. So many of our young men are graduating from high school (or dropping out of it) with inadequate skills, and we badly need agencies to do the remedial work necessary to make these young men – many of them already fathers – employable.
College Bound is doing similar remedial training, but for students rather than workers. Founder Lisa Zarin tells us she wants “to bring the privileges that kids from high-income backgrounds have to kids from low-income neighborhoods.” Typical of College Bound’s students is Tanner Senter, who graduated from Lake Forest College in May – the first college graduate in his family. “My father has been absent in my life,” he told our reporter. “You hear about it on TV – a young black man without a father goes and becomes a criminal.” Instead, this young black man became a college graduate.
We applaud the efforts of these organizations to fill the void of our fractured families, and we can name many others, including Fathers Support Center, Big Brothers Big Sisters, Boy Scouts, the Boys & Girls clubs, and the United Way (which funds so many of them). At the same time, we must not let structural challenges excuse us from personal responsibility. This is where our clergy – and, really, all of us – need to step forward and show some tough love to the boys and men in our community. There are too many people we know stepping out for “Grown but Sexy” nights at the club when they should be at home with their sons and daughters, overseeing their homework and simply paying positive attention to them.
Ayriel Hadley said of College Bound, “Self-esteem came through building strong relationships with basically adult strangers. It was a highly supportive environment. Even when you failed, they acknowledged that it occurred and it doesn’t have to occur again.” We find it both moving that “adult strangers” are willing to dedicate their time to supporting our children – and disturbing that our children need them. It’s time to tell all of the absent and inadequate fathers in our community that failure as a father doesn’t have to occur again. It’s time to make connecting with your children and committing to their future your highest priority. Happy Father’s Day.
