"Why don't you guys study like the kids from Africa?"

The social consequences of unwed mothers are long-lasting and heart-breaking.

Why don't you guys study like the kids from Africa?"

In a moment of exasperation last spring, I asked that question to a virtually all-black class of 12th-graders who had done horribly on a test I had just given. A kid who seldom came to class -- and was constantly distracting other students when he did -- shot back: "It's because they have fathers who kick their butts and make them study."

Another student angrily challenged me: "You ask the class, just ask how many of us have our fathers living with us." When I did, not one hand went up.

Making the Grade Isn't About Race.  It's About Parents by Patrick Welsh.

It's not about race though that is what school administrators and community activists focus on. There's plenty of money for schools.

"The real problem," says Glenn Hopkins, president of Alexandria's Hopkins House, which provides preschool and other services to low-income families, "is that school superintendents don't realize -- or won't admit -- that the education gap is symptomatic of a social gap."

Hopkins notes that student achievement is deeply affected by issues of family, income and class, things superintendents have little control over.

In The Daddy Gap, Amy Alkon, the Advice Goddess points to a 2005 Kay Hymowitz piece in City Journal.  Kay Hymowitz is a trenchant observer and writer about  the marriage gap that is increasingly responsible for the growing divide between economic classes.

1. entrenched, multigenerational poverty is largely black; and 2. it is intricately intertwined with the collapse of the nuclear family in the inner city.

By now, these facts shouldn't be hard to grasp. Almost 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers. Those mothers are far more likely than married mothers to be poor, even after a post-welfare-reform decline in child poverty. They are also more likely to pass that poverty on to their children. Sophisticates often try to dodge the implications of this bleak reality by shrugging that single motherhood is an inescapable fact of modern life, affecting everyone from the bobo Murphy Browns to the ghetto "baby mamas." Not so; it is a largely low-income--and disproportionately black--phenomenon. The vast majority of higher-income women wait to have their children until they are married. The truth is that we are now a two-family nation, separate and unequal--one thriving and intact, and the other struggling, broken, and far too often African-American.

Until black leaders come to grips with what is really happening in the inner cities, the plight of black males and black females will only get worse.   

The men won't grow up, won't become fully formed,  but stay passionless and apathetic, distraught in their failure to launch.  As a black woman pleaded, "Enough of this selfishness: Time for black men to act like men." 

Too many young girls may yearn for marriage, but making babies is something they can do, something they believe they must do if they want meaning in their lives.  Misbegotten health policies are not teaching young girls that they are too young to start families, but giving them contraceptives without parental consent and essentially saying do what you want.

The model of the two-person, mother-father model of parenthood is being changed to meet adults' rights to children rather than children's needs to be known and , whenever possible, by their mother and father.  It's the ultimate selfishness that will continue to cause ruin in people's lives and in our society.

How do we respond to the fact that so many children are starving for a father?