I've got a full day of fatherly taxi driving today as my daughter has two tournament soccer games, so this will be short.
I took the plunge and read Maureen Dowd's column today. It may well have been a reprint as it is so full of lefty leftovers, some dating back to the mid-60s, some back to the 1930s. From what I've seen elsewhere in the progressives' writing and speaking, columns like this haven't changed in decades. It's all race and envy all the time.
I've spent a little time working with boys and young men from broken homes, trying to provide some amount of fathering to make up for what they've missed. In all cases they were at a severe disadvantage and in no cases would money or a change in melanin have made a difference. Money is a marker of behavior and race means almost nothing any more.
Money comes from self-denial and work. Obtain a skill that others value and deny yourself pleasures to the extent that you live on less than you earn. Fatherless boys aren't big on self-denial or work.
Race was irrelevant in my lads' daily lives. There wasn't a single instance where race played a role in what they could or could not do, in what they did or did not do. Race may have played a role in their selection of their social circle and the choice of that social circle was of great import, but externally, there were no racial pressures on them.
What was missing was what I'm doing this weekend with my daughter. Yesterday was a cross country meet and the first game of the tournament. Today are the second and third games of the tournament. I'm devoting my weekend to her and in exchange, I expect her to not just make her high school soccer team this winter, but to be a starter. She chose the hobby and I am supplying the expectations. Had she chosen piano, she'd be playing recitals for big crowds or I'd be very unhappy with her. She's going to work and work hard to be really good at what she chose.
None of my boys had that. Not one. They came from different races and some had money while some did not. They had experienced lax discipline and no enforced parental expectations. They were going nowhere and it had nothing at all to do with Maureen Dowd's worries about race and money.
Maureen lives in a world that does not exist.
2 comments:
A question:
I agree that those boys would have been vastly better off if they had involved fathers like you at home. But, how much like you are their actual biological fathers? Even if their fathers had married their mothers, and stayed married to them, would they have been worth much as fathers?
Tim, what the statistics show is that married, biological families do best, followed by divorced families, followed by living-together and single parent homes which are tied for last place. The mechanisms are pretty simple - performance is proportional to fatherly authority.
The married, biological father has the most authority to enforce unpopular rules. The live-in boyfriend or the totally absent man has the least. At some point in time, the kids have to be forced to do things they don't want to do or they fall back into sloth, poor performance or worse.
Yes, it's possible that a married, biological father would do worse, but they would have had far more tools than I did. It's exhausting to have to continually thread the needle, balancing what the child needs with what the mom will allow.
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