James Walsh at the Strib pays tribute to a woman who got through college, despite having been pregnant twice by ninth grade:

There is something about Jennifer Banks that erases doubt.

Perhaps it’s her clear and steady gaze, the way she never looks away as she talks about her past — or her future. Or is it her voice? Calm and matter-of-fact when she says she never doubted herself. Talk to Jennifer Banks for just a little while, and you see what so many others who have met and helped her have seen: Determination to achieve.

Banks graduated last month with a two-year degree in radiography from the College of St. Catherine. Two days later, Hennepin County Medical Center hired her.

In this season of graduations, Banks stands out because she reached this goal after she gave birth to her first son at 14 and another at 15. She moved to Minnesota from Arkansas as a pregnant ninth-grader.

Her own parents sent her away to find better schools and, perhaps, a better life here.

So congratulations – sincerely – to Jennifer Banks. There’s no denying that she’s accomplished a lot. And stories like hers are certainly an encouragement.

Unfortunately – and we’re going to open the focus up Ms. Banks to all of society, here – situations like Jennifer Banks’s are a silver lining on a very dark cloud; the epidemic of fatherless families in our society.

J Roosh links us to this rather bone-chilling article about the future of the American family by Walter Williams:

It is now common to meet young people in our big city schools, foster-care homes and juvenile centers who do not know their dads. Most of those children have come face-to-face with their father at some point; but most have little regular contact with the man, or have any faith that he loves or cares about them.

When fatherless young people are encouraged to write about their lives, they tell heartbreaking stories about feeling like “throwaway people.” In the privacy of the written page, their hard, emotional shells crack open to reveal the uncertainty that comes from not knowing if their father has any interest in them. The stories are like letters to unknown dads – some filled with imaginary scenes about what it might be like to have a dad who comes home and puts his arm around you or plays with you.

You don’t need me to tell you it’s an epidemic:

The extent of the problem is clear. The nation’s out-of-wedlock birth rate is 38%. Among white children, 28% are now born to a single mother; among Hispanic children it is 50% and reaches a chilling, disorienting peak of 71% for black children. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, nearly a quarter of America’s white children (22%) do not have any male in their homes; nearly a third (31%) of Hispanic children and over half of black children (56%) are fatherless.

This represents a dramatic shift in American life. In the early 1960s, only 2.3% of white children and 24% of black children were born to a single mom. Having a dad, in short, is now a privilege, a ticket to middle-class status on par with getting into a good college.

The odds increase for a child’s success with the psychological and financial stability rooted in having two parents.

And yet society as a whole actively fights this notion. Not just the usual targets – “urban” culture and rap music with is misogynistic themes and “bitches” and “hos” and bump and run approach to sex; not just Hollywood, which has been increasingly portraying fathers as a useful lifestyle accessory that glamorous starlets might or might not keep about the house (on and off camera), on top of a generation of movies that depict sex as something that magically stops at “fun” and avoids the whole “baby” thing.

It also includes a welfare system that systematically devalues fatherhood (the DFL might as well refer to the family as “womenandtheirchildren” for all the times that the likes of Ellen Anderson refer to the concept), giving fatherless families more welfare benefits and actively encouraging them to make themselves scarce.

So congratulations, Jennifer Banks. I hope a lot of people follow your example. I just hope society learns a different lesson altogether.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 6:00 am and is filed under Family Law. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.