The "Parenting Problem" is a "Poverty Problem"
"We have a parenting problem, not a poverty problem," Mike Petrilli writes at Flypaper. I agree that parenting matters greatly to a child's academic success or failure, and in fact may be the single largest determining factor. But Petrilli concludes that the best way to solve the "parenting problem" is through cultural messaging promoting marriage and stigmatizing divorce, so that kids benefit from growing up in two-income households. This ignores, I think, the concrete reality of life in many low-income neighborhoods, where women are making a rational choice when they remain single.
Here in New York, for example, only one of every four young black men has a job. The communities from which these men hail have also been decimated by the drug war; 17 percent of adult black males have been incarcerated, compared to 2.6 percent of white men. In addition, low-income women, regardless of race, are
