between the lines
pointed perspectives and penetrating punditry
The Mecca of Missing Dads
by Jack Cashill
“Our biggest question,” said Garry Kemp of the Greater KC Building & Construction Trades at Ingram’s January Industry Outlook forum, “is where are we going to get the people?”
By “people” he meant skilled laborers. Kemp and others worried out loud about the ability of the market to replace a rapidly aging work force. Said Kemp of the building trades, “We followed our fathers, many of us. Our children are not.”
The trades have historically drawn workers from rural areas, workers who typically come to the job with good basic skills and a good work ethic. A trip by any job site, even those in the heart of the city, will confirm this truism. But the building industry, like other industries that rely on skilled craftsmen, can’t rely on those sources any longer.
“I think the key thing,” said Skip Hutton of the Builder’s Association, “is going out and recruiting in the inner city.” Hutton argued that in the skilled trades, a young person could “make a very good wage” and become part of the middle class. He was not alone in looking to the inner city for relief.
A month later The Kansas City Star quietly released an article whose implications spell disaster not only for the building trades but also for the future of Kansas City. The Star released the article without fanfare. City leaders read it without comment. Yawning into the abyss, they pressed on with more urgent priorities like, say, the building of a pointless light rail system or the equally pointless move of the ballpark downtown. Here is what they read: “Single moms have almost half of KC babies.”
Donald Bradley’s article was more sober than its headline, as well it should be. Last year, as he related, 48.9 percent of all births in Kansas City were to unmarried women. That is 50 percent higher than the absurdly high national norm, 13 percent higher than the average for America’s 50 largest cities. In Kansas City, nearly one out of four of these new mothers has less than 12 years of schooling. And one out of six is a teen-ager. Again, both figures are above the national average.
To its credit, The Star did not trumpet this news as so much of the media did when census data was released nationwide. I refer here to the nearly ubiquitous “Changing Face of the American Family” articles whose experts, like University of New Mexico Professor Polly Turner, chirped happily that “family is more about the emotional, consistent relationships that children have than whether they all live in the same house or not.”
Said USA Today’s expert on the subject, Stephanie Coontz, “Those old cut-and-dried boxes that we used to put people in don’t reflect the way families live and interact.” The media message in a nutshell was that the family is in flux, that Ozzie and Harriet are dead, get used to it, nay, celebrate it.
Forgive these children born out of wedlock if they choose not to join the party. They are too busy struggling to survive. If TV melodramas invariably show the married dad as the abuser of children, in reality it is more often the “boyfriend.” Dramatically so. Studies have shown that boyfriends are between 28 and 33 times more likely to abuse a child in their charge than are the children’s natural fathers.
These kids are also three times more likely to fail at school than children from intact homes are. If half of the city’s children are born fatherless, the more narrowly drawn School District’s percentage must be approaching two-thirds. What this means is that the Kansas City School District can never reach national parity, can’t even get close. At school, too, these kids are three times more likely to commit suicide. And when these students do fail or do kill themselves, Kansas City will respond as it traditionally has by building nicer schools—that is, if it can find the work force to build them.
Many of these kids will never join that work force. Children raised without fathers will commit an astounding 75 percent of all adolescent murders. They will perpetrate 60 percent of all rapes. They will make up 70 percent of all long-term prisoners. They will commit the majority of their crimes against others who have been raised without fathers. And in the dim light of their prison cells, they will read cheery stories about Madonna and Jodie and Rosie and all those other single moms “changing the face of the American family.”
Why sons need fathers
My own father died shortly after teaching me what I needed to know to get my Home Improvement merit badge. Deprived of his wisdom and experience, not to mention his tools, my skills as a craftsman did not progress much beyond the merit badge stage. But in a way, I was lucky. I had a father until I was an adolescent, and I had other options.
Most boys in the inner city will have neither. I have gleaned an unspoken result of this through a recent video project that has had me interviewing craftsmen, mostly HVAC and plumbing technicians, across the country. What I have discovered is that the skilled crafts are almost always passed from fathers to sons. Boys without dads may get lucky and find a friend or uncle kind enough to instruct them, but at its best this instruction lasts a lifetime. At my sister’s last week, I saw her 84-year-old father-in-law teach his 45-year-old son how to build a retaining wall with the kind of patience only a father can bring to the job.
Although fatherlessness now plagues every demographic group in America, it has struck hardest and longest in the inner city. As a result, the skilled crafts are almost devoid of young black men. Among the hundreds of technicians I have met across the country, African-Americans are conspicuous by their absence. At one large Southern California enterprise, I met scores of young male Hispanics, Vietnamese and Koreans, who had come from “cut-and-dried” families not yet Hollywood-ized, but no black men.
It’s a shame. A young plumber can make $75,000 a year. It’s not pretty work, but neither is making license plates, and a plumber’s perks are a whole lot better. He has a skill that gives him pride and portability. He can take that skill anywhere. Like other craftsmen, he can start a “mom-and-pop” business. Many do, and many of these mom-and-pop shops are now worth millions.
Calling Mayor Barnes
It has gotten weird here, in this the era of bread and circuses. Despite the epidemic of abandoned children, we have named a street after a man who fathered 7 or 8 children with five different women only to orphan them all. Yet many of those who chose not to judge Derrick Thomas invest great emotional energy in abusing Mayor Kay Barnes harshly for the sin of not rushing to build a new sports stadium downtown.
Only the Mayor can set this right. She can dedicate her remaining years in office to the only serious problem the city facesfatherlessness. The solution is simple enough. It’s called marriage. Marriage would improve the schools, greatly reduce child abuse and adolescent crime, create a viable work force, and all but eliminate poverty.
The schools could teach its virtues, and Mayor Barnes could become its national champion. And if she succeeds at this one great task, her “remaining years in office” will number more than two.
The views expressed in this column are the writer’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Ingram’s Magazine.