Shaming of single parent families continues, even through to this day.

Moms have taken the blame for shit for 100 years, starting with Freud on up. [one could go back further but I’ll start modern era].

Up through the 1970s, Autism was blamed on “refrigerators mothers”. Moms didn’t love the kids enough. Not enough hugs. Cold moms. Created autistic kids.

In the 80s: moms going to work led to latch-key kids but they didn’t blame the fathers but rather the ERA and women wanting to go out to work. They were wrecking the family by divorce courts.

They also were used to define “dysfunctional families”. Why were they dysfunctional? The so-called “broken home”. That’s a great message for kids and single parents to get bombarded with. If you have love in a home, you’re 80% there.

Through this whole time, various marriage acts get proposed in state courts. Shaming of single parent families continues, even through to this day.

It’s fine for a family or church to say “Shouldn’t you really be with someone?” – you know, regular passive aggressive family guilt and shame.

But then that’s all over the media, in textbooks, and what does it succeed in improving? Pats on the back for “intact families”?

There’s a reason WHY you hear less and less about “broken homes” being “the reason” for crime. Stats aren’t bearing it out as the reason. Correlation aside, it doesn’t seem to be causation.

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Question: Do you consider this an equal issue among white single parent households and black single parent households?

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Another option: If it’s single mother black families, less targeting of black fathers by police, or even earlier, get rid of the school to prison pipeline, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School-to-prison_pipeline – more community youth programs in black neighborhoods with male mentor figures abundant.

If you really want to “solve”, solve.

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It’s irrational to point out something is bad and then stop.

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This is a short time scale – only 10 years – but it looks like despite marriages and divorces and new pairings and such, the levels seem to be the same for this 10 year period.

This is good. It can provide a stable background to see if there are differences in crime rates over the same period of time.

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Now, here’s violent crime (not all crime) for the same period by race.

*but* here’s a problem: these would be *adult* statistics whereas the “single parent households” would be kids.

*now* you’d have to go back in time to figure out what generation the criminals are in and look at whether there is a correlation between crime rate now to the single parent rate when they were counted in single parent statistics.

I’m not going to do that. But point is, it starts to get complicated.

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Let’s say you institute community programs to help kids in single family households. You institute scholarship programs to help them pay for extra schooling.

The program starts working.

But then the messages continue about crime rates and single parents.

The programs get cut by new politicians before their success or failure comes in. Why? Because they’re based upon old data from adults who are NO LONGER in single parent households but whose actions negatively reflect about CURRENT single parent households and the kids in them.

I”m not saying things shouldn’t be done. But too often programs get cut long before there’s been enough time to assess success/failure rates.

No fixing takes places and the repetition of the statistics amounts to blame because efforts to fix aren’t given time to work properly long enough to be reflected in new crime stats. The cycles continue.

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Time problem is parental interaction time, yes.

I don’t believe in the nuclear family alone as automatically beneficial. Rather, I believe in communities that have cohesion between citizens, including children, adults, schools, police, government.

I believe a single parent household in a strong community will produce kids who will be more likely to be upstanding members of society.

But there’s an additional problem than interaction time: income.

Single parent income is automatically more likely to be lower. That prevents participation in a number of school programs and usually prevents completion of college.

Regarding blacks and incarceration, looking at the “School to Prison” pipeline is one avenue for answers. It’s a known problem. It’s not an exclusively US problem but it’s been addressed better in other countries, like Australia, who have less zero-tolerance policies and have had more restorative justice models in place.

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Identifying a problem without providing a solution though doesn’t provide an avenue for a solution.

Even a ridiculous solution is better than none at all.

Why? When you state a bare fact it can be used for a LOT of other reasons than solutions.

It can be used for blame. It can be used as excuses for non-solutions to be ok because of these bare facts. such as discrimination.

Not providing some suggested solution can lead the reader into presuming that these are fixed and unchangeable. Why, if someone believes in evolutionary psychology they may even use these bare facts to concoct a just-so story to explain “why fundamentally ‘this group’ is” – something negative – permanently.

A bare fact doesn’t mean anything without a reason behind stating or a direction to go into. If you don’t provide the direction or purpose, your audience will and it often won’t be in the direction of reasonable solutions.

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I think it belongs in this conversation. If you present a statistic, why? There’s a “so what?” moment with facts.

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I’m not saying they trump statistics. I’m saying they’re meaningless without a reason why they’re brought up.

That’s where current experience (conversation) joins statistics.

Here we have statistics about single parents and crime. Ok. Next topic.

Statistics don’t exist in a vacuum. Why do these statistics matter to you?

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I question these easily thrown around stats because of the often questionable justifications they’re used for.

I can easily accept them but only if there’s some point to accepting them.

It’s the “and because you accept this statistics, ‘you must also accept'” that often follows that I’m attempting to predict because stats without context serve no purpose, do they?

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I mentioned race because “single-parent households in inner-cities leads to gangs which must be stopped by stronger police force” is a very common US narrative. I’m not suggesting this is your narrative, but the link between “single parent household” and “crime” and presumably “USA” typically leads to race.

But, not always. I wasn’t presuming you had a bias against black people by the way. Just that this statistic is often used as a proxy for poor black inner city families on welfare who are draining the taxpayers hard earned money. [another common US narrative].

It’s so common which is why I brought it up early and used myself as an alternative to sway a conversation away from that possible zone.

Besides a quest to correct inaccurate comprehensions of reality – which is also my quest – what in specific draws you to have an interest in these statistics? Why does the correlation matter to you?

Or has this ALL been solely to get me to agree with the statistics? [which I’d already done earlier].

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Oh jeez, to get statistics on this would require drilling down to city/neighborhood level programs.

Neighborhood. Name of program. When instituted. Who politically supported it. How long did the program last. Did the funding get cut by a politician? Was there any tracking of the effectiveness program when the kids in these programs were adults, even though funding had been cut long ago?

Even if I could answer those, I could only likely produce anecdotes.

So, you can dismiss it if you like because the data collection for such a task would be a massive undertaking and I doubt anybody’s even tried.

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Crime/parent statistics are simpler. Rolls up cleanly. Easy data.

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