TheSchoolofAthens Posted June 22, 2015 Posted June 22, 2015 I've just taken notice of some articles that claim that it is a myth that the black community suffers from absentee fathers more so than other races. Here is a link to one of the articles. You will quickly notice just how liberal this article is, but the statistics and visual aids are there. Link here. Is there anything flawed with the CDC study? Are the statistics wrong? I've been persuaded by reason that - because of a great many factors - black fathers are abscent from the family picture. It is tragic. But the articles I've seen, such as the one linked above, beg to differ. Please let me know what your thoughts are and how you would respond!Here is the link to the CDC document.
webdever Posted June 22, 2015 Posted June 22, 2015 So he starts by showing data from a study that shows, not that the black communitee doesn't suffer moreso from absentee fathers, but that black fathers are slightly more involved with their children and uses this to say the absentee father myth was "debunked". Then someone calls him out on it and he points out that yes, there is significantly more absenteeism among black fathers and spends the rest of the blog post trying to explain how this doesn't matter. These do show a difference in the percentage of children living with one parent (the mother only) vs two parents between White (18%), Latino or Hispanic (24%) and Black (50%) households. But what's interesting is the percentage who live with their father only (White - 3.8%, Hispanic - 3.0%, Black - 4.3%) is also higher.Does this invalidate the CDC analysis? Well, no. There is a lower marriage rate among black people and that does seem to have an effect on how many of them are living with vs living apart from their children. But the level of involvement, of parenting, across racial lines from men in either of those two living situations - is not that significantly different. In fact, more Black fathers who live apart from their children are in most measurements are actually far more involved in their children's lives [in some cases by nearly a 2:1 or 3:1 ratio] which may be a direct result, and/or offset, to the fact that far more of them are in that situation percentage-wise. *facepalm*
Blackout Posted June 22, 2015 Posted June 22, 2015 Second what webdever wrote. I have read and heard that black father absenteeism is a product of the breakdown of marriage and high incidence of teen pregnancy in the black community. This study does nothing to refute this and discounts the disparity between single motherhood in black families even though it is nearly double that of white families.
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