[NPR] Poverty, Dropouts, Pregnancy, Suicide: What The Numbers Say About Fatherless Kids

Every time the Left responds to school violence with knee-jerk gun-grabbing rhetoric, they are turning their collective back on an increasingly pervasive and pernicious problem facing our children today:  fatherlessness.  Of course, they MUST ignore this problem as it stems in part from the policies which they’ve implemented through the dependence-building “great society” programs, destroying the family, denigrating fathers and shredding communities generally.  

But fatherlessness, even according to this NPR article, contributes to higher than average dropout, pregnancy and suicide rates, as well as poverty and the consequent ills.  

The growing number of fatherless children in this country poses one of the the most serious problems in education today, according to best-selling author Alan Blankstein. 

He has spent most of his life advocating for kids who struggle in school. He wrote Failure is Not an Option, a guide to creating high-performing schools for all students.

So, just how many kids are fatherless? NPR Ed put that question to Blankstein, who told us that 24.7 million kids in the U.S. don’t live with a biological father.

Some statistics:

Children are four times more likely to be poor if the father is not around. Poverty is heavily associated with academic success. [Fatherless kids] are also twice as likely to drop out.

Girls are twice as likely to suffer from obesity without the father present. They’re four-times more likely to get pregnant as teenagers. Boys are more likely to act out.

 There is a 20 percent rate among white fathers who are absent in their children’s lives, 31 percent for Hispanics, 57 percent for African-Americans.

Children growing up without a father are more than twice as likely to commit suicide.

Read the article here.

I’d also like to draw your attention to this heartfelt blogpost by “anonymous” written just days ago, published on “The Stinger,” a “student-produced newspaper and website that is created to inform, educate, and entertain the students and faculty of Rockwall High School.”    Its personal cry provides a different perspective from the NPR interview and corroborates as well as supplements it.