The war against our children’s prosperity is not just occurring on the front lines of schools across this nation and isn’t singularly perpetrated by activists and politicians.
The real downfall for America’s children began as a consequence of selfishness of parents who fail to be moms and dads.
Worse, this tragedy of dereliction of parental duty gets socially rationalized by enablers who empathize only with the happiness of the adults and overlook the needs of the kids.
The United States has the world’s highest rate of children living in single-parent households, with nearly a quarter of American children (23%) under the age of 18 living with just one parent and no other adults.
This was the story of my childhood, and it was primarily authored by my father, who penned it with his absence.
The man who created me was essentially a stranger, with visits years apart and his phone calls were just as infrequent.
When we did see him, it wasn’t because he missed his children but because he needed a place to stay for a few days while visiting New York City.
As a father, I now know what parental love should look like, and can say with confidence: My father did not love me more than himself, if he even loved me at all.
Yet, as in every war, there are war mongers who don’t care about the victims.
They beat the drums of conflict no matter the cost to the victims.
Studies show the children of two-parents families are more likely to graduate high school and college, less likely to go to jail, and are better positioned to have a successful career.
Yet opponents of the “normalization” of two-parent families ignore all this, and say the model is outdated, even prejudicial.
It’s old-fashioned, patriarchal, even “white supremacy” to encourage nuclear families.
We’ve lost our shame
These parental war propagandists say we should do everything to support, even encourage, single-parent households.
The worst of them are adamant about convincing us that fathers are optional and unnecessary to keep around outside of extracting resources from them.
But as a child, I didn’t care about receiving money from my father, I just wanted my father to embrace me like a father should.
I wanted his wisdom about the world, protection from negative influences, and instilling confidence in me that I can become a greater man than himself.
The problem is that our culture surrounding family has drastically shifted to where we allow the adults to act like impulsive children and we expect the children to respond like adults.
Where we once shamed the parent who neglected their children and ridiculed the parent who drove away the other, we now shrug our shoulders and mutter about how we accept that relationships sometimes fail.
Our children will always be under attack from ideologues and bad actors, but they’re not designed to fight the world alone.
Protecting families is how we protect children.
Adam B. Coleman is the author of “Black Victim to Black Victor” and founder of Wrong Speak Publishing. Follow him on Substack: adambcoleman.substack.com.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
