Over the weekend, I was reading Juan Williams interesting essay in the Wall Street Journal on the sorry state of fatherhood (HT: Joanne Jacobs) in America. Williams point was as familiar as it is depressing: an enormous number of children simply do not know their fathers in any meaningful way. “The nation’s out-of-wedlock birth rate is 38%,” Williams writes. “Among white children, 28% are now born to a single mother; among Hispanic children it is 50% and reaches a chilling, disorienting peak of 71% for black children.”
The numbers reflect what I saw teaching in the South Bronx, where fewer than a dozen of my students in five years lived with both biological parents. They were, not surprisingly, some of my best, most diligent students. Then, this passage got my attention:
A study of black families 10 years ago, when the out-of-wedlock birthrate was not as high as today, found that single moms reported only 20% of the “baby’s daddy” spent time with the child or took a “lot” of interest in the baby. That is quite a contrast to the married black mothers who told researchers that 88% of married black men, or men living with the mother, regularly spent time with the child and took responsibility for the child’s well-being.
There’s a name for someone who spends time with his child and takes responsibility. The name is “father.” It’s sure as hell not “baby daddy.” I began wondering when this hip, ubiquitous phrase gained traction in the language, and why no one takes umbrage at its dismissiveness, connoting a man who is little more than a sperm donor. It turns out Julia Turner addressed exactly this point two years ago in her language column in Slate.
Who knows why these terms became catchphrases? Perhaps it’s just that they’re metrically pleasing: Baby-mama and baby-daddy are undeniably fun to say. But it’s the novelty factor that explains how the words lost their negative connotations. Sure, there are many gossip writers who still use the terms in their original senses (calling dancer Carlos Leon “Madonna’s baby-daddy,” for example) because they’re useful, reducing a complex chain of possessives—Madonna’s daughter’s father—to a nice, comprehensible noun. But it seems there are also plenty of writers who just like the way the words sound and don’t care much about the stigma once attached to babydaddyhood.
Indeed, last week, Fox News found itself imbroiled in a minor flap when it referred to Michelle Obama as ‘Obama’s baby mama.’ The network was almost certainly guilty of a lame attempt to use a current turn of phrase, but conservative columnist Michelle Malkin pointed out to the New York Times that Michelle Obama herself often refers to Barack as her ‘baby’s daddy’ and has used the phrase ‘baby daddy’ to describe Barack while on the stump this year.” Quite a contrast to the sober address Obama himself on fatherhood yesterday.
The word is “father.” If we want it taken it seriously, perhaps we should start by refusing to describe parenting in such a casual, off-handed way. The term “baby daddy” if it is to be used at all, should be used dimissively, even as a pejorative remark to describe the kind of men Juan Williams–and Barack Obama–rightly decry.
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Sports also provides a good metaphor. Our high school won three basketabll state championships in a decade, and was always in the semi-finals at least, and put plenty of ball players into major colleges.
In almost every case, the point guard came from a two-parent family. We had three two-parent families that provided eight “skill players,” the players who were most likely to take control at crunch time. More, those three fathers were active in summer leagues, as well as providing a welcome place for neighborhood kids. They helped develop two or three dozen other top players.
The same dynamic applied for football. Year in and year out, the skill players came from the western half of our school feeder area where there was a mixture of poor, working class, and middle class, as well as the generational poverty of the eastern part of the feeder pattern. When the less-poor area was split off into a new high school, the pattern became even more clear in b-ball. The lower poverty school got the two two parent families (including the point guard’s parents) and the kids who came up with them from the summer leagues. Both teams had comparable talent, but the teams with fathers in the stands, at practice, and on road trips was phenomenal. Our team, having lost that stability, lost almost every game, usaually by thirty or forty points.
So how does the metaphor apply to classroom instruction? Every class needs its metaphorical point guards. It needs at least some students who learned the fundamentals of reading in elemnetary school. It needs some students who lead through their actions. It needs some to run the metaphorical “fastr break” i.e. ask the questions that spur classroom discussions to higher levels. It needs kids who value learning, even if for no other reason that their dads valued education.
Today, it is not just school choice that has creamed off parents and families with fathers. When the fathers move to the suburbs and exurbs, that means that the uncles, volunteers, coaches, and neighborhood mentors also move out of the inner city.
I should stress that the same dynamic is obvious in choir. Because I use a lot of music, I quickly learn which kids came from church choirs. The self-trained hip hop singers may or may not have good fundamentals, but the kids from the choir always do. That means that they are instantly open to any style of music from Irish folk to Bruce Springsteen. The adults who taught them the fundamentals of music thus also opened them up to a wider world.
A really interesting observation, John. As a sports fan, I’ve grown up with the idea–almost certainly a cliche–that poverty and success in sports at a professional level are somehow linked. The parenting piece is rarely discussed. I’d be very curious to know if the cause and effect that you infer between parenting and success in performance arenas like sports and music exists. I wonder if there have been studies.
I don’t know about studies, but I have anecdotes. I don’t discount the value of lessons learned when kids are raising kids. But it takes an adult to teach kids proper footwork, to always box out, and to always follow your miss, or run out ground balls. And those fundamentals have the bonus of teaching “respect for the game.”
The same metaphor applies to metaphors. When a child is raised in the church and someone teaches them about parables, they are being prepared for literacy and cultural literacy.
The classic oil field joke is too dirty to repeat here, but the punchline is, “pay close attention, because I’m only going to show you once.” Every working class male of my generation heard that phrase over and over. We were being taught to “learn how to learn.” The same applied when my mom taught me to wash fresh vegetables with cold not hot water because of the hot water caroded pipes and released chemicals. Whether or not that lesson needs to be taught today, it was teaching a kid to always do A, because of B, which was a result of C.
The answer is not to complain about the lack of parenting but to honestly recognize its effects. Not all teachers signed up to be surrogate parents and that’s OK. But we need to consciously recognize that schools need to fill a parenting role, and they can’t function without adults who want to be teacher/parents.
John’s surrogate parent theory, while compelling, is off the mark.
We don’t need schools to be surrogate parents, we need schools to employ effective classroom management techniques and technically sound instruction. These two factors are the compensatory education that low SES students need. As long as the parent(s) gets the student to school on a regular basis, schools employing these things (along with the panopoly of comprehensive health and social services already in place) will be able to educate (most) low SES students regardless of the parental support/involvement.
Middle class schools are different because they have higher levels of parental support and the students are more easily educable. Parental support lessens the need for employing high-quality classroom management techniques and more readily educable students with parental support lessens the needs for employing high-quality instructional techniques.
It is understandable why teachers call for increased parental support. They think it’ll allow them to teach low SES kids like they teach middle class kids, something they apparently like to do. Whereas, teaching low-SES kids requires improving classroom management and teaching skills and limits the curriculum used. I assume this means more work and decreased job satisfaction for some, perhaps many, teachers.
I’m not sure that John was advocating teachers self-consciously serve as surrogate parents, but I’ll let him speak for himself. I took it to mean that in the absence of stable parent relationships, teachers become the principal adult in the child’s life, and we need to understand and embrace that.
Viewed through that lens, Ken, I see no conflict with your post and John’s. I planned much of my teaching and classroom management — predictable routines, explicit modeling of adult behavior, an emphasis on work habits, accountability for interpersonal interactions and, yes, serious consequences for misbehavior, with that quasi-parental role in mind. I thought (and still do) that holding my students responsible for their behavior was vital, not just to maintain an orderly classroom, but rather to communicate the values and expectations of the adult world.
I suppose you’re right that many teachers want parental support so they can focus on the academics. I merely wanted my students to see me and Mom (and it’s almost always Mom) on the same page. Not surprisingly, my greatest disappointment as a teacher came when parents made excuses for their child’s misbehavior, actively challenged and undermined my authority, or validated bad behavior and irresponsibility.
That feeling of being isolated, alone and frustrated — that no one else was holding a child accountable — is probably the biggest reason for the low job satisfaction you cite. It’s simply too big of a cross to bear on behalf of dozens of children at a time.
I agree that in the absence of a suitable parental figure, the school/teachers need to fill at least the portion of that gap related to academics.
The teacher should not be the only one holding students accountable, it needs to be done be done by the institution school-wide, all teachers, and admistrators.