Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, November 29, 1993 TAG: 9404220008
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
You knew that already? Well, sure.
Except that when the talk turns to unwed teen mothers, to children having children, the idea of fatherhood is notable mainly for its absence.
Roanoke, it should be well-known by now, has the highest teen-pregnancy rate in Virginia. Males behind this sad statistic are more irresponsible, in fact, than the girls. The males typically and despicably accept no responsibility for helping to raise their children, not to mention supporting them financially.
Even so, is it too much to suggest that, in a way, the fathers of the children of unwed mothers are also victims - victims of their own attitudes?
It's the mothers and the children, of course, who bear the most obvious burdens of unwed teen pregnancy. For the mothers, there's the trap of welfare dependency and a closing off of future possibilities. The children, if not necessarily condemned to a life of poverty, are at least subject to a greater likelihood than they ought to be of growing up poor and, as teens themselves, perpetuating the cycle.
Yet a portrait of the fathers, for whom siring children by unwed teens is perhaps a source of pride, isn't exactly an inspiring sight.
Many were themselves the children of impoverished, single-parent households; (half the children reared without a male permanently on the premises are, after all, boys). Often unemployed or underemployed, or failing in school, the fatherless boys can turn societal demands for regular child-support payments into exercises in futility, because they have no regular income from which to draw the money.
The apparent popularity of the macho notion of fatherhood without responsibility is doing the young men no favors.
As if inhabiting the world of TV and movies, where sex is recreational and people shoot and kill each other with little attention to the impact on families, these males lack a sense of the links between cause and effect.
Indeed, when action (impregnation) is disconnected from consequence (responsibility for helping rear the baby) on something so fundamental as child-rearing, it reinforces a disconnect between action and consequence on all matters.
This is of a piece, moreover, with a weak sense of one's own future, of how what one does today influences what one's tomorrow will be like. Without a sense of that, from what place can come the discipline to defer a reward or two now, make a sacrifice or two now, for one's own longer-term benefit?
Yet more is lost in such rupture of cause and effect than future material reward for oneself. When a young man's culture encourages him to regard fatherhood as a fleeting act that entails nothing thereafter, it is also robbing him of another kind of opportunity - to see his own children as people in themselves rather than as a sort of game prize, and to be a central part of their upbringing rather than little or nothing to them.
Mothers without real husbands and children without real fathers aren't the only casualties of the epidemic of unwed teen pregnancies. Count also among the casualties the fathers without real children.
by CNB