Series: Being a Black Man

Absentee Black Fathers

Federal statistics show that 69 percent of all black children are born to single mothers, more than twice the national average and almost triple the rate of whites. Some 48 percent of all black children live without their fathers, double the rate of any other ethnic group in America. In "Dad, Redefined," the latest installment of the Being a Black Man series, Post staffer Neely Tucker profiles a young black man as he tries to turn his life around for his infant son and trump the "deadbeat dad" statistics.

On Monday, Dec. 18 at noon ET, Tucker was online to respond to your questions and comments about his story. The transcript follows below.

In our video "Fatherless," teens share their thoughts on growing up without a father.

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Neely Tucker: hi everyone,

thanks for joining us online. there are a lot of questions, and i vote we jump right in. two items: one, i generally type w'out caps in online communication in order to speed the process; please indulge me. two: the city dept. that won the $10 million grant is the d.c. dept of human services, not the d.c. dept of health. my mistake. onwards.

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Washington, D.C.: The good thing about this article is that Tim Wagoner doesn't make any excuses for being in the situation that he's in. It annoys me how some of the people who were profiled in previous articles would sometimes try to put the blame on others for their life. It's also good to hear that Tim is going for his GED. I think the main thing that Tim needs to do is find out exactly what he wants out of life. This will enable him to find a fulfilling career. I think being a responsible father is more than just "being there". It includes leading by example. After getting his GED, Tim should explore going to college and getting a career, so he can be a better role model for his child.

Neely Tucker:

tim was very straightforward about assessing his station in life. i thought that was one of his real strengths. what he wants most out of life, he told me, is a "really good job."

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Takoma Park, Md.: This was a GREAT article. Unlike some feature stories that seem to highlight extremes, this story, unfortunately, was very typical. Did you ask the young man why he felt comfortable being sexually involved with a 19 year old at the age of 28? My other question is whether you got a sense of why the young woman got pregnant. I hear a lot of these girls say it was an accident, but birth control is so commonplace, cheap, and effective that I almost believe a lot of these girls long to be single mothers for various reasons.

Neely Tucker:

the age difference is notable, particularly for a teenager to be involved with someone nearly a decade older. but they have a relationship, whatever anyone else might make of it. they did NOT plan to get pregnant, it seemed to be one of those things.

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Washington, D.C. suburbs: Dear Mr. Tucker,

Thanks for an engaging article. There are no heroes or villains -- just people doing there best under less-than-optimal circumstances.

I would like, however, to add a comment about the accompanying boxes of information on the correlation between growing up in a single mother family and poor outcomes. This is a CORRELATION -- social scientists (and others) know that correlation is not causation. As such, the relationship between these variables may well be spurious. Put another way, these poor outcomes are no less likely to be linked to other factors that affect children in single mother families, such as poverty or being raised by a parent with a low level of education. In our culture, however, there is a persistent tendency to blame single moms for "ruining" children and society. As a single mother, I can say with conviction that single mothers work as hard (and harder!) than most and that living in a society that presumes a home with two parents is not easy (a small example: back-to-school nights to which children cannot come and at which no childcare is provided -- should we assume that all kids have a second caregiver in the home????????). We should stop treating single motherhood as a pathological condition. As we see in the article, the full meaning of this can vary enormously.

Thanks.

Neely Tucker:

this is a good comment, and an interesting position. statistics only show averages; they don't predict individual outcomes. i think there are several possible "causes" out there, and the degree to which they influence individual lives is up to interpretation. the one clear economic issue with single parent homes, regardless of gender, is a single income to run the house. if you make $1 million per year, you're going to be okay. if it's a considerably smaller amount, problems will likely increase. but there was certainly no attempt in this story to "blame" single mothers; they're usually the ones doing most of the work.

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UpMo, Md.: Did I miss the article on my Dad, and my friends' dads and my husband and his father and the other 52% of black kids who grow up with their fathers in their households? Could you tell me where to find that article?

washingtonpost.com: You can find it -- and many others -- here: www.washingtonpost.com/blackmen among the many archived stories and interactive features from the "Being a Black Man" series.

Neely Tucker:

as noted by the folks at dot.com.

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Washington, D.C.: Why did you choose to write a story about a stereotypical Black man/Father?

One of my friends is a journalist and he tells me that news is what you -don't- expect. How is this story defying expectiations?

Neely Tucker: i wouldn't say tim is so much stereotypical as he is "average" in a growing circle of society. i don't know that the intent of the story was to "defy expectations." it was to report with some depth on the issue of "absentee fathers," and i felt tim was pretty representative of the issue.

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Bowie, Md.: I am a college-educated Black man with multiple college degrees. I am embarassed when I read about the exploits of these Black men in your articles. They make terrible life decisions and compound their mistakes by fathering children and by not having steady employment. They have no one to blame but themselves. With all of the successful Black men in the metro D.C. area, why do you choose to concentrate on these failures of the Black race?

washingtonpost.com: You might check out " At the Corner of Progress and Peril" by Michael Fletcher (Post, June 2, 2006), the first story in the " Being a Black Man" series.

Neely Tucker: also, could we add the link to keith alexander's story from last month, on the three men starting a new business?

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Petworth, D.C.: I am a 30 year old Black man who's been married for four years now. My wife and I view family planning as our most important responsibility.

The article on Sunday broke our hearts.

Juxtapose that article, about an unmarried couple with a combined income of $15.50/hr with the article in the business section delineating how expensive infants are in 2006, and it becomes terribly clear why the cycle of poverty persists in so many of our nation's Black communites.

Neely Tucker:

that business article, which i would suggest reading for anybody who's a parent, was sobering. and on $15.50 per hour, regardless of race, you're going to have a very, very difficult time of it.

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Baltimore, Md.: I work in an elementary school where most of the (black) children either don't have fathers around or dads who pop in and out as they'd like, which isn't that often. They talk about their dads only in terms of what they have bought them.

They miss having fathers and this influences their moods and self-control and schoolwork more than anyone can imagine or acknowledges. (Especially since many of them have mothers who aren't always able to fill the void themselves - to the extent one person could.) One of my students for an assignment had to write a friendly letter, and in it he asked his dad not to have his eleventh child by an eleventh woman. The boy was seven. He cried writing it.

I'm not sure I have a specific question. I just wanted people to understand how widespread and deep-seeded a problem this is. I beg Tim and fathers like him to see their children if not every day, at least regularly and often.

Neely Tucker: i'm posting this, as it goes to what i was trying to get at in the story, and why the activist i quoted near the end of the story said the main thing he was left with was the pain of it all.

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washingtonpost.com: A Chance To Get Into The Room by Keith L. Alexander (Post, Nov. 17, 2006)

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John; Arlington: Hi Neely,

Insightful story. What's he doing the other 3 days a week he's not working or going to class? I'm amazed to read that a 27 yr old male is perfectly content with working 12hrs a week at 7.50/hr when he has a child.

Neely Tucker: this is a very good point. tim has a three day weekend each week. when i asked if he'd thought about getting a second job to fill that space, his reply was that he wanted to focus on his ged and get that passed as soon as possible. whether that's a good strategy or not is debatable, i suppose.

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washingtonpost.com:

Story about the cost of having a child: High Expectations by Cecilia Kang (Post, Dec. 17, 2006)

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Fatherly Sacrifices...: I didn't get the sense that the young man depicted in the story was willing to make that "Fatherly Sacrifice" for his kid. I say this because of the "reasons" why he quit/couldn't work at Target (too many carts and not enough people) and his lack of holding steady employment. I compare this sacrifice/drive to Chris Gardner (Pursuit of Happyness - who had it A LOT ROUGHER THAN MOST OF US) and I see a huge difference. Could that be the answer that we men don't want to make those "fatherly sacrifices" or "swallow our pride" to take care of our kids?

Neely Tucker:

you know, this is a really good point. i was in the food court at pentagon city yesterday doing some c'mas shopping, and the guy next to me happened to be reading the story. he was about 45, first name of tony, had two sons he was raising. and he was talking about, as many of the fatherhood counseling directors did, that there was often a misplaced idea of manhood that's gained currency. if your job is hard, or demeaning, or your boss is giving you the flux, a lot of guys think they're "being a man" by not doing that job, showing that they're not going to take that anymore. however, once you have kids, taking those sort of emotional blows is often what "sacrifice" entails, and that is amuch more profound and responsible view of masculinity.

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Washington, D.C.: Like one of the previous readers, I was also brought up in a two-parent home. My parents are still married after almost 40 years of marriage. Why aren't some of our success stories highlighted? I wasn't exposed to a lot of what happens in black America. That doesn't make me better than anyone, but I am really tired of the media and mainstream society depicting us African-Americans as less-thans, or underprivileged. Not all of us came up that way.

Neely Tucker: pls see earlier post from dot.com. there are many, many stories in this series. this was one.

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Glenburnie, Md.: Neely, I feel you are incorrect in stating they didn't plan to get pregnant. There is so much education out here and why are these young people who aren't in relationship (did you see he said we are just friends) or have the income to raise a child. These folks should have been on birth control, using condoms or other means to prevent this unwanted pregnancy. Saying they didn't plan is a major-cop out!

Neely Tucker: i'm posting this one because there are a lot of similar responses. i agree on there's a lot of education out there. also note they are not the first or last to get pregnant when not planning...i'm not saying it was the best of all plans. my job was to report what happened. i don't have the means to contradict two people who tell me in separate interviews that the pregnancy wasn't planned.

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Bethesda, Md.: I'm a Black 33 y.o. professional woman and all my life I've heard how slavery has contributed to the breakup of Black families. Now I read that as of 1960 80% of them consisted of two parents and children. Wow! I have a lot of rethinking to do.

Neely Tucker: well, it DID, of course. one of the interesting bits of research that we didn't have room for in the finished story was about the long-standing issues with the census and minorities. one of the first really substantial studies of black relationships was e. franklin frazier's book, "the negro family in the united states." (title might we a word or two off.) this is in 1939. frazier was one of the first black sociologists to do major work in the field, and one of his (later controversial) findings showed that a very high number of black women who reported being married did not have marriage certificates to show for it. whether that went to common-law marriages, or just poor paperwork, or what have you, it was still an interesting peek beneath the statistics.

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Millersville, Md.: I think it's useless to try to "put the toothpaste back in the tube," i.e., return to the days of stable, 2 parent families. It seems to be a given, esp. in the Black community, that children born to unmarried parents are likely to continue to be the norm. So I think we need to put support systems in place to help those families thrive.

Maybe this is because I am Swedish, where illegitimacy rates are also very high. But, due in large part to available social services, most of these "families" are also very stable and many of the couples eventually marry. It's not unusual to see marriage pictures with the couple's teenage children as attendants. I realize this approach would drive conservatives up the wall, but it seems to be a much more realistic approach than what is trying and failing here.

Neely Tucker: this seems to be a realistic approach to a complicated issue, refreshingly from outside the u.s. echo chamber.

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Washington, D.C.: At one point in the article, you wrote that around 1900, the majority of black kids were born into married families. If my information is correct, this continued to be the case until about 1970. You correctly cited the loss of factory and other industrial work in cities and the accompanying drop in marrigability of large numbers of black men was a big factor. But you failed to mention what many other social scientists say is another cause -- the proliferation of social welfare programs that remove the impetus for the family unit to work together. Do you think this is a significant factor?

Neely Tucker: i think i mentioned the influence of "man in the house" rules, which were in play until, i believe, 1996. the cause you cite is one of many things in the mix, certainly. but johnson's "great society" wasn't just for blacks. it was for poor people across the board, and i didn't see anything in the research (outside of polemics with an ax to grind) that showed why those programs would have a unique affect on black families. but you're right: there is no one answer to the question.

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Washington, D.C.: As a DC native I noticed that in the late 80's and early 90's during the "babies having babies" epidemic that there were a lot of support systems for the mother however the father was left on his own. Do you think that the lack of social service assistance, job training, etc. for the father as contributed to the one parent household? It has always amazed me that the system is quick to retain child support (rightly so) from the father, however nothing is established to assist the father.

Neely Tucker:

this is a good point. the social welfare system in the u.s. dates back to roughly the depression, and was for widows and children. it has maintained that influence ever since; women and children. fathers are scarcely included. the federal government has something like $16 billion in aid to needy famlies; only about $50 million goes to fathers. (across 50 states!)

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Fort Worth, Tex.: Did you yourself grow up without your father?

Neely Tucker:

no. but my father did; i never met the man who gave my family our last name. my father never discussed it. he's an old school kind of guy, and it's not something he would discuss. but i think it certainly hurt him on an emotional level. he can write in and tell me i'm wrong, of course.

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Washington, D.C: Really enjoyed your article. Earlier this year, a black female teacher wrote a piece for Outlook on young black teenagers' attitudes towards marriage and family. She reported that many of the kids viewed marriage as a white institution, and therefore not something they wanted to participate in. Did you encounter opinions like this during your research for this story?

washingtonpost.com: 'Marriage Is For White People' by Joy Jones (Post, March 26, 2006)

Neely Tucker:

william julius wilson published a study 30 years ago that showed young black men were twenty (that's no typo) times more likely than young white men to say they expected to become fathers before marriage. i think the outlook story used a very provocative remark to explore that territory.

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Greensboro, N.C.: It is true that Mr. Wagoner steers away from making excuses, but we have a epidemic of low expectations among our black youth. The relationship between Mr. Wagoner and McDaniels was considered, from his quote, just friends. They never considered marriage, yet she was good enough to have a heavy physical relationship with. That is a major problem to be addressed. The relationship, expressed by him in this article, seemed a little too flippant. Not only does having a relationship with the child important, but viewing the mother as good enough to love and commit to is crucial as well. When a child grows up in a home not seeing this sort of relationship (the good enough to commit to kind) they will likely have a difficult time figuring out what is a good relationship between you and your person of interest, how to treat a women as more than a friend you can "get with" sometimes, and who is good enough to marry. That is crippling to our youth today, not just black men.

More goes into providing a healthy environment for a child than just "being there" for him/her...how do you view the mother or father? Is that person good enough? If not, then that is a good reason to hold off on physical relationships that could cause pregnancy. No protection is guaranteed from pregnancy. As far as the pregnancy being "just one of those things" according to your earlier quote....in this world, our increasingly global world, that is not good enough.

Neely Tucker:

i think the saddest thing tim told me was that he'd never been in love. not with donne, not with anyone. for a 27-year-old human being, that is missing out on the one true great gift of this existence. i think he's lost a number of very important people to him, some to deadly violence, and he's drawn a very close emotional circle around himself: his mom and siblings and zyhir are okay to express love towards. anyone else would be iffy. given his life experience, i could understand that.

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Upper Marlboro, Md.: Some of the previous posts demonstrate what's wrong with our people. It's what makes songs like Fantasia's tribute to baby mamahood popular amongst us. So many of us have fallen into the trap that we now view out-of-wedlock births as a healthy alternative among equals. Or maybe people don't want to feel that their "choice" was a bad one. If, by circumstance, you become a single mother, more power to you if you can make it work. But to dismiss the "correlation" between single parent households and crime and poverty is nonsensical.

Maybe if more single parents expressed to their children how difficult their life has been as a result of their choices (including some regret and shame) maybe their children would not repeat them.

Neely Tucker:

this strikes me as a hard but fair post. i think most kids would benefit, when they reach an appropriate age, from a talk from their parents about their own fears/regrets/triumphs at earlier stages in life. it's like the old adage: the older you get, the smarter your parents get.

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Annapolis, Md.: As a "single" mother, I hate to see these statistics. I think they would be more accurate if they accounted for non-traditional households. I have been in a long-term relationship with my daughter's father for more than a decade. We are unwed but no longer single. This would also assist in the allocation of funds to support services.

Neely Tucker:

the census struggles mightily with this. in the current instance, tim would show up as an "live away" father, even though he sees zyhir several times a week.

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Glenarden, Md.: I grew up in a single parent home-no father present. My mom worked a 12-hour a day job from the time I was age 5 to 18. I was blessed to graduate college, and I now am able to take care of myself. My mom did the best she could, with what she had. It was tough at times when she couldn't go to PTA meetings, I wasn't in a lot of activities during those years. However I still know that you benefit when you have a two parent household a mother, and a father.

Neely Tucker: again, an interesting post, and a voice of experience.

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Washington, D.C.: Very good article. However, in today's society all a high school diploma is going to get for you "maybe" is a job making $7-$10 an hour which is not enough to provide for yourself and/or any dependent(s). We have rapidly moved into a high tech world and clerk and labor jobs are being handled by computers and less and less by humans. Rather, a computer can now handle the job of 4-6 human clerks and we see it in the amount of layoffs and scale back in these kinds of jobs.

Neely Tucker: this is true, and this is exactly what started to happen about 35-40 years ago that was one of the causes of poverty in urban areas today.

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Ann Arbor, Mich.: It used to be that children born out of wedlock were the exception rather than the rule. Now, Black culture seems to embrace out of wedlock births. We cannot blame white people or racism for the decline of the Black family because historical data shows the Black family remained intact from slavery through the Civil Rights Movement. The introduction of welfare as well as our reliance on government handouts and the cultural embrace of ignorance are really to blame for this troubling problem.

Neely Tucker:

agreeing on education: a simple fact in today's america is that if you don't have a college degree (or a REALLY good trade skill) you are going to have a difficult time.

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Neely Tucker:

okay, everyone, thanks for coming. we're a few minutes over as it is. lots of good questions, lots of good debate. this isn't an issue that's going to resolve itself anytime soon. as a final note, i want to say a public "thank you" to tim and donne, for opening up their lives and talking about issues that very few people want to discuss in a public forum. i wish them well, and i hope you do, too.

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