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"The statistics would have you believe the black family is an endangered species.
The New York Times reported Tuesday that for what experts say may be the first time, a majority of American women -- 51 percent -- are living without a husband. The number for black women is even higher -- 70 percent. Coupled with statistics that say the out-of-wedlock birthrate is also about 70 percent, there is an image that suggests, for whatever reason, that black Americans have abandoned traditional family arrangements.
Numbers, however, do not tell the whole story.
“Statements on the decline of the black family and its imminent demise are greatly exaggerated,” said Faye Wattleton, president of the Center for the Advancement of Women and a longtime advocate for reproductive rights and health.
“You have to look at the historical trajectory of the black community,” Wattleton told BlackAmericaWeb.com. “The structure of the family has been disrupted in profound ways in a historical context ever since we came to this country ... black women have been in a position of raising families and being head of the household historically.”
What’s missing for many black families, Wattleton said, is the traditional extended family, the network of relatives who provided a communal environment for families. Just as blacks migrated from the south to the north in the early to mid-20th century in search of economic opportunity and became physically estranged from family, today’s mobile society continues to keep black families separated from the support of extended family.
To characterize subsequent family separations in the black community as a pathology, Wattleton said, “is really the wrong perspective to take on this.”
Societal inequities also affect outcomes for many black families, Wattleton said, noting that schools in many communities are deficient, and when black men do get in trouble with the law their sentences are disproportionately longer than for their white counterparts and job opportunities are inadequate as well.
“I think this traditional family context is an artifact of someone’s imagination,” Wattleton said. “We’ve always had different constellations of family structures.”
“We need to probe the stats more,” said David Campt, author of “The Little Book of Dialogue,” a consultant on diversity and family issues. “The numbers say there are only so many women with long-term relationships, but there are a whole bunch of families not in a formal family structure,” including stepparents, domestic partners who never married but live in nuclear family structures and relatives -- particularly grandparents -- who rear the children.
The main criteria, should be “what is the degree to which the child is exposed to adults who will help usher them into teenhood and adulthood; what’s going on with those adults and (fostering) consistent relationships that work to nurture us,” Campt told BlackAmericaWeb.com. “We have always been more of a communal people.”
However, “these kinds of connections are increasingly difficult to create and maintain,” said Alvin Poussaint, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and an expert on media images and the needs of children and families.
The burden on single mothers particularly, Poussaint told BlackAmericaWeb.com, is enormous.
“There is a lot of strain if they have to do it all alone. Support is needed from their families; otherwise, a lot of women will develop a lot of the signs of stress and strain,” he said.
It’s easy to become discouraged when one considers that 800,000 to 1 million black men are imprisoned, and many of them are already fathers. “How any were already never with the children, estranged from the mother?” Poussaint said. And it’s difficult, he added, for parents to model good behavior for their children if they themselves were victims of bad parenting.
In the absence of kinship relationships, Poussaint said, programs that promote the involvement of fathers or that provide support for working parents become increasingly important.
“Boys & Girls Clubs, settlement houses, YMCA, Big Brothers/Big Sisters become essential,” he said.
The image of what constitutes a family, fostered by television, music and other media, have often put undue pressure on young black adults, particularly young men, who sometimes have been made to feel they’re not up to the task of marriage and family.
“We certainly face a lot of pressures and always have pressures on black men to take care of their families,” Campt said. “People don’t want to get married because they can’t provide or have the wherewithal” to take care of their families economically.
And while men have the pressure of living up to the image of being the provider, women often feel torn between being independent and able to make a living and expecting to have a man provide for them. It’s a formula almost guaranteed to have black men and women arguing over issues of commitment and support.
“In the face of all these fears that make us ready to battle, we have to tone down the rhetoric,” Campt said.
He suggests that churches and fraternal organizations can provide the forums to help men and women to talk in collective venues with each other besides listening to relationship experts. Campt conducts workshops with parents and their children to discuss expectations at every stage of life.
“We need a new narrative or script about what we expect. We don’t have a mechanism for talking to each other. We need to talk to each other about what kind of families we’re trying to create,” said Campt, who conducts workshops with parents and children.
Poussaint said society in general and women in particular also need to be open to creative arrangements that provide support for single parents.
“Take two single mothers and pair them up together,” Poussaint said, “I’m not talking about a lesbian relationship, but to help each other economically, almost like a couple, logistically saying we can we help each other because we will be two people caring for these kids.
“I think the mindset, values and orientation of America doesn’t let them think that way.”
Poussaint added that discussions between couples, parents and children need to begin early and happen often to help families find every opportunity to grow and succeed.
And the discussion goes on for years, said Colin and Sheryl Wiseman, of Oxon Hill, Md., who have been married for 32 years.
Their longevity isn’t due to luck, the Wisemans told BlackAmericaWeb.com. They married young -- he was 18 and she was 16 -- with a baby on the way and weathered a couple of separations. What holds them together, the couple said, was an underlying friendship and a reexamination of what they expected from marriage and whether those expectations could be met by one another.
Colin Wiseman went into the Navy after high school because, he said, the military offered him a way to support his family. The frequent separations helped, he said.
“In our case, the Navy did a lot in terms of absence. It was a relief whenever I would have to do deployments,” Wiseman said. “I had time to think about my relationship.”
Money was tight, and finances were often a sore point for the couple. After the Navy, Wiseman said he would work several jobs “to make sure my family had what they wanted -- not what they needed, what they wanted.”
There are times, he said, when it feels that he gave a lot more to his family than he got in return, but “as a man, that’s what you do. You do the things that you have to do so your family can have. But what I do get is I have my pride that my family has it. They’ve done okay, and the reason is because of my efforts.”
Sheryl Wiseman said that as a young bride, she often allowed herself to be swayed by girlfriends who would try to tell her how to run her relationship. Some of them, the couple said, were deliberately trying to drive wedges between the Wisemans.
“We split up several times because of someone who told me something I shouldn’t have been listening to anyway,” Sheryl Wiseman said.
“And it was my fault because I let it happen,” her husband added.
Now that their two daughters are grown and married, the Wisemans said they offer advice if their daughters want it, but they are taking the opportunity to reevaluate and rekindle their own relationship.
“We were friends, and we had to become friends again,” Sheryl Wiseman said.
“And lovers,” said Colin Wiseman. “They call it empty-nest syndrome, but that’s for a very brief moment, immediately followed by husband and wife sitting together in quiet moments and trying to decide whether you even like each other anymore. You have to decide what you want to do to become lovers again.”
“And it’s not a physical thing,” Sheryl Wiseman said. “It’s a lot more to being lovers then the physical act of loving. It’s how much do I really love you.”
The Wisemans said marriage is organic and that it requires constant care and feeding. Young couples thinking about marriage, they said, should focus on getting their careers on track and plan slowly.
“If it’s right, it will happen,” Colin Wiseman said. “If it’s not right, it could happen. You can either get married or marriage can happen to you.”
If he could do anything differently, Wiseman said, it would have been to work less and spend more time with his oldest daughter. His younger daughter got more of his time, he said, and he saw it pay off in terms of building her self-confidence and her academic performance in school. His older daughter, he said, understands that her father was often away working and trying to build a future for the family, but there is still a sense that she felt that she missed something by not seeing him more frequently.
Nikki Bannister, a staff writer for the Kentucky New Era in Hopkinsville, Ky., said her father worked for McDonnell Douglas and traveled frequently for work. She and her three brothers were born in Detroit, but by high school, Bannister was living in rural Louisiana and felt like a fish out of water. Even though her mother, a school librarian, was a constant figure, Bannister and her siblings missed their father.
“He missed my (high school) graduation, my Navy graduation, my youngest brother’s graduation. We had our grandfather but he could only do so much,” Bannister said. “When my dad finally retired five or six years ago, it’s too late to raise your kids; you really don’t know what’s going on.”
Bannister, 32, told BlackAmericaWeb.com that she has been engaged three times, “and I walked away each time. I wasn’t ready.”
In addition, as a sports reporter, Bannister said, many men don’t understand the weird hours she works covering games. “Guys would want to know, ‘Why are you not available at 10, 11 o’clock on Saturday night?’ Well, the game doesn’t end when you walk out of the stadium.”
She said for now, she would rather focus on her career and not get entangled with the expectations that men and women bring to the table in relationships.
Too many women, she said, wait to be spoiled instead of treating themselves in the manner to which they would like to become accustomed. “They are willing to be Cinderella for the rest of their lives.”
Conversation early and often is important to help children develop a sense of family and what their expectations and value systems are when it comes to developing relationships.
“There was a lot of bull in music and movies about what a real relationship is,” said Poussaint, adding that the best advice couples can get when it comes to relationships is that they should look for people “who actually share a lot of interests, a person who cares about your well-being and welfare.”
It’s important “if people really can talk and communicate and understand each other," Pouissant said. "What are the things they fight about? Do they have shared values for the future? What do they want to achieve and will they stand behind each other getting it? What other things do they enjoy besides sex, parties and movies?”
“It’s not all about fun," he said. "It’s about responsibility.”
blackamericaweb.com/site.aspx/bawnews/stateof/soba2007part4119
"The statistics would have you believe the black family is an endangered species.
The New York Times reported Tuesday that for what experts say may be the first time, a majority of American women -- 51 percent -- are living without a husband. The number for black women is even higher -- 70 percent. Coupled with statistics that say the out-of-wedlock birthrate is also about 70 percent, there is an image that suggests, for whatever reason, that black Americans have abandoned traditional family arrangements.
Numbers, however, do not tell the whole story.
“Statements on the decline of the black family and its imminent demise are greatly exaggerated,” said Faye Wattleton, president of the Center for the Advancement of Women and a longtime advocate for reproductive rights and health.
“You have to look at the historical trajectory of the black community,” Wattleton told BlackAmericaWeb.com. “The structure of the family has been disrupted in profound ways in a historical context ever since we came to this country ... black women have been in a position of raising families and being head of the household historically.”
What’s missing for many black families, Wattleton said, is the traditional extended family, the network of relatives who provided a communal environment for families. Just as blacks migrated from the south to the north in the early to mid-20th century in search of economic opportunity and became physically estranged from family, today’s mobile society continues to keep black families separated from the support of extended family.
To characterize subsequent family separations in the black community as a pathology, Wattleton said, “is really the wrong perspective to take on this.”
Societal inequities also affect outcomes for many black families, Wattleton said, noting that schools in many communities are deficient, and when black men do get in trouble with the law their sentences are disproportionately longer than for their white counterparts and job opportunities are inadequate as well.
“I think this traditional family context is an artifact of someone’s imagination,” Wattleton said. “We’ve always had different constellations of family structures.”
“We need to probe the stats more,” said David Campt, author of “The Little Book of Dialogue,” a consultant on diversity and family issues. “The numbers say there are only so many women with long-term relationships, but there are a whole bunch of families not in a formal family structure,” including stepparents, domestic partners who never married but live in nuclear family structures and relatives -- particularly grandparents -- who rear the children.
The main criteria, should be “what is the degree to which the child is exposed to adults who will help usher them into teenhood and adulthood; what’s going on with those adults and (fostering) consistent relationships that work to nurture us,” Campt told BlackAmericaWeb.com. “We have always been more of a communal people.”
However, “these kinds of connections are increasingly difficult to create and maintain,” said Alvin Poussaint, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and an expert on media images and the needs of children and families.
The burden on single mothers particularly, Poussaint told BlackAmericaWeb.com, is enormous.
“There is a lot of strain if they have to do it all alone. Support is needed from their families; otherwise, a lot of women will develop a lot of the signs of stress and strain,” he said.
It’s easy to become discouraged when one considers that 800,000 to 1 million black men are imprisoned, and many of them are already fathers. “How any were already never with the children, estranged from the mother?” Poussaint said. And it’s difficult, he added, for parents to model good behavior for their children if they themselves were victims of bad parenting.
In the absence of kinship relationships, Poussaint said, programs that promote the involvement of fathers or that provide support for working parents become increasingly important.
“Boys & Girls Clubs, settlement houses, YMCA, Big Brothers/Big Sisters become essential,” he said.
The image of what constitutes a family, fostered by television, music and other media, have often put undue pressure on young black adults, particularly young men, who sometimes have been made to feel they’re not up to the task of marriage and family.
“We certainly face a lot of pressures and always have pressures on black men to take care of their families,” Campt said. “People don’t want to get married because they can’t provide or have the wherewithal” to take care of their families economically.
And while men have the pressure of living up to the image of being the provider, women often feel torn between being independent and able to make a living and expecting to have a man provide for them. It’s a formula almost guaranteed to have black men and women arguing over issues of commitment and support.
“In the face of all these fears that make us ready to battle, we have to tone down the rhetoric,” Campt said.
He suggests that churches and fraternal organizations can provide the forums to help men and women to talk in collective venues with each other besides listening to relationship experts. Campt conducts workshops with parents and their children to discuss expectations at every stage of life.
“We need a new narrative or script about what we expect. We don’t have a mechanism for talking to each other. We need to talk to each other about what kind of families we’re trying to create,” said Campt, who conducts workshops with parents and children.
Poussaint said society in general and women in particular also need to be open to creative arrangements that provide support for single parents.
“Take two single mothers and pair them up together,” Poussaint said, “I’m not talking about a lesbian relationship, but to help each other economically, almost like a couple, logistically saying we can we help each other because we will be two people caring for these kids.
“I think the mindset, values and orientation of America doesn’t let them think that way.”
Poussaint added that discussions between couples, parents and children need to begin early and happen often to help families find every opportunity to grow and succeed.
And the discussion goes on for years, said Colin and Sheryl Wiseman, of Oxon Hill, Md., who have been married for 32 years.
Their longevity isn’t due to luck, the Wisemans told BlackAmericaWeb.com. They married young -- he was 18 and she was 16 -- with a baby on the way and weathered a couple of separations. What holds them together, the couple said, was an underlying friendship and a reexamination of what they expected from marriage and whether those expectations could be met by one another.
Colin Wiseman went into the Navy after high school because, he said, the military offered him a way to support his family. The frequent separations helped, he said.
“In our case, the Navy did a lot in terms of absence. It was a relief whenever I would have to do deployments,” Wiseman said. “I had time to think about my relationship.”
Money was tight, and finances were often a sore point for the couple. After the Navy, Wiseman said he would work several jobs “to make sure my family had what they wanted -- not what they needed, what they wanted.”
There are times, he said, when it feels that he gave a lot more to his family than he got in return, but “as a man, that’s what you do. You do the things that you have to do so your family can have. But what I do get is I have my pride that my family has it. They’ve done okay, and the reason is because of my efforts.”
Sheryl Wiseman said that as a young bride, she often allowed herself to be swayed by girlfriends who would try to tell her how to run her relationship. Some of them, the couple said, were deliberately trying to drive wedges between the Wisemans.
“We split up several times because of someone who told me something I shouldn’t have been listening to anyway,” Sheryl Wiseman said.
“And it was my fault because I let it happen,” her husband added.
Now that their two daughters are grown and married, the Wisemans said they offer advice if their daughters want it, but they are taking the opportunity to reevaluate and rekindle their own relationship.
“We were friends, and we had to become friends again,” Sheryl Wiseman said.
“And lovers,” said Colin Wiseman. “They call it empty-nest syndrome, but that’s for a very brief moment, immediately followed by husband and wife sitting together in quiet moments and trying to decide whether you even like each other anymore. You have to decide what you want to do to become lovers again.”
“And it’s not a physical thing,” Sheryl Wiseman said. “It’s a lot more to being lovers then the physical act of loving. It’s how much do I really love you.”
The Wisemans said marriage is organic and that it requires constant care and feeding. Young couples thinking about marriage, they said, should focus on getting their careers on track and plan slowly.
“If it’s right, it will happen,” Colin Wiseman said. “If it’s not right, it could happen. You can either get married or marriage can happen to you.”
If he could do anything differently, Wiseman said, it would have been to work less and spend more time with his oldest daughter. His younger daughter got more of his time, he said, and he saw it pay off in terms of building her self-confidence and her academic performance in school. His older daughter, he said, understands that her father was often away working and trying to build a future for the family, but there is still a sense that she felt that she missed something by not seeing him more frequently.
Nikki Bannister, a staff writer for the Kentucky New Era in Hopkinsville, Ky., said her father worked for McDonnell Douglas and traveled frequently for work. She and her three brothers were born in Detroit, but by high school, Bannister was living in rural Louisiana and felt like a fish out of water. Even though her mother, a school librarian, was a constant figure, Bannister and her siblings missed their father.
“He missed my (high school) graduation, my Navy graduation, my youngest brother’s graduation. We had our grandfather but he could only do so much,” Bannister said. “When my dad finally retired five or six years ago, it’s too late to raise your kids; you really don’t know what’s going on.”
Bannister, 32, told BlackAmericaWeb.com that she has been engaged three times, “and I walked away each time. I wasn’t ready.”
In addition, as a sports reporter, Bannister said, many men don’t understand the weird hours she works covering games. “Guys would want to know, ‘Why are you not available at 10, 11 o’clock on Saturday night?’ Well, the game doesn’t end when you walk out of the stadium.”
She said for now, she would rather focus on her career and not get entangled with the expectations that men and women bring to the table in relationships.
Too many women, she said, wait to be spoiled instead of treating themselves in the manner to which they would like to become accustomed. “They are willing to be Cinderella for the rest of their lives.”
Conversation early and often is important to help children develop a sense of family and what their expectations and value systems are when it comes to developing relationships.
“There was a lot of bull in music and movies about what a real relationship is,” said Poussaint, adding that the best advice couples can get when it comes to relationships is that they should look for people “who actually share a lot of interests, a person who cares about your well-being and welfare.”
It’s important “if people really can talk and communicate and understand each other," Pouissant said. "What are the things they fight about? Do they have shared values for the future? What do they want to achieve and will they stand behind each other getting it? What other things do they enjoy besides sex, parties and movies?”
“It’s not all about fun," he said. "It’s about responsibility.”
blackamericaweb.com/site.aspx/bawnews/stateof/soba2007part4119
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