Single Moms

Single moms . . . good? bad? indifferent?

Single moms . . . increasing incidence? decreasing incidence? the same ?

According to the Census Bureau, the number of children living with two parents has dropped since 1968, while the percentage living with their mother only, has doubled.

“About 7.6 million (11%) children lived with their mother only in 1968 compared to 15.3 million (21%) in 2020,” the Bureau found.

So what ?

Brad Wilcox, a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies and the director of the University of Virginia’s National Marriage Project, warned that the trend could spell disaster if not reversed.

He cited an essay he wrote for Slate, in which he pointed out that “boys raised in a single-parent household were more than twice as likely to be incarcerated, compared with boys raised in an intact, married home, even after controlling for differences in parental income, education, race, and ethnicity.”

“Of course, many kids raised by single moms do just fine,” Wilcox added. “I was raised by a single mom.”

“This is bad news because kids raised by single mothers are markedly more likely to grow up poor, fail in school, be depressed, and end up incarcerated,” Wilcox tweeted. 

Again from the Census Bureau: 

“Monitoring these trends is important because children’s living arrangements can have implications for children’s outcomes, such as academic achievements, internalizing problems (e.g., depression and anxiety), and externalizing problems (e.g., anger and aggression).”

But why should this be the case?

Is there any similarities in other animal species?

I recently read an article that started off by describing a past problem at Pilanesberg National Park in South Africa. It was written by a Will Alexander, of whom I am not familiar, but from the photo adjacent to his article, he is a black African American.

Pilanesberg National Park, or Pilanesberg Game Reserve as it is often called, is located in the Bojanala Region, within the North West Province and relatively near Johannesburg, South Africa.

I usually do not do this, but because I found Mr. Alexander’s story about Pilanesberg Park so interesting, most of the following is copied word for word from his piece:

“Years ago, South Africa’s Pilanesberg Park had big trouble. Tons of it. Someone went on a killing spree of its prized white rhinos. Thirty-nine of the 5-ton ungulates were mysteriously turning up dead around the park. That was 10 percent of the park’s endangered rhino population.

“A break came in the case when staff saw a video of young elephants terrorizing tourists. Others witnessed elephants taunting and bullying rhinos for hours.  After tracking the herds, chronicling their behavior, and developing rap sheets on the most aggressive ones, rangers found their killers: gangs of teen male elephants.”

But why?

“The problem went back two decades. Kruger National Park, half the size of Switzerland, was dangerously overpopulated with elephants. Adult males were too big to relocate, so the excruciating decision was made to shoot them and move the children and some of their mothers to other parks.”

This is where Pilanesberg National Park enters the picture as it received some of these young elephants. Mr. Alexander goes on describe a male elephant hormone called “musth,” which has a lot to do with aggressive male adolescent aggressive behavior, and must be tempered.

Alexander continues:

“But what seemed like a good idea at the time severely disrupted the delicate balance of life in elephant society. It triggered a disaster. Young elephant herds, deprived of adult male leadership, were forced into an extremely destabilized childhood that turned deadly in their teens.

“ ‘You don’t want to believe that an elephant is capable of killing a rhino,’ said Gus Van Dyk, the Pilansburg’s field ecologist. ‘What’s different is they don’t have a father,’ said Dyk. ‘I think everyone needs a role model, and these elephants that left the herd had no role model and had no idea of what appropriate elephant behavior was’.

“‘Like juvenile delinquents from urban jungles, they’ve grown up without role models,” said journalist Bob Simon, who reported on the story for 60 Minutes in 1999.

“To solve Pilanesberg’s problem, adult male elephants were brought back to the park on specially designed trucks emblazoned with the words: ‘We’re on our way to kick butt in the Pilanesberg.’ And that’s what happened.  The adult males established a new hierarchy, and the rhino killings stopped.  Simon called it the ‘biggest Big Brother Program in the world.’”

Now although it would be interesting to go to Pilanesberg National Park, the reality is that I will never see it in person. Sure I like wild animals, and this story is interesting, but is what happened in Pilanesberg Park many years ago, relevant to anything in our world today? 

Hmmm!

I will close with a 17th Century English Proverb:

“One father is more than a hundred schoolmasters.”