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Tony Dungy Is Right: Troubled Kids Don’t Just Need Better Schools — They Need Fathers

VySky

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I’ve been meaning to read his book. I know he has men’s Bible study videos as well.

But this has been my view too. Some of America’s deepest issues are in part due to lack of fathers in the home.

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When Tony Dungy noted on Monday that the reason so many young boys end up in trouble is “not socioeconomic. It’s not racial. It’s not education,” but because “95 percent of these boys did not grow up with their dad,” leftists were quick to label the former NFL coach a “fascist political prop” for his argument in defense of fatherhood. But I know from personal experience the challenges caused by a neglectful father, and Dungy is right that addressing the decline of invested fathers is key to resolving a myriad of social ills.

Struggling Kids Don't Just Need Better Schools — They Need Fathers

The children we are attempting to educate are an extension of their original educational environment: their families.
thefederalist.com
 
Agreed, more involved fathers would be best.

If not, then a woman is very reasonable to have an abortion if she believes the child would be poorly raised in her care or not be properly supervised to become a good citizen.

Thanks, just one more reason to support a woman's choice.
 

What if the father wants his child to live? Should she be allowed to abort anyway? I’m sure it’s happened.
 
VySky said:
What if the father wants his child to live? Should she be allowed to abort anyway? I’m sure it’s happened.
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Did he go into sleeping with her expecting a child? Did they use birth control? In most cases, no. So why should he have any expectation of having a kid?

Of course she should be allowed to abort...did he know before they slept together that's her decision? Of course he did.
 
Nonsense, kids need a loving parent/parents and a loving, embracing and supportive family beyond that loving parent (grandparents mostly). You are better off with no dad than an asshole dad who does not care.
 

And the woman made a pro life decision by making love with her husband.

Currently there is indeed nothing the man can do.
 
Dads who can provide a decent, positive role model for their sons, sure. But if there is a loving mom and other positive men in the child's life (like uncles, a coach, minister), all is not lost, either.

Funny you'd bring it up...today at the drug store, I saw a llittle guy, maybe 6 or so, walking into the store beside his Dad, hands slid in his pockets, very cool and confident, keeping up with Dad's stride. It pulled my heart strings to see the little guy so proudly acting like his Dad.
 
Well gee Tony Dungy a whole ass demography expert now holy shit.

Also maybe a lot of fatherless kids would have their ****ing dads around if the state wasn't jailing them for dumb shit like having a couple ounces on em. The idea that that's not racial or socioeconomic is absolutely laughable.

Also for the kids that grow up without a dad cause mom and dad had a kid before they were ready to, seems like a hell of an argument to expand access to contraception instead of making it ****ing harder like the right likes to do.
 
didn't dungy's young adult son commit suicide years back, pushing tony out of the coaching ranks?
 
justabubba said:
didn't dungy's young adult son commit suicide years back, pushing tony out of the coaching ranks?
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He still coached for a little while if I recall.
 
VySky said:
He still coached for a little while if I recall.
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it's quite possible i am wrong, but i seem to recall that he 'lost it' after losing his son and soon chose to stop coaching
have seen him mentioned from time to time as a prospective replacement coach, but that has not happened
 
MaryP said:
Dads who can provide a decent, positive role model for their sons, sure. But if there is a loving mom and other positive men in the child's life (like uncles, a coach, minister), all is not lost, either.
Click to expand...
It's a nice sentiment, but it just doesn't seem to work out that way often enough. As a group, the data demonstrating the socio-economic problems of families with absentee fathers is a bit overwhelming at this point. Raising children is a hard and somewhat expensive activity; it's a team sport.
 
I see. Fathers walking away from their obligations are not the problem. Others are to blame.

Furthermore, we don't need a culture that more highly values personal accountability. We need more contraception.

Makes perfect sense. Really.
 
Yep.
- Comprehensive sexual education in public schools
- Easy access to contraceptives through public health
- Paid parental leave/government income support to ease the financial pressures of parenthood
- Access to abortion if still required
- Full gay marriage and adoption rights to maximise the number of stable two-parent homes
- UBI or non means-tested welfare to avoid any perverse incentives to reduce 'household income'
- Not sending people to prison for victimless 'crimes'

These are the sort of public policies which conservatives have always championed, so we know that their concerns over single-parent homes are absolutely sincere and not influenced by the relative rates in different 'racial' demographics whatsoever.
 
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We have been moving toward all of those policies to some degree (or entirely) over the past 60 years and the problem has gotten steadily worse, and especially so in the black community.

Ever stop to think you might be misdiagnosing the problem?
 
NatMorton said:
We have been moving toward all of those policies to some degree (or entirely) over the past 60 years and the problem has gotten steadily worse, and especially so in the black community.

Ever stop to think you might be misdiagnosing the problem?
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What problems do you think have "gotten steadily worse" over sixty years? As far as I can see from some quick Googling, most of the obvious indicators of social wellbeing have either steadily improved over fifty-plus years (education, life expectancy, divorce rates), or improved or remained level over thirty-plus years (crime, poverty, average incomes). Teen pregnancies are at an all-time low, as are overall birth rates; hence despite increasing percentages of unmarried parents, the actual number of children in single-parent homes has declined since the 1990s for black and latino children and since the 2000s for white children.





While birth rates have declined significantly for teenagers and young women, the groups they've increased for are women in their 30s. By implication, many of the increasing fraction of single-parent homes belong to women who've attained some preliminary goals for education and career/financial security and chosen to become single mothers. The potential for even greater financial security in multi-parent households (and not least, the role modelling of conflict and resolution between respectful partners) are surely added benefits in many cases: But claims about the supposed evils of single-parent homes based on aggregate data from past decades and/or including teen pregnancies and 'responsible' shotgun weddings which fall apart after a few years can't be validly applied to current trends.

Conservatives have seemingly done everything in their power to prevent the decline of teen pregnancies, divorces and so on, but despite their best efforts those things have been on the wane, and most metrics of social wellbeing are improving or holding steady.
 
Peter King said:
Nonsense, kids need a loving parent/parents and a loving, embracing and supportive family beyond that loving parent (grandparents mostly). You are better off with no dad than an asshole dad who does not care.
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There might be some truth to the bolded.

As a father, when I see problems with the kids or the family, I always look first to the father. Is he doing his job? Why not? It's his job to provide leadership, foundation, and safety.

If the family has a bad father, it and the kids will flounder . . .
 
Um, at least a 50% increase in the chart you've shown?

BTW, the problem is more out of wedlock births rather than children of divorced parents, which your chart above would include. Take a look at births to single moms over time and tell us what that slope is like.
 
Out of wedlock births doesn't mean absentee fathers. You can co-parent and even co-habitate without getting married.
 
And conservative policy proposals (or, more accurately, opposition and obstructionism) seem specifically tailored to increase the number of out of wedlock births by reducing access to sexual education, contraceptives and abortion. But again, what 'problem'? Virtually no-one says that single-parent households are the go-to ideal, but if women in their 30s who've attained some financial security are deciding to become single parents (as seems likely based on the trends I highlighted) that's a far cry from the much worse outcomes of teen pregnancy and 'responsible' shotgun weddings which fall apart after a few years. The broader metrics of social wellbeing (education, crime, poverty etc.) all seem to confirm that current trends are not the scary bogeyman you apparently want to believe.

Of course you have to believe that things are getting worse, because - as you noted - most social trends in this area have been going the way of common sense rather than conservative dogma.
 
My dad could not care, was never at home, drank excessively, cheated on my mother, was aggressive to her and to us (his children).

Every Sunday night (about the only night he was home really) he had to watch football on the big color television while my, my mom and my sister were sitting in another room watching at a TV that really could not be called a TV (tiny and black and white) so that he could drink beer and watch soccer on TV.

He was an abysmal father and when we were getting ready to refuse going to him on visits (why would we want to see him, the asshole was a piss poor excuse for a father when he was able to see us daily). He only wanted to see us so that he could make the divorce harder for my mother. When the household had to be divided between him and my mother he wanted to get ownership of every piece of toys me and my sister had and even our beds, bicycles and clothes were something he wanted to be included in the property settlement in the divorce. And we had just a few toys and he had no earthly use for our beds. This was all done to hurt my mother for the fact that she had decided to divorce him.

Fathers like that no child needs.
 
Weird how right wingers just can't make the connection between fatherless black children and the cycle of poverty and crime and racial bias in criminal justice that keeps taking away those fathers...
 
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