Equal opportunity?

And why are so many children “less affluent?” One important reason is the number that are born to single mothers — 41 percent up from 17 percent three or four decades ago — 4 percent in 1960. According to “Child Trends,” a Washington research group, less than 10 percent of these births are to college-educated women. For women (and girls) with high school degrees or less, that figure is nearly 60 percent. Many of these babies arrive because of indifference and ignorance and because their mother’s lifestyle is so distorted and unhealthy that, to them, a pregnancy is just a result of her irresponsibility that will be dealt with later. As Peter Edelman wrote in his book, “So Rich, So Poor”: “The two biggest factors in the story of poverty in the last 40 years are the change in the American economy and the significant increase in the number of families headed by single mothers.”

The less “affluent” are more likely to have lived with physical, psychological or emotional deprivation and to have become disheartened and/or cynical. They obviously give no thought to how their behavior may affect others, including future offspring (One sad example of this is a report recently that the great increase in the number of babies born addicted to painkillers like OxyContin). Then there are those who have heard from the pope that using contraceptives is a sin and who obviously have not learned from anyone else that having a child that cannot be cared for adequately is a much greater “sin.”

As a result, many children born under such circumstances have a couple of strikes against them. Besides the inability of their parents to support them adequately, the parents and their children are more likely to be malnourished, compromised by drugs and/or alcohol or chemicals in their environment. Our major social institutions, especially the family and the schools, need to be adequately supported by government so their lives can be improved.

All social institutions have an important responsibility to drum into the heads of our youth that it isn’t “cool” to casually procreate. And they must emphasize the terrific responsibility that raising a child entails. And all parents must learn that it is their duty to do their best to give their children the kind of love and support they need so they believe in themselves, develop healthy values and look optimistically to the future.

As Kevin Skelly, superintendent of the San Mateo Union High School District, wrote in his guest perspective in our Daily Journal April 5: “Perhaps our society needs to think a bit less about its young people’s accomplishments and more about how they are woven into our families, our schools and our communities. Because that’s from where their strength and ours, will come.”  

When we deprive children physically, emotionally and/or intellectually, we are creating dysfunction that will come back to haunt us. A government focused on increasing the advantages of the wealthy is destined to increase the gap between the “more affluent” and “less affluent” to the point of serious dysfunction and unrest. The concept of equal opportunity will evaporate. Our inability and/or unwillingness to see how our decisions and actions today will affect tomorrow, plus our cultural worship of power, wealth and celebrity is the outcome of the collapse of intelligence and integrity and the antithesis of wisdom.

“Political candidates will have to spend less time trying to exploit class divisions and more time trying to remedy them — less time calling their opponents out-of-touch elitists, and more time to come up with agendas that address the problem. It is politically tough to do that, but the alternative is national suicide.” — Brooks.

Remember, as we were reminded by the “Thought for the Day” feature in our Journal April 7: “The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world it leaves to its children.” — Deitrich Bonhoeffer.

Since 1984, Dorothy Dimitre has written more than 1,000 columns for various local newspapers. Her email address is gramsd@aceweb.com.