Lottery Ticket.

Education courses in college can give you a pretty depressing outlook on the future of your child when you are a single parent. Frequently, professors will refer to the students you will one day teach and the situations that they face at home that will make them difficult in class. One of the most common examples of said situation is the student raised by a single mother. Those students will be poor, have bad manners and anger problems, and they will not be able to focus. Chances are that child will be a juvenile deliquent- these are the students we have to look out for.

Hearing these things, day after day, class after class, has made me determined to not only be the exception to that assumption in the raising of my daughter- but to also be the type of teacher that does not made this generalizations and to treat each student with great care and respect. I also plan on treating the parents of these students will the respect that they deserve- as a struggling single mom, I know the frustrations and the struggles and the amount of hardwork (DONE ALONE) to make sure my daughter is raised in a healthy, loving, environment.

With all that said, I am frequently looking for articles about single parenting, especially ones that include statistics. While doing one of my searches I came across a blog post written by John Hawkins for the site http://www.rightwingnews.com/. The article is definitely worth reading, and I will be addressing what I found to be some of the most disturbing snippets and ones that just continue to feed the ignorance that drips over single mothers.

http://www.rightwingnews.com/mt331/2009/04/ann_coulter_on_single_mothers.php

The article begins with Hawkins giving his brief summary on the abilities of single parents. It is his belief that single parents, no matter how well intentioned, will never be able to reach their potential as parents. Marriage is essential and directly linked to success as a parent. Apparently, a home in which both parents cannot stand one another is better than a home with only one parent.

However, as a society, we need to understand: staying in a marriage, even a bad marriage, is better for the children except in the most egregious cases because single parents, even conscientious, well meaning single parents, generally don't do as good a job raising their children as two parent families.

Hawkins justifies his ignoRANT RANT by copying and pasting facts listed in the Ann Coulter book, Guilty. The chapter in which she places all her fun facts is entitled "Victim of a Crime?, Thank a Single Mother." Coulter's attack on single mothers is vicious and unnecessary- it cuts them down swiftly and continues to step all over the pieces that are left. She not only blames single mothers for crime, and dropouts- but for suicides and continued teenage births. Coulter goes so far to blame single mothers for rapists. She does not point a finger at the thousands of fathers that CHOSE to leave- and CHOSE to not be involved- but the single mothers who have to work multiple jobs, and scrap by to make ends meet in order to provide THEIR children with a good life.

Here is the lottery ticket that single mothers are handing their innocent children by choosing to raise them without fathers. .. the strongest predictor of whether a person will end up in prison is that he was raised by a single parent.... Seventy two percent of juvenile murderers and 60 percent of rapists come from single-mother homes. Seventy percent of teenage births, dropouts, suicides, runaways, juvenile delinquents, and child murderers involve children raised by single mothers.... Imagine an America with 70 percent fewer juvenile delinquents, 70 percent fewer teenage births, 63 to 70 percent fewer teenage suicides and 70 percent to 90 percent fewer runaways and you will appreciate what the sainted single mothers have accomplished.

Coulter continues her rant by discussing how children who are put up for adoption do not have the problems that children raised by single mothers do. Suggesting heavily, that the solution to the problems facing America is for the single mothers to "do the right thing" and give their children up.

...Not surprisingly, unwed mothers who care enough to give their children up for adoption also come overwhelmingly from responsible backgrounds. You will note that we do not read about adopted children filling up the prisons, welfare rolls, and runaway shelters. Adopted children are no worse off-- and, indeed, are generally better off than non-adopted children.

Hawkins selects several other quotes from Coulter's book, some of which point out the burden single mothers put on tax payers, statistics about how unwed mothers are more likely to be victims of domestic violence that the wonderful married woman, and that unwed mothers are less likely to marry than other single women. I won't include this quotes, but I found them to be even more proof of the ignorant attitude of many conservatives, as well as Americans in general. As I was reading I wondered if Ann Coulter, or John Hawkins in his analysis of this work thought to ask WHY? Why would unwed mothers be more likely to the victims of domestic violence? BECAUSE they CHOSE not to marry the person that was causing them this pain- they chose to leave that relationship and raise their children ALONE to avoid having their INNOCENT children witness the abuse at the hands of their father. They made a brave and difficult decision, to love their children with everything they have, to sacrifice dreams, to build a life that is worth living!