Single parents

If it is true that adult resilience can be largely predicted by how lovable mothers think their children are when they are two, then it should be fairly obvious why single parent homes do so poorly.  Children feel everything their mother feels, and if she is feeling anxious, lonely, angry, sad, she is not loving that child: specifically, she is not making it feel lovable.

It may or may not be the case that “there needs to be a man in the house”, but there definitely needs to be love, safety, and attention.  Who is a teenage mother living in poverty in a dangerous neighborhood?  Well, she is a saint if she is fully available emotionally, particularly when her own mother never modeled the behaviors she now needs to be showing her own child.

Humanity is not clay.  Our DNA, the hard wiring of our brains, our entire instinctual complex, is not something that can be molded like clay.  It cannot be overthrown overnight through any amount of violence generated by emotionally retarded, petty, arrogant, and blind intellectuals.

We have to work with who we ARE, not who it is preferable to believe we are.  Public policy has to be grounded in sanity, and the assumption that most people will pursue their own self interest, if they can perceive it, and that living productive, creative, engaged lives is and should be the goal.