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Mothers and Sons How does the son of a single mother become a successful man? It’s not easy, if you listen to a number of voices from across the political and social spectrum. In independent filmmaker John Singleton’s 1991 Boyz in the Hood, ten-year-old Tre’s mother, played by Angela Basset, brings her son to live with his father after he gets into trouble at school; she fears that she will be unable to keep him from joining a gang. “I can’t teach him how to be a man,” she tells his father, played by Laurence Fishburne . “That’s your job.” “Single-parent families are the source of the saddest and most destructive part of our society’s two nations,” says sociologist James Q. Wilson in his widely reviewed book The Marriage Problem (131). “The children of single moms,” he says, “are more likely than those of two-parent families to be abused, to drop out of or be expelled from school, to become juvenile delinquents, to take drugs, and to commit adult crimes” (8). Without fathers at home, sons become unruly: “Fathers are part of the first line of defense of a family, guarding their wives and children from unsavory lures and dangerous predators. The police are a backup force when adult protection is inadequate. But without a father, the family is less safe and the streets more threatening. Energetic, sexually active, unsupervised males fill the streets; many have impregnated women but few have married them.” In the parenting section at the mega-bookstores, advice books on how to cope with divorce worry that boys will not develop “normally” if they grow up only with their mothers. Says Evelyn Bassoff in Between Mothers and Sons: The Making of Vital and Loving Men: “The most obvious explanation for the poorer adjustment of older boys who are raised exclusively by their mothers is the absence of a viable connection to their fathers . Mothers can nurture, teach, discipline, and provide financially for their sons, but they cannot, of course, model male behavior” (117). She 5 173 recounts a story initially told by Robert Bly about a boy named Kevin whose parents divorced when he was twelve; he lived with his mother. Kevin had a dream about running with a pack of “she-wolves” through a forest; when they came to a riverbank, they all looked in the water and saw their faces. “But when Keith looked in the water, he saw no face at all.” Bassoff quotes Bly: “When women, even women with the best intentions , bring up a boy alone, he may in some way have no male face, or he may have no face at all” (118). I’m playing catch in the street with seven-year-old Alex. I throw balls high into the air, over his shoulder, grounders to his right and left. He scrambles all over, scooping them up, squeezing his glove, firing the ball back. A neighbor, an older man who has surely seen us play before, stops to watch us. “Who taught that boy how to play?” he asks. The very visibility of mothers raising children alone prompts a denial, one especially vehement for mothers of sons, since mothers of daughters maintain the traditional assumptions about child development. This may be more true for adults, less so for children who are slower to rely on gender stereotypes. Even at twelve, Alex’s friends are ready to accept me on their basketball team. I’m helping coach an informal league and often play in the full-court scrimmages, as does the male coach, father of another player. After a few outings in which I prove myself, the boys call out when teams are being chosen: “We want Alex’s mom on our team!” They say nothing about the other coach, one boy’s father, who tires quickly and doesn’t have my prowess with the left hand. As the oft-cited statistic goes, one in two marriages in the United States ends in divorce. In about 90 percent of divorces, mothers are awarded either sole or primary residential custody of the child(ren). What is produced is a family structure that both diverges from and relies on the nuclear family, as mothers are awarded custody precisely because they have always been the primary caregivers. Mothers also bear the burden, then, of the conservative backlash against the breakdown of the nuclear family norm, for it becomes our responsibility to prove that divorce...

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