Morality pays off
I was at the PU campus the other day and picked up a copy of the Princeton Alumni Weekly. In it was an article, Encouraging two-parent households that says (emphasis mine)

Noting that marriage correlates with higher earnings for each parent, Brookings fellow Isabel Sawhill said, “If we could get back to where our society was 25 years ago, the child poverty rate would drop by 3 or 4 percentage points.”

Many misguided government interventions over the past 40 years have led to the current state of things, as you can see from Kay S. Hymowitz’s City Journal article on Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Department of Labor report warning that the ghetto family was in disarray, from 40 years ago

More than most social scientists, Moynihan, steeped in history and anthropology, understood what families do. They “shape their children’s character and ability,” he wrote. “By and large, adult conduct in society is learned as a child.” What children learned in the “disorganized home[s]” of the ghetto, as he described through his forest of graphs, was that adults do not finish school, get jobs, or, in the case of men, take care of their children or obey the law. Marriage, on the other hand, provides a “stable home” for children to learn common virtues. Implicit in Moynihan’s analysis was that marriage orients men and women toward the future, asking them not just to commit to each other but to plan, to earn, to save, and to devote themselves to advancing their children’s prospects. Single mothers in the ghetto, on the other hand, tended to drift into pregnancy, often more than once and by more than one man, and to float through the chaos around them. Such mothers are unlikely to “shape their children’s character and ability” in ways that lead to upward mobility. Separate and unequal families, in other words, meant that blacks would have their liberty, but that they would be strangers to equality. Hence Moynihan’s conclusion: “a national effort towards the problems of Negro Americans must be directed towards the question of family structure.”

The PU article talked about the second issue of The Future of Children report of the Brookings Institution and the Woodrow Wilson School titled, Marriage and Child Well-Being. Just as Sen. Moynihan predicted, the report states,

The decline in two-parent families since 1960 has been closely linked with a rise in child poverty, primarily because poverty rates are far higher in single-mother families than in two-parent families. The post-1960 changes in marriage and family formation also appear to be depriving children of such documented benefits of marriage as better physical and emotional health and greater socioeconomic attainment.

All this converges with what John at Sigmund, Carl, and Alfred and The Anchoress have been posting on prudery and morality.

As SC&A point out,

The issues our kids face today aren’t only about sex, AIDS, or other STD’s — there are issues of and about morality, family, and values

In another post, Mamacita explains what she had to deal with when she was teaching middle school:

Unpopular girls became suddenly popular. Early-developing boys were chased down the halls and solicited. It was sick. A time or two someone was actually caught in the act, but our principal had a hard time believing such things could happen at that age, and we had a really difficult time convincing her that yes, it was happening two or three dozen times a day. Nothing was ever done, because ‘the teacher must have just misinterpreted the situation and assumed the worst.’
Yes, it happened like that over and over. The parents were our worst problem, because they simply refused to believe their innocent child could possibly do that, and they became furious at the implication.

And the middle school kids were giving, and getting, blowjobs all day.

When something like that becomes ‘cool,’, the ‘thing to do,’ because ‘everybody’s doing it,’ then it’s hard to explain to a kid that blowjobs are not the way to go at age thirteen. At thirteen, fourteen, hormones are overflowing and overwhelming, and there are no legitimate outlets. And then suddenly, there is one. And nobody gets pregnant, either. STD’s? VD? Not taught. Against community standards.

Schools often do not have any kind of sex talk for kids this age. Parents refuse to believe it could ever be true. Communities are up in arms at the very thought. Teachers are helpless. And the students are giving and getting blowjobs in the bathrooms all day.

What is the solution? I don’t know. Parents have to work. Kids are going to watch whatever they can get by with. We did. They do.

As The Anchoress points out,

All of it comes back to the recurring theme of what the “enlightened” generation is all about – the utter devaluation of anything that has formerly been deemed as “sacred,” including human life, itself. And the strange mindset that suggests that a child’s reasoning is more credible than an adult’s.

The same strange mindset, as The Anchoress calls it, ignores the legal implications of teen sex. As you can read in in this chart, except for Hawaii and South Carolina, sex with a person under the age of 16 is considered statutory rape anywhere in this country; in many states the age of consent is 17 or 18, and often same-sex sex is illegal. In a legal sense, non-abstinence among minors is against the law.

The reason why The Boy Scouts of America has a no-homosexual policy is that the Scouts is an organization that recognizes the fact that many, many teens are not ready for sex, and aims to provide opprotunities for young men to enjoy activities that promote their individual growth and development outside a sexual context.

Read Heather Mac Donald‘s article,

The Times notes nonchalantly that the gay cruisers ogle the male softball players who change their shirts outside their cars. Neanderthal readers may ask: And what about the boy ballplayers? Are they ogled, too? And if so, tell me again why we should risk gay Boy Scout leaders? But such benighted readers—if one can even imagine such thinking—are not worth the Times’s worrying about.

Considering that the latest nationwide sex survey found that only 2 percent of men self-identify as homosexual, the Scouts are right to stay within their no-sex policy. I have known adult gay men in loving, committed, exclusive relationships that would make good Scout leaders, but the question remains: Children as young as 11 can join the BSA. As a parent, would you expect chastity and restraint from gay teen Scouts, considering that our entire society doesn’t expect chastity and restraint from anyone of any age?

It behooves us as parents to closely watch what activities our children are involved with. It is up to us not to abrogate out our obligations. Otherwise, there’s hell to pay.

And it all comes down to morality.