Today’s post will generate a lot of controversy but it is discussion that I think is way overdue. The question is can a woman raise a male child to become a “successful” man alone? Now of course the knee jerk reaction will be a resounding yes and there will be story after story of how it was and is being done. I applaud any and all single mothers that are raising young men alone. I pray for you daily. The question remains, is it possible for a woman, a single woman to raise a man on a consistent basis? The reason for this question stated this way is because of the numbers of young black men being raised by single mothers. Has this been positive for Black people or negative?
Due to the diverse myriad of information and scenarios, I am not going to try to answer this question in one post. I plan to continue this series periodically so that we are able to examine as much data and empirical evidence as we can. I am going to be proposing some controversial steps and ideas and I want to provide them with a full hearing. I ask that you be open minded and at least consider the proposals before dismissing them out of hand.
The rule of thumb has always been that a boy needs a man in the house to imitate and emulate the masculine skills needed to successfully navigate manhood in a hostile environment. With the landscape of the “family” changing daily, the question is this still a valid assumption or was it ever valid? We must begin by developing some common ground that we can proceed from or our debate will be grounded before ever taking flight.
Are men and women different and does being a man or woman require different skills to be successful? This is always a fly in the ointment for many, because we often times equate different with unequal. Men and women are equal in the eyes of their Creator and should be so in the world, with that being said men and women are different. Men and women were created to fill different roles and despite our societies insistence to the contrary the fact remains. Most women can bear children and have a more maternal or protective instinct of the family than men. Because we are a continuation of nature we can look to nature to get some ideas of the difference in roles between the species. Regardless of our desire to rid ourselves of our connections to our untamed neighbors we share a lot of similar behaviors with them. It’s funny in nature how it is often the mother that does most of the raising of the off-spring and giving them guidance in hunting, surviving, and development into adulthood.
As independent parents raising children without the presence of a father, mothers have long been treated with dubiousness, fear, and even contempt. Traditional theories contended that mothers who reared sons without the presence of an active father -- or who were married but “overbearing” or raising “mama’s boys” -- instilled lifelong psychic disability, schizophrenia, or, worst, homosexuality in their sons. More recently, society’s guardians have declared that mothers -- especially single mothers, whether unmarried and poor, divorced and employed, straight or lesbian, or as white and prosperous as Calista Flockhart and Jodie Foster -- are sending violent, drug-using hellions out in into the world, boys who present no positive maleness, all due to the combination of Mom’s presence and Dad’s absence. Since Freud, mothers have been inculcated with the idea that we need to cut our sons’ cords to make them men ready to take on masculine roles in the world, from working toward worldly success to making war.
We have been further told by Freudians, social psychologists, and the popular culture that our sons need their dads in order to become upstanding male citizens. If not for Beaver Cleaver’s mom and dad, June and Ward, where would Beaver and his brother, Wally, have been? Without Ward, wouldn’t the boys have missed the supposedly crucial opportunity to separate from June by identifying with a very present father?
According to Freud and others who followed him, June alone could not have achieved everything required to bring up “the Beav” successfully. During the first 3 to 4 years of Beaver’s life, he would have needed Ward to imitate, long for, and react to, in order to gain the prize of being like his father. This theory -- that boys acquire masculinity only with an in-house male in the mother’s bedroom -- has prevailed to the detriment of both mothers and their sons. It presumes that the earliest relationship between infant and mother is simply a caretaking one. The assumption is that the mother is only a need provider for her son, while he in turn becomes physically and emotionally dependent on her. Eventually, assuming there is a present father in the home, the mother must withdraw herself from the child if her son is to become independent of her and escape the dire fate of being a mama’s boy.[1]
Are these concepts accurate and have they served our community well in the past? Are there any lessons to be learned from the past? I believe we must begin to look at ourselves and ask some tough questions about what we truly believe and what we truly want. We cannot continue to live the way we do and allow the things we do and expect things to improve. On the contrary things are getting worse.
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