According to The Brookings Institution, as much as 85% of African-American children will spend some or all of their childhoods in single-parent homes

Merlene Davis:

When I was a single mother, I said I didn't need my daughter's father because I could rear her alone.

And I could. But it was not the best scenario for my child. It was just a make-do thing. I knew my child deserved better.

No matter how much we run from it, a two-parent family is better for all involved.

Deborah Keys, a certified family life educator who leads a monthly couples ministry at Imani Baptist Church, thinks that fact should be getting out more.

She said research by Lorraine Blackman of Indiana University and others shows children who live with their married fathers:

• have better physical and emotional health in infancy.

• are less likely to become delinquent.

• do better in school.

• receive substantially more parental support.

And research has found that marriage is also one of the strongest determinants of economic status for black Americans, Keys said.

"It is the difference between being above or below the poverty line, especially for families with children."

To highlight the benefits of marriage to black families, Keys is coordinating the "Black Marriage Day Celebration" for this month's couples' meeting.

The gathering is an offshoot of the third annual national Black Marriage Day, which was celebrated March 26 in 150 cities throughout the United States. It was founded by Wedded Bliss Foundation Inc., based in Washington, D.C.

The Lexington event, which is open to the public, will be Sunday in the Bishop & Lady S.P. Rawlings Multi-Purpose Building behind House of God No. 1, 866 Georgetown Street. Dinner will be served at 2 p.m., followed by a video presentation of successful couples in the Imani group.

Then, Aaron Thompson, associate vice president of academics and a sociology professor at Eastern Kentucky University, will speak about the findings in his book Black Men and Divorce, (Sage Publications Inc., $102 hardcover, $48 paperback,). He co-authored that book with Erma J. Lawson, a sociologist at the University of North Texas.

Thompson and Lawson talked with 50 divorced men, ranging in age from 25 to 55, in three states who had been married four to 20 years before divorcing. All of the men were fathers, and none had re-married at the time of the interviews. Each man suffered after his divorce. "It was the first study conducted with middle-class African-American men," Thompson said.

What they found was just how deeply divorce affected those men. The men worried that they would fit the stereotype of the absent black father and that their biological children and stepchildren would be hurt by the divorce.

The scholars did not find the strain on marriages often caused by stepchildren, which has been documented in white families, Thompson said.

The men in the study, he said, found "it was as hard or harder for them to be removed from that child that wasn't biologically theirs, and they kept the bond long after the divorce.

"They wanted to stay married because of the stepchildren," he said. "In African-American families, we are kind of used to that. That is very much a part of who we are. Stepchildren do not add to divorce; they kept people together longer."

Still, black marriages end in divorce or separation three times more often than those of whites and twice as often as those of Hispanics.

Why aren't we hearing about this more often from the pulpits of our churches?

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