Walter Dean Myers Quotes

Though politicians and media eminences are too frightened to say so, nonmarital births are problematic. On just about any measure of development you can think of, children who are born to unmarried women fare worse than the children of divorce and far worse than children raised in intact families.

Blacks as a group will never be equal while they have this situation going on, where the vast majority of children do not have fathers in the home married to their mother, involved in their lives, investing in them, investing in the next generation.

Conservatives highlight the primacy of family and argue that family breakdown exacerbates poverty, and they're right. Children raised by single parents are three times as likely to live in poverty as kids in two-parent homes.

Most children of the underclass are born out of wedlock; relationships are fleeting and unstable (which ensures that what is born into the underclass stays in the underclass). This is a world in which there are almost no worthwhile male role models, which is a disaster when boys turn to youths.

Kids who are the victims of broken families are more likely to end up in poverty, rehab, or jail. I'm a Republican, but I respect President Obama for setting the right example and addressing this problem.

Most American children suffer too much mother and too little father.

The causes of crime are very complicated. But there is a very big literature, as you know, about single parenthood in crime, about race in crime, and about poverty in crime.

More than 72 percent of children in the African-American community are born out of wedlock. That means absent fathers.

I think race is very important. I think generally speaking, we've to face the general problem, which is that we are seeing more children coming out of families which simply don't give them adequate resources for their development.

In 2013, 71 percent of black children in America were born to an unwed mother, as were 53 percent of Hispanic children and 36 percent of white children. Indeed, a single parent is the new norm.

It is widely known that the effects of childhood poverty follow children through adolescence and into adulthood.

We know what happens to little black boys that have no dads; we've heard that, we get it. But no one is really saying that young women who are born without fathers have real serious issues especially when their mother had no father and the mother has issues.

I've grown up with girls that are like Precious. I've grown up with people that are like everyone that I read about in that book. And so years later, when I was given the role, I just felt a huge responsibility to show the reality of that situation and to show that we're not making it up.

You have little representation of young black men in the business sector, so you have children growing up in disadvantaged neighborhoods who don't hear discussions at the dinner table about what goes on in business. It's almost as if we have two nations.

Poverty places not just one or two obstacles but multiple obstacles in a child's pathway to what we would consider to be regular development - cognitively, intellectually and emotionally.

A child's geographic location, race or parent's income level should not predetermine their life's course and it's up to us to see that they don't.

My father passed away a few days before my election. This man, an African American born to a poor single mother in 1936 in the South, would worry in the last years of his life that he had better life chances when he was growing up than a young man born in the same circumstances would have today.

The balance of our population, our human stock is threatened. A recent article in Poverty, published by the Child Poverty Action Group, showed that a high and rising proportion of children are being born to mothers least fitted to bring children into the world and to bring them up.

In the decades since my youth, I've witnessed the explosion of fatherless families and an exponential increase in illiteracy and crime.

When someone is in 'the struggle,' which many of our black communities are in, they are living with a lack of educational facilities, high unemployment, and poor recreational facilities.

The black community has fallen into this horribly dysfunctional equilibrium.

The U.S. is becoming an increasingly fatherless society. A generation ago, an American child could reasonably expect to grow up with his or her father. Today an American child can reasonably expect not to. Fatherlessness is now approaching a rough parity with fatherhood as a defining feature of American childhood.

I think the single most important question is how do you maximize the number of children who grow up in stable two-parent households. We know in all kinds of ways it makes a huge difference to how kids come out and we are hardening into a caste society where some kids do better in all kinds of ways because they have two parents and others don't.

I was actually very fortunate. I think I was actually the only kid in my class at one stage that actually had a father in the home.

On our toughest estates, generations pass with the same experience of worklessness and educational failure.