|
Thanks Giving
For Single African-American Mothers Raising their Sons
By Anthony L. Bouyer
Guest Column
I would like to take a
minute during this holiday season to salute all of the
single African-American mothers who have guided their sons
in pursuit of academic excellence.
There has been a plethora
of negative literature on low academic achievements of
African-American males which has presented a seemingly
hopeless picture of the possibility of reversing
long-standing trends of academic failure.
However, the mainstream
media does not give much attention to the academic success
many African-American males achieve. One important factor
in this success is the influence of their mothers. It is
these single African-American mothers who found the resolve
and resilience to transform their sons into high academic
achievers and to them I give honor.
But this is not only my
personal observation. If we dig into research that has been
conducted during the last decade, we can find considerable
evidence that identifies common characteristics of
successful single African-American mothers and the
strategies they use to help their sons beat the odds. Above
all, research points to the importance of mothers in helping
their sons develop resilience.
Differences in life
experiences dictate how individuals respond to and utilize
resilience. For individuals who have never had to respond to
adversity resilience is not a factor in their world view.
There are many forms of
resilience and the concept is used in a number of different
fields and consequently yields a number of definitions. For
the purpose of this article, academic resilience is defined
as academic achievement when such achievement is rare for
those facing similar circumstances or within a similar
context exceeding in the face of adversity. In this sense,
resilience is treated as an outcome.
Anthropologist Jonathan
Gayles (2005) has noted, “For many African American
students, especially those educated in urban or inner-city
schools, academic success is contingent on their ability to
demonstrate resilience in the face of racism, poverty, and
environments with few resources.” Gayles found that the
students he studied developed resilience as a response to
society’s expectations of these African-American male
students’ social economic status and they prevailed
academically despite those low expectations.
Family and Community Support for Resilience
Families and community
assume an important role in how resilience is formulated for
African-American males, particularly for communities and
families who have been beset with difficult environmental,
social and other adversities that test the sure survival of
these two institutions. Sociologists Quentin Robinson and
Jason Werblow (2012) examined “the ways in which single-
Black mothers influence the educational success of their
sons by focusing on the mothers’ academically successful 11th
grade Black males.”
Single African-American
mothers have consistently been the cornerstone of the
African-American community, whether their singleness is due
to voluntary absence of the father (possibly due to fathers
themselves who were raised without fathers to help them
develop a sense of parental responsibility) or involuntary
(possibly due to incarceration or early death due to social
conditions that many African-American men succumb to in
urban areas). In many cases, African-American mothers have
admirably taken on the role of both mother and father in
such households.
Sociologists Quentin
Robinson and Jacob Werblow (2012) conducted a study on
single mothers of African-American male high school students
enrolled in failing schools, who despite this situation were
high academic achievers.
Robinson and Werblow
identified the common characteristic of these mothers of
academically successful African-American males in low
performing school, finding the mother tended to:
·
Be a “knowledgeable resource, using their own skills and
resources to teach their sons how to be successful”
·
Be a ”tactful motivator, motivating their sons by nurturing
their passions and strengths”
·
Provide “support of whole child, through constant monitoring
(direct/indirect), provide financial, psychological, and
emotional support to their sons” (p. 59).
Through these
characteristics, single black mothers are able to develop
strategies to help their sons be academically successful.
Robinson and Werblow also
identified the following strategies as important:
·
talk to him regularly (knowing what issues and problems
their sons are facing by having meaningful, daily
interaction with their sons)
·
leverage positive roles models in the community (surround
their sons with positive live role models, teacher,
ministers, and coaches), and
·
address the root of the problem facing their son (get to the
root of the problem by identifying individual people, peers,
teachers or counselor).
This research study not
only highlights the magnitude of parental involvement in
their children education, but also provides a framework to
help other single African-American mothers achieve academic
success with their sons who are facing the same socially
challenging conditions.
These mothers give us
hope. They do not match the racist stereotype of single
African-American mothers that the dominant culture puts out
and that we know is not a true picture. These mothers taught
themselves and their sons how to be successful despite
trends.
If the contribution of
African-American mothers, as those described here, were
sought and nurtured by more educators and administrators,
schools might better teach more black males to achieve to
their full potential. By identifying and supporting
African-American mothers, more urban schools can become
institutions that inspire and educate other parents to help
their sons beat the odds.
Anthony L. Bouyer is a candidate for the Ph.D. in Social
Foundations of Education in the Department of Educational
Foundations and Leadership at the University of Toledo,
specializing in African American male student success. He
is writing his dissertation on how African American young
men who are on probation succeeded in graduating from high
school and how they view life success. Bouyer has been a
probation officer for 20 years, as well as a parole officer,
police officer, and mental health professional. He is a
licensed drug and alcohol counselor with the State of Ohio.
|
