Black Positive People : Single men are filling the parenting void

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ST. LOUIS — Kory Alexander says he got tired 11 years ago of meeting teenagers from his St. Louis neighborhood with no parents to care for them and no place to go.

So Alexander, then a 24-year-old single guy, became a foster parent to a teenager he knew while working at St. Vincent's Children's Home in Normandy. It's a role he has since undertaken 11 times.

He didn't stop there. So far, he has adopted three teenagers from foster care who are now legal adults. And he's hoping to soon adopt two of his five current foster teens.

"They see me working, they see me home. They see how I step up to the plate and take care of them," Alexander said of the youths, ages 15, 16, 16, 16 and 17, on a rainy afternoon as three of the boys played video games and did homework inside the apartment.

"I talk to them mostly about being independent," he said of the boys, whom the Post-Dispatch cannot name because of their foster care status. "I tell them, 'If you don't go to college, you go into the Army.'"

Although the number is still relatively small, more and more single men are adopting from the nation's increasing pool of hard-to-place foster children.

http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/ne...24C574489F51C1218625742E00117907?OpenDocument





It's been going on for some time. I have been mentoring the youth in my city since I was in undergrad over 30 years ago. I help found a citywide mentoring and tutorial program.



















 
We need men to raise men.......
~Qwamii~

Some of the finest men on earth who are leading constructive and remarkable lives were raised solely by their mother, so raising children of either gender is not based on the gender of the parent; it's based on the responsibility and character of the parent, and nothing else.

There's no denying that countless women all over the world are failing their children, but it's not because they're women, it's because of their poor character in their willful decision to fail their children, and the same thing is true for men. Countless fathers have mishandled their children and destroyed them psychologically or murdered them. Joe Jackson is a prime example of this in how his cruelty destroyed Michael. Raising children is in the mind and the heart, not the gender.

The father could die for example. It happens you know. But that shouldn't mean that it's curtains for the children unless the mother isn't on the ball.
 
It's been going on for some time. I have been mentoring the youth in my city since I was in undergrad over 30 years ago. I help found a citywide mentoring and tutorial program.


God bless you brother. Keep on keeping on. Our children need you. And your take on women is right on the money. But it's not the kind of man that women sleep with that reflects their character, it's what they allow to go down in their life and that of their children that reflects their character. Women who want to be a man's doormat or victim is a woman of bad character because she won't fail to let her children down.

But a woman like myself who will not stand for this kind of thing or wouldn't fail to protect my children's life with my own and guide them down the right path, is a real woman. Or my mother who knew that my father had some serious problems but she built him up and made him stronger. She made him respect her, and she made him a better father, because she had the guts to stand up to him when he was wrong, and she did not sit back and let him batter her children. She straightened my dad out when he was wrong, and he loved her fiercely for her bravery and sensibility. Quite an impressive fellow my dad became with my mom's help. My mom was a real woman as well. Or my cousin Elaine, whose husband came to her as an alcoholic and a waste of oxygen; but she turned him into a sober and successful business man whose running his own company that he started mostly himself but with her help and support. Elaine is a real woman too.

What I'm saying is that a man with problems can be helped and made stronger with the right woman. So a woman taking up with a man with problems is not a woman of bad character. It all depends on how she handles herself with that man that reveals where she's coming from.
 

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