Ambulance needed at bottom of cliff?

Susan Cowen, in her May 3 letter, writes of an unemployed homeless teenage mother who received help from Illinois Youth Services. Why was this girl homeless? Was she the daughter of another unwed teenage mother?

The letter claims she now has an apartment and is going to school and "the future for her and her baby looks bright."

Studies by Harvard sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan show otherwise. Moynihan writes, "A community that allows a large number of its men (or women) to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship with male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future, that community asks for and will get chaos."

The solution is not a quick fix of a subsidized apartment and school. The problem goes much deeper: the broken home affecting both young boys and girls. What is happening to the men who are not anchored in family with its stabilizing effect, its order, its responsibility, its pride and its joy? What will happen to the child when he or she goes to school? George Gilder writes, "Liberals force lower-middle class families, who love their children, to dispatch them to ghetto schools dominated by gangs of fatherless boys bearing knives."

Statistics show that 25 percent of the males raised in these fatherless homes will eventually do some petty or serious crime and will do jail time. And often these are the young men whose irresponsible behavior results in countless unwed teenage mothers.

While it is commendable to have a million dollar ambulance at the bottom of the cliff that thousands of teenage boys and girls are falling over, is it not better to have a carpenter build a sturdy fence at the top of the cliff?

Priscilla Weese

Wheaton