[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 39 (Tuesday, March 31, 1998)]
[House]
[Pages H1837-H1838]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




            PARENTS' TRUE PRIORITY: TIME WITH THEIR CHILDREN

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Duncan) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, as I was driving to the airport last Friday, 
I heard on the CBS News part of a statement by the national head of the 
YMCA. He said, because of all the broken homes and other factors, 
children are being deprived of time, love, and attention like never 
before in our history. He was speaking out because of the horrendous 
tragedy in Arkansas.
  Then I switched stations and heard Dr. Laura Schlesinger, the radio 
psychologist, read something written by a third grader about his 
heroes, his parents. He emphasized, and Dr. Laura emphasized by reading 
it twice and stressing the word, ``time.''
  Then in Sunday's Knoxville News Sentinel was an article by Mike 
Barnicle of the Boston Globe. The headline said, ``How much time do we 
really spend with our children?''
  Mr. Barnicle wrote, ``It's not the guns. It's not TV. It's not movies 
featuring enormous amounts of gratuitous violence.'' He said,

       ``We can indulge ourselves in all of the semantic or 
     psychological contortions available. We can assemble 
     commissions, tie yellow ribbons around trees, shed tears, 
     utter prayers, listen to speeches, read editorials, and we 
     are still left with the apparent stone-cold fact that these 
     multiple homicides were committed allegedly by two boys. One 
     is 11, the other 13.''

  Mike Barnicle continued by pointing out that,

       ``Today we communicate by e-mail, cell phones, laptops, the 
     Internet, websites, and home pages. Yet we don't know what a 
     13-year-old is doing in his spare time.''

  He ended his article in this way:

       Accountability rarely makes its way to the conversation 
     table because so many parents are busy, too preoccupied with 
     the moment to realize that the true priority--the most 
     difficult task, as well as their greatest achievement, 
     potentially--is staring them in the face with a . . . look 
     that says, ``Talk to me, man.''

  For 7\1/2\ years before I came to Congress, I was a criminal court 
judge trying primarily the felony cases. The first day I was Judge, I 
was told that 98 percent of the defendants in felony cases came from 
broken homes.
  I went through thousands of cases and read over and over again, 
``Defendant's father left home when defendant was 2 and never returned. 
Defendant's father left home to get a pack of cigarettes and never came 
back.''
  Then 3 or 4 years ago, I read an article about two leading 
criminologists who had studied 11,000 felony cases from around the 
country; and they said, the biggest single factor in serious crime, 
nothing else was even close, was father-absent households. Then I read 
that the 13-year-old boy in Arkansas, probably the leader, was the son 
of parents who divorced when he was 9; and his father lives in 
Minnesota.
  I know there are exceptions to every rule. I know that many wonderful 
people come from broken homes. I know there are hundreds of thousands 
of single mothers who are doing miraculous, even heroic, jobs raising 
their children. I also know that divorce hurts children; and many of 
them are hurt deeply, far worse than we realize, and scarred for life.
  So many fathers are slowly going out of the lives of their children. 
This hurts both boys and girls, but girls, who so often stay with their 
mothers, seem to be able to handle it better. We have a very serious 
epidemic in this Nation of small boys growing up without a good male 
role model. I know sometimes divorce is inevitable. It is the only 
choice. But I also believe that one of the greatest blessings you can 
give any child is two loving parents.
  Government cannot solve this problem alone. We need more men who will 
get active with the Boy Scouts and Sunday school and organizations that 
work with young boys, but government can help. We need school systems 
which will make a greater effort to hire male teachers at the 
elementary level. A very small percentage of elementary teachers are 
male right now.
  But the biggest way government could help, Mr. Speaker, is by 
lowering its budget and increasing the family's budget. The biggest 
factor in most divorces is strong, even bitter disagreements over 
money.
  In 1950, the Federal, State and local governments took about 3 or 4 
percent each from the average family. Today, the government at all 
levels takes almost 40 percent in taxes and another 10 percent in 
government regulatory costs. One spouse has to work to support the 
government while the other works to support the family. If the 
government at all levels took less from the average family, there would 
be far fewer families that would split up due to the millions of 
arguments over family finances.
  There is nothing we can do to end all divorce or end all crime, but 
if we could greatly downsize government and decrease its cost, we would 
greatly strengthen the family. If we could substantially decrease the 
government's budget, we could increase the family's budget. Many more 
families would stay together; and parents, whether single or married, 
could do far more for their children. It is no accident that when

[[Page H1838]]

government was much smaller and took far less of our incomes, there was 
far less divorce and far fewer broken homes than today.
  I think it is obvious that serious crime would go way down if we made 
government much smaller and let families keep more of what they earn.
  Unfortunately, we will see even more serious crimes committed by 
children if we continue to see broken homes at the rate of the past 
several years.
  One last thing, Mr. Speaker, is the fact that acts of violence and 
other very serious problems have become much more frequent since prayer 
and Bible-reading were taken out of the schools.
  There has been much national publicity given to the study that showed 
the most serious problems in schools in the 1940s were things like 
chewing gum and talking in class, while today teachers have to deal 
with guns, knives, drugs, violence, and so forth.
  I know that most children, on most days probably did not listen when 
we had prayer and Bible reading in the schools.
  But you never knew when some child might have come to school hurting 
in some way because of a problem at home or something else and who 
might have been helped by a prayer or a particular Bible verse.
  Also, it sent a daily message to our children that there was some 
chance of help when our problems got too big. Now, and for many years, 
children do not and have not received that message.
  Once again, it would not solve all problems if we put prayer and 
Bible reading back in the schools, but it would help, and it would do 
much more good than harm.

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