Hardy, who came up with the idea for the seminar, said part of his inspiration for the event came from his experiences doing ministry work in area prisons.

"A lot of these young men are in prison because they had no strong father figure guiding them through their early life and adolescence," Hardy said. "The goal of this conference is to help young fathers both spiritually and mentally build their relationship with their sons that will one day prepare the son to enter society as an adult with values."
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The conference does not seek to undermine the role of mothers in raising sons, the two said, but, instead to emphasize the beautiful and often overlooked relationship that a good father can have with his son.

Montgomery is being accompanied in this Paris suburb by his girlfriend, Marion Jones, but she'll be doing TV commentary for Eurosport instead of trying to defend her 200 title. Jones, who won an unprecedented five track medals at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, has been sidelined since giving birth June 28.

After their son was born, Montgomery dropped off the European track circuit to help at home.

"I have a wonderful girlfriend who gave up her season to have my child,'' he said. "I gave up my season to be with her.''

[T]he population of Europe to double[d] between 1750 and 1850. Above all, there was a huge rise in illegitimate births. By 1850, half the children born in Vienna and Stockholm, and one-third in Paris, were illegitimate. Who managed to keep their daughters intact? The Calvinists in the Netherlands, the Muslims in the Balkans, the Catholics in Ireland and many southern regions, and the Jews throughout Europe. For the rest, especially in the cities, there seems to have been a free-for-all. Many of the couples in question were engaged to be married, which, once the girl got pregnant, they swiftly did. As researchers have discovered from parish registers (all you have to do is compare the marriage date with the date of the first child�s baptism), thirty-seven per cent of English brides in the late eighteenth century, and half in the early nineteenth century, went to the altar pregnant.

"What is the good of a good divorce?" When splitting up, married couples choose mediation over litigation with increasing frequency. But a productive conversation about divorce can be confusing, one man notes: "I felt like, if we can work these things out in mediation, can't we work them out in the relationship?"

There is a lot of nervousness about marriage, but the research shows that people are actually pro-marriage. People want to marry. This is a conversation that [welfare recipients] probably would not spurn to the same extent that the welfare caseworkers think they would. We cannot ignore the economic side of it as well as the attitudinal side, but there is a reservoir of interest in marriage that should be acknowledged.

Melanie recognizes what appears to be her child, but doesn't have the tools to get through to her. Tracy is all vivacity looking for boundaries, and Melanie can't provide her daughter with any. Their relationship has been more about acting as friends than parent and offspring, and Melanie's boyfriend doesn't have the authority to change anything and doesn't want it�.

Tracy, in contrast, vibrates those flashes of rage that erupt from the hearts of young girls growing up without a father in the house � a boiling m�lange of anger and frustration born of what feels like rejection.

Researcher/author Robert B. Hill believes a heaving sea of White and Black female teacher biases, fortified by the back-up authority of mostly single female-headed households, has effectively "pushed out" bright Black male students from the public schools to the extent that Black nationwide suspension rates for African-American students are nearly double the size of the Black school population.

Black male school teachers are needed desperately, he says, to break the female wall of authority that sends Black male students through a gauntlet that begins with school suspensions and culminates with dropouts, no work, fatherless families and, too often, prison.
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"They graduate to the juvenile justice system and when they come out they're not marriageable, thereby tearing the fabric of the Black family," he says.
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"Well-trained teachers can defuse a situation by not becoming overwhelmed by a violent episode," she says. "They know how to de-escalate, rather than escalate a situation." And more Black male teachers are the answer, says Hill. "The boys suffer from the lack of a Black male role model in their lives. They need to see someone who looks like them in front of their classroom."

AMY DAVIDSON: Why does the government want poor women to get married?

KATHERINE BOO: The deeper I got into this story, the more I tended to turn that question around: Why wouldn�t governments want poor people to marry? The economics are terribly seductive. To help one of the women I wrote about, Kim, become, say, a registered nurse�to give her skills to earn more than she made as a telemarketer�a government might have to invest tens of thousands of dollars. Conducting a three-day marriage class for a group of Sooner Haven tenants requires less than a tenth of that investment. And if, inspired by that indoctrination, Kim, whose income was less than ten thousand dollars, manages to meet and marry a man who makes ten thousand dollars, their combined income would remove both of them, in one fell act, from America�s poverty rolls. Moreover, if they go on to have children, those children will be less likely than the children of unmarried parents to drop out of school, require public assistance, and become single parents themselves. For a very small initial investment, a government might save hundreds of thousands of dollars in public-assistance costs over the course of Kim�s lifetime. Now, multiply that anticipated savings by tens of millions of poor women.

AMY DAVIDSON: Is it that simple? Is this really an outcome that a government can, or should, engineer?

KATHERINE BOO: The research suggesting that governments and individuals tend to benefit from an increase in marriage rates is at this point very persuasive, and I don�t see much point in being coy about it. Marriage is probably the most cost-efficient antipoverty instrument a society possesses. But there are two reasons other modern industrialized governments have declined to encourage it as explicitly as America�s does. One reason is of course ideological: many governments see state intervention in marriage as a gross violation of personal freedom. (Besides, what elected leader wants to tell his citizenry that making such choices on the basis of love should be a privilege for the rich?) And, second, no credible research yet exists to indicate that government-sponsored educational interventions actually produce real, live marriages among the poor. What the Bush Administration is attempting to do now is a total social-policy flyer, which is why I thought it might be interesting to check it out.