According to a Pew Research Center study of 130 countries, nearly one in four children in the United States grows up in homes without a father or any other adult present. That is more than three times the global average. And the cost to our society is staggering.

America is the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world, but when it comes to our children, we are falling short in the most fundamental way.

Children who grow up without a father are more likely to live in poverty, drop out of school, engage in crime, and struggle with emotional and behavioral issues. This is not a theory. These outcomes are well-documented across decades of research.

The cancer that is this crisis has been fostered for years as society has normalized the lack of a father’s involvement, especially in the black community. It is about a breakdown in our culture, a turning away from the values that once anchored families. We have abandoned the idea that fathers matter.

Government policies in the 1960s, while intended to provide support, ended up disincentivizing marriage and promoting dependence on the state. Nowhere has this been more destructive than in minority communities. In 1965, nearly 80% of Black children were raised in two-parent homes. Today, more than 70% grow up without their fathers.

At TakeCharge, we reject the idea that these outcomes are the inevitable result of systemic racism. Often, they are the result of choices — choices made by all levels of our American society that have chipped away at the foundational role of fathers.

Single mothers are not to blame. Many are doing incredible work under difficult circumstances. But a child should not have to rely on one parent when two are meant to be present. Fathers are not optional. They are essential.

The path forward begins with rebuilding what we have lost. We need to revive a culture that respects marriage, celebrates fatherhood, and teaches boys to become responsible men. The foundation of any strong society is strong families.

We must also return to the values that once made our communities thrive: faith, family, education, and personal responsibility. TakeCharge is committed to restoring these values. Through advocacy, education, and direct community engagement, we help families reclaim their identity and purpose.

This issue is not limited to any one group. Fatherlessness affects all races and income levels. But the consequences are particularly severe in low-income and minority communities, where the absence of fathers contributes to cycles of poverty and dysfunction.

That is why we support solutions rooted in personal responsibility, not dependency. We promote school choice, academic excellence, and the power of free enterprise. We believe the promise of America still works — but only when the family is restored.

This Father’s Day, we ask you to do more than say “thank you” to the fathers in your life. We ask you to join a movement to rebuild fatherhood in America. Encourage young men to see fatherhood as a gift and a calling. Support policies that promote marriage and family stability. Mentor a boy who needs a man to look up to. Advocate for cultural change that uplifts the role of dads.

Until we address the fatherhood crisis in America, no program or policy will be enough to fix what is broken.

Our families depend on fathers who show up, stand firm, and lead with love and responsibility. Let’s make this Father’s Day a turning point.

NCFR has a wide reach. Founded in 1938, the organization publishes three journals, including the Journal of Marriage and Family, which the organization touts as “the leading research journal in the family field.” The group’s lamentable views on marriage will influence hundreds of marriage and family therapists and researchers across the nation.

NCFR’s members come from more than 35 countries and all 50 states, and work as teachers, program developers, and counselors, according to the organization’s website. It has thousands of active members, who participate in focus groups, discussion, and networking. NCFR has 10 state and regional-level affiliates and 26 student chapters at universities.

NCFR also produces research for lawmakers. In its most recent 2020 annual report, NCFR lists as its first “program highlight” its “racial justice resources.”

The Nuclear Family As ‘Family Privilege’

In an announcement for a webinar that premiered in May, titled “Toward Dismantling Family Privilege and White Supremacy in Family Science,” the organization offers continuing education credits for its members to learn that the field of “Family Science” is “struggling” with “how it privileges certain types of families over others.” NCFR introduces its webinar as follows:

Like White privilege, family privilege is an unacknowledged and unearned benefit instantiated in U.S. laws, policies, and practices and bestowed upon traditional or ‘standard’ nuclear families to the disadvantage of non-traditional configured family systems (e.g., sole-parent families, unmarried committed partners rearing children together, grandparents raising grandchildren). Family privilege is defined as the benefits, often invisible and unacknowledged, that one receives by belonging to family systems long upheld in society as superior to all others. It serves to advantage certain family forms over others and is typically bestowed upon White, traditional nuclear families.

According to NCFR, the nuclear family is now a vehicle of “family privilege” – yet another new term – and white supremacy, a “structure” that no longer is viewed as one that nurtures young children, provides them with stability and security, and prepares them for successful and emotionally sound adulthood.

Instead, NCFR now says the family of mom, dad, and kids has mistakenly been upheld as “superior to all others” and “creates systemic barriers to equal opportunity and justice for all families.”

Teaching the Dismantling of ‘Family Privilege’

In NCFR’s webinar, attendees “will examine, recognize, and learn how to dismantle the manifestations of family privilege in our social systems by using an intersectional framework developed by critical feminist and race scholars.” Webinar attendees are expected to learn how to “define family privilege, White supremacy, and apply a critical intersectional framework that can be used in one’s work.”

NCFR is essentially stating everything they have taught about family science in the past was a lie, because the organization failed to recognize “family privilege” throughout all these decades, and now must acknowledge its guilt. After only a 90-minute webinar, attendees are expected to have the ability to:

• Dismantle family privilege in Family Science scholarship, teaching, practice, and policymaking.

• Recognize family privilege and White supremacy in research, practitioner, and policy settings.

• Reduce the ways in which family privilege manifests in Family Science and in society.

Data Shows This Is All a Dangerous Lie

Ironically, critical race theory (CRT) is a tool of the same left that has created a populace within the black community that is dependent upon the government for survival. Even though published data confirms that two-parent families – including black two-parent families – dramatically reduces poverty, childhood abuse, and many other social ills, NCFR is now asserting our two-parent American families, white and black, represent systemic racism and “family privilege.”

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 18.3 million children – 1 in 4 – live without a biological, step, or adoptive father in the home. Research that has not been tainted by CRT has shown children raised in fatherless homes have a four times greater risk of poverty, seven times greater risk of becoming pregnant as a teen and are two times as likely to be obese and to drop out of high school.

Additionally, traditional research has shown children raised without a father are more likely to exhibit behavioral problems, to face abuse and neglect, to abuse drugs and alcohol, to commit crimes, and to go to prison.

The black community is missing out on the opportunities our country has to offer, and it is not because of systemic racism or white privilege. It’s because, since the 1960s, the culture has declined from approximately 80 percent two-parent families to 80 percent fatherless homes without one national initiative to reverse the trend.

It is time to address the real issues that drive racial disparities, while helping to move the country toward a post-racial America.

For those unfamiliar with Newton, he was an English clergyman and the author of the iconic Christian hymn Amazing Grace, which he penned in 1772:

“Amazing grace! How sweet the sound

That saved a wretch like me!

I once was lost, but now am found;

Was blind, but now I see.”

Before his spiritual awakening, Newton was a seaman who eventually became the captain of a slave ship and an investor in the slave trade. At one point, Newton wound up being enslaved himself to an African princess in what is now Sierra Leone. He was rescued but faced death in a storm at sea on the journey home. He prayed for deliverance and converted to Christianity when his prayers were answered. This eventually led him to join the clergy and later renounce the slave trade and devote his life to abolition and honoring God. He became a mentor to William Wilberforce (1759 – 1833), a member of Parliament who was instrumental in the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire in 1807, just months before Newton died.

As I sat in the audience for this tribute, the connection between Newton’s story and my own family’s lineage weighed heavily on my heart—with both a profound sense of appreciation and a sobering awareness. My parents grew up under the oppressive conditions of the segregated South. I began my life in poverty, living in Harlem’s public housing projects with my divorced mother. Later, I moved to Oklahoma to live with my father, who resided in a trailer park. And yet despite these unpromising beginnings, I enrolled in college, which I worked full-time to pay for, served as an officer in the U.S. Army, and later earned my MBA from the University of Michigan and capped my career as a Global Vice President of Sales and Marketing in an $850MM business unit. My journey is not just a story of the American Dream—it’s a testament to God’s overflowing grace and abundant blessings.

The day before the concert, while my daughter rehearsed, I took time to visit my childhood neighborhood—just three blocks north of the famed Apollo Theater on 125th Street and 8th Avenue. More than five decades have passed since I lived there, but in many ways, the neighborhood remains unchanged. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Harlem was the epicenter of drugs, violence, and broken families. While the dynamics may have shifted, the struggles persist: fatherless homes, failing schools, crime, addiction, and low expectations still plague the community.

Sadly, my mother, siblings, and their children—my nieces and nephews—have become part of the painful statistics of urban failure. These outcomes are not merely the result of bad luck, but of deeply flawed government policies that promised utopia, enabled dependency, and destroyed accountability. For decades, corrupt politicians, pastors, and community leaders—often paid to toe the Democratic Party line—remained silent as the black family and culture deteriorated.

After 60 years of placing hope in government programs and other false idols, we must confront an uncomfortable truth: the only path forward begins with turning back. Like the prodigal son in the Gospel of Luke, we must return to the teachings of God and the core principles of the Christian faith.

Black Americans do not need to wait for permission from politicians or officials to move forward. It begins with acknowledging the reality: we are living lives that dishonor our ancestors, grieve the heart of God, and provide no sustainable future for our children.

So, what comes next?

Here are practical action steps that can begin to heal and transform our communities:

• Support School Choice so tax dollars follow students, empowering families to choose the best educational setting.

• Restore Vocational and Technical Education in public schools, ensuring students graduate with skills to enter the workforce.

• Require the U.S. Citizenship Test as a graduation requirement in middle or high school, reinforcing civic literacy and national identity.

• Incorporate Honest Education on the historical consequences of socialism and communism versus the freedoms and opportunities under capitalism.

• Promote Entrepreneurial Clubs beginning in middle school to spark innovation and economic independence.

• Modify Tax Policies to incentivize marriage and the nuclear family structure.

• Teach and Celebrate Marriage as the foundation of strong families and communities—encouraging marriage before parenthood.

If these steps were embraced nationwide, I am confident that we would witness a renaissance within the black community—an explosion of prosperity, strength, and cultural transformation within a generation. It would be a conversion from blind to free. When this transformation takes places, the entire nation will have reason to rejoice.

“When we’ve been there ten thousand years,

Bright shining as the sun,

We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise

Than when we’d first begun.”

Kendall Qualls

Six years ago, I spoke at a college campus in Minnesota during one of the most turbulent moments in recent American history. The country was reeling from the death of George Floyd and the subsequent riots across the country. Emotions were high. Division was everywhere. My talk addressed the Black Lives Matter organization, and its explicit call (since rescinded) to “disrupt the…nuclear family structure.” I argued that this sort of radicalism was ultimately bad for black people and indeed for the country as a whole.

After my remarks, a young woman approached me—not with curiosity, but with anger and resentment. She challenged everything I said. She was dismissive, confrontational, and openly disrespectful. At the time, it wasn’t unusual. I had seen it before—and I’ve seen it many times since.

But recently, I heard from her again.

This time, the tone was entirely different. It turned out her name was Avery and she was writing to apologize. She admitted that at the time, she was “filled with anger,” not walking with God, and blinded by what she now recognized as a distorted worldview. Avery acknowledged that she had not understood the message I was trying to share—and that she had responded out of ignorance. Today, she is married, a mother, and living a life centered on faith, family, and purpose.

A Generation Shaped by Indoctrination

What I encountered in that young woman wasn’t just disagreement. It was the product of a system. Across our public education system—from K–12 classrooms to college campuses—too many young people are being taught what to think, not how to think.

They are immersed in a worldview that emphasizes grievance over gratitude, division over unity, and victimhood over personal responsibility. Respect for elders, appreciation for tradition, and adherence to basic social norms are increasingly dismissed as relics of the past.

The result is a generation that is often misinformed, emotionally reactive, and hostile toward ideas that challenge what they’ve been taught. That’s not education. That’s indoctrination.

Closed Minds, Not Critical Thinkers

Even more troubling is what comes next.

When ideology is taught as truth—and competing ideas are discouraged, you don’t produce independent thinkers. You produce rigid ones. Young people become resistant to truth itself.

Avery, the young woman who once confronted me, now says it plainly: she was blinded—unable to see beyond the narrow framework she had been given.

We see this play out across the country every day. Speakers are shouted down. Debate is replaced with outrage. Facts are dismissed if they conflict with the narrative. An education system that cannot tolerate dissent is not preparing students for the real world—it is isolating them from it.

This Strategy Is Not New

The idea of shaping society through the minds of children has long been understood. As Vladimir Lenin famously said, “Give me your four-year-olds, and in a generation I will build a socialist state.” Control what children are taught, and you shape the future. That’s exactly why what happens in our classrooms matters so much.

What Actually Changed Avery

And yet, despite everything she had been taught, this young woman’s life changed—completely.

Not because of a new policy.

Not because of a different professor.

Not because of a political movement.

She gave her life to Jesus Christ. That is when everything shifted.

Her anger gave way to humility.

Her confusion gave way to clarity.

Her resentment gave way to purpose.

Today, she and her husband are raising a child and working to help others avoid the same mistakes they made. That kind of transformation cannot be manufactured by any institution. It comes from a changed heart.

We Cannot Ignore This Any Longer

If we continue down the current path, we will raise generations increasingly disconnected from truth, from one another, and from the values that sustain a healthy society. We cannot afford to look the other way. Parents must take a more active role in what their children are being taught. Communities must demand accountability from schools. And leaders must have the courage to speak honestly about what is happening.

Because this is not just about politics.

It’s about the future of our country.

Seeds of Truth Still Grow

Avery ended her letter to me with a powerful reminder: The seeds you plant may not grow immediately—but in time, they can. Six years ago, she rejected everything I said.

Today, she is living it.

That should give us hope—but it should also serve as a warning. If we don’t reclaim the truth, someone else will shape the next generation in its place. And the consequences will be far greater than one angry conversation on a college campus.

By Kendall Qualls

OPINION:

It’s Black History Month, and that means we must finally confront an uncomfortable truth: the profound and deliberate cultural and economic decline of the Black community over the past century, largely under the stewardship of the Democratic Party. Make no mistake: This is the largest political scandal of our lifetimes.

Since the Civil Rights era of the 1960s, Black American culture has undergone a dramatic transformation. What was once defined by strong Christian faith, commitment to family and a deep desire for educational advancement is now a fatherless, lawless, godless culture. It dishonors our ancestors, grieves the heart of God and provides no sustainable future for our children.

Family

From the 1960s to now, the Black family structure in the United States has shifted from nearly 80% two-parent households to approximately 80% fatherless homes, and there has not been a single sustained national initiative to reverse the trend.

Five decades of data confirm what common sense already tells us: Children raised in single-parent households face significantly higher risks of academic failure, social instability, financial hardship and entanglement with the criminal justice system than their peers raised in intact families.

For political power and personal financial gain, influential individuals and institutions within the Black community have been complicit in this cultural collapse. Notably absent has been any sustained outcry from the Congressional Black Caucus, the NAACP, the National Urban League or Black Lives Matter.

The outcomes are undeniable. In nearly every major inner city governed by Democrats, political leaders and their allies grow wealthy and powerful while the masses remain trapped in generational poverty, fatherless homes, and public schools that graduate students who are functionally illiterate. Meanwhile, many of these same leaders have intact families, expensive homes and children who often attend private schools.

Wealth

As of 2025, Black Americans have a median household wealth of approximately $24,520, compared with $250,400 for non-Hispanic White households. Seven of the 10 states with the largest racial wealth gaps are Democratic-led states, including my home state of Minnesota.

By contrast, seven of the 10 states with the smallest wealth gaps are Republican-led states — another inconvenient fact rarely acknowledged by legacy media or universities.

Education

Public schools are increasingly failing to prepare children for success in life. Instead, many have become ideological training grounds for a leftist political agenda at the direct expense of Black children’s futures.

Too many Black youngsters today are raised without a sense of hope or expectation. In 2019, the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis reported that Minnesota has the largest academic achievement gap between Black and White students of any state in the nation. This failure is not unique to Minnesota but is the case in many Democratic-led states. In Baltimore, a group of Black families recently sued the school district for failing to educate their children.

Where do we go from here? After extracting decades of political loyalty from Black Americans to secure electoral victories, Democratic leadership now appears to be shifting its focus, turning to illegal immigrants as the next constituency to fuel the next half-century of political power.

Black Americans do not need permission from politicians or bureaucrats to pursue restoration and a course correction. Here are practical steps that can begin healing and transformation:

Vote for candidates who support policies that help you and your family, regardless of what your friends and family might say. Most often, that candidate will be a Republican.

Restore vocational and technical education so students graduate with marketable skills.

Teach honest history about the consequences of socialism and communism compared with the freedoms and prosperity enabled by capitalism.

Promote entrepreneurial clubs beginning in middle school to encourage innovation and economic independence.

Reform tax policies to incentivize marriage and the nuclear family.

This is exactly why I’m running for governor of Minnesota. I’ve lived the American dream, growing up in the slums of Harlem, New York, and a trailer park in Oklahoma. I delivered pizzas to put myself through college. I went on to serve as an artillery officer in the U.S. Army and built a successful career.

I’ve been married to my wife, Sheila, for 40 years and have five wonderful children. That path was possible only in the United States.

I wouldn’t have been able to do that in today’s Democratic-run Minnesota.

I’m running for governor to save Minnesota and end the biggest political scandal in recent history. Still, it’s not just Minnesota. If these steps are embraced by leaders nationwide, then we can create a renaissance within the Black community: an explosion of prosperity, strength and cultural renewal within a single generation.

Kendall Qualls is a Minnesota gubernatorial candidate and the founder of Take Charge.