Panelists discuss values at Pachyderm Club forum

The effects of the breakdown of the American family was the theme of discussion Thursday at the Southeast Missouri Pachyderm Club's Family Values Forum.

"Young people don't believe in marriage anymore because there's been so much divorce," said panelist Molly Strickland, executive director of Lutheran Family and Children's Services. "That's why they're just living together ... to see if they can make it because their parents didn't."

Strickland, who works with women facing unplanned pregnancy, said that about 40 percent of children are now born into single-parent homes.

"Clients who come to us don't have families who can help them. With every client we work with our goal is to help them develop healthy family relationships," Strickland said.

Other panelists at the Family Values Forum included former teacher and school administrator Pete Frazier; Maj. Ben Stilwell of the Salvation Army; Shawn Wasson, pastor at Bethany Baptist Church; and Mike Woelk, a former pastor at Livingway Foursquare Church on Cape Girardeau's south side.

"Politicians use family values to their advantage and people attack it to their advantage," Woelk said.

Frazier, who is running unopposed in November for Cape Girardeau County auditor, said that education that historically took place in the home by family members and at church is now left up to the public school system.

"A child spends more time with their teachers and peers than they do with their families," Frazier said. "As a parent, I want to know that what I'm teaching them at home is reinforced at school."

Stilwell said a lack of family values is contributing to Cape Girardeau's low high school graduation rate. In the Cape Girardeau public school system, the current graduation rate is 72 percent. "We have the highest drop out rate of African-American students in the state," he said. "We have to make an attempt at intervention."

Frazier said the rise in popularity of private and parochial schools is because they provide more set expectations for students.

"Families are sending their children to those schools that are not neglecting family values," Frazier said.

Wasson said churches provide a place for healing those from broken homes.

"I recently counseled a young teenager whose mother went into homosexuality," he said. "I saw the pain her freedom of lifestyle caused her daughter."

Families should be the foundation of American society, not government, several panelists said.

Pachyderm member Paul Summers pointed to President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society initiative as eroding family values.

"When you start paying single parents, they're going to take over, and that's what's happened," Summers said. "If we turn that spigot off, those couples who are cohabitating will say, 'I think it's time we get married.'"

mmiller@semissourian.com

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