Photo courtesy of Boswell Book Company
In the United States, roughly half of young mothers under the age of 25 are raising children alone. Said another way, about 50% of young families currently have no father figure in the home. As a society, we tend to focus much more frequently on the stories—and especially the hardships and challenges—facing young mothers, while forgetting to consider the struggles that young fathers are simultaneously facing.
UW-Milwaukee’s Paul Florsheim has researched the stories of more than 1,000 men in Chicago and Salt Lake City, and his surprising and revealing findings, focusing on 200 young male father figures, are captured in his book, Lost and Found: Young Fathers in the Age of Unwed Parenthood. Rather than simply assigning blame to these young men, Florsheim’s research provides a more nuanced perspective on the state of many young families in America and explains, in often startling ways, how we’ve arrived at this phenomenon.
Florsheim is a professor in UWM’s Joseph J. Zilber School of Public Health, where he focuses on public health issues facing high-risk adolescents, including the prevention of relationship problems. He is currently involved in a number of social science projects, including the development of a co-parenting support program for pregnant teens and their partners, as well as an innovative health curriculum for high school students. Florsheim will appear at Boswell Book Co. at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 13, to discuss Lost and Found in an event co-sponsored by the UWM School of Public Health. (Jenni Herrick)
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Noon to the Butterfly
Why not share the cost of printing by sharing the pages of a book? Noon to the Butterfly is a slender, well-designed poetry collection by Jamie Robin Spatt and local musician Homerow. Both are Milwaukeeans, albeit Spatt is now teaching in San Francisco. The poems are not co-written (“The fonts are different, and there’s a hint of whose each is in the first poem,” Homerow says), and differences in style can be discerned. Like all good poetry, they force readers to slow down, ponder and embrace the nuances of language. “The pearl to the oyster is always perplexing.” Yes! (David Luhrssen)
