We love to celebrate the degrees. The businesses. The “I did it on my own.” But there’s a conversation we keep sidestepping and it’s costing our sons.
Let me tell you what happened before I wrote this post.
I went to the girlies first. I posted a question about whether Black women who are leading their households should be intentionally teaching their sons about provision. About financial responsibility. About being a provider.
And as I suspected? The room got quiet real fast.
That’s a man’s role.
And I heard it. I understood it, even. Because there’s something in us that holds onto the idea that if we teach our sons those things, we’re somehow accepting a future where there’s no man in the picture. Like naming our reality is the same as surrendering to it.
But here’s what I can’t sit with: 67% of Black households are led by women. That’s not a narrative. That’s the data. And if we know that, if we boost about our degrees and our six figure businesses and our ability to hold everything down, then we have to reckon with what we’re passing down. Or not passing down.
So let’s talk. No judgment. No Black mom shaming. Just an honest conversation and a perspective that might shake the group chat… because two things can be true at the same time, and we’ve been acting like they can’t.
The Stat Nobody Wants to Sit With
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Black women head households at a higher rate than any other demographic group in America. Nearly 4 in 10 Black children are being raised in single mother households. And before we rush past that number, let’s be honest about what it carries.
Those numbers tells a story about the woman waking up before everyone else, stretching the budget, navigating schools and doctors and broken appliances and emotional meltdowns she is the provision in that home. She is the financial strategy. She is the model.
So why …why …are so many of us still telling our sons that managing money, building wealth, and providing for a family is “a man thing to figure out when he finds a man to show him”?
We are the model who is showing him. Right now. By default. Whether we name it or not.
Are We Raising Daughters & Coddling Our Sons?
Dr. Joy DeGruy, author of Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, has written and spoken extensively about the intergenerational trauma patterns embedded in Black family systems. One of those patterns? The way Black mothers out of love, out of fear, out of grief, often over protect their sons in ways that leave them emotionally and practically underprepared for adulthood.
We teach our daughters to cook, clean, manage a home, build credit, handle their business. We tell them, “Nobody’s going to save you, baby. You better know how.”
And then we turn to our sons and say, “You don’t have to worry about that.”
Out of love. Out of a desire to give him something soft in a world that’s going to be hard on him. I understand that impulse deep in my bones.
But softness without substance isn’t protection. It’s a setup.
Dr. Na’im Akbar, Black psychologist and scholar, wrote in Chains and Images of Psychological Slavery that the miseducation of Black men begins in the home not just in systems. That when boys are not given real responsibility, real expectation, and real mentorship in the formative years, they reach adulthood without the internal architecture to carry it.
We’re building girls who can run the world and boys who don’t know how to run a household.
That’s not equity. That’s not preparation. And in the name of love, it is genuinely doing harm.
Provision Is Not Just a Man’s Word
Here is where the theology matters to me. Because this community is faith-lrooted, and I know some of y’all are sitting in your tradition saying, “But the Bible says the man is the provider.”
And I’m not here to argue that away. I believe in God-ordained covering too.
But let me introduce you to Dr. Obery Hendricks Jr., New Testament scholar and author of The Politics of Jesus. Hendricks consistently challenges the way scripture gets weaponized to maintain comfort rather than pursue justice. He’d ask us: whose comfort does it serve when a Black boy grows up without provision skills, financial literacy, or a model of healthy stewardship?
Let me also bring in Howard Thurman, theologian, mystic, mentor to Dr. King. In Jesus and the Disinherited, Thurman wrote about how the disinherited must find inner resources and self determined dignity when external systems fail them. He wasn’t talking about money specifically but the principle stands. You cannot wait for a system or a person who isn’t there to hand you your dignity. You cultivate it. You develop it. You pass it down.
Provision is a spiritual posture before it’s a gender role. It means: I am prepared. I am equipped. I am not a burden on others because I have cultivated what I need to give.
That’s not masculine or feminine. That’s stewardship. And the Bible has a lot to say about stewardship that doesn’t come with a gender caveat.
What We’re Actually Modeling
I want to name something tender here before I keep going, because this is The Circle, and we don’t just swing the sword without holding space.
Many of us are doing the absolute most. Working. Parenting. Healing. Trying to break cycles while still living inside them. The fact that provision education has fallen through the cracks isn’t because we don’t love our sons. It’s because we never got the blueprint either.
We were told to survive. Not to build.
And so here we are building anyway but sometimes we build around our sons instead of with them.
Dr. Jawanza Kunjufu, one of the most cited Black male education scholars in the country, spent decades researching the “Fourth Grade Failure Syndrome” the documented pattern of Black boys who enter school with enthusiasm and exit the elementary years disengaged, underdisciplined, and spiritually deflated. His work in Countering the Conspiracy to Destroy Black Boys argues plainly: Black boys need high expectation, real responsibility, and conscious mentorship. When mothers are the primary caregiver, that work does not disappear. It falls to her.
High expectation is not hard heartedness.
Teaching him to cook, manage money, work with his hands, honor a commitment, save before he spends and that’s not stripping him of his boyhood. That’s investing in his manhood.
Two Things Can Be True
Here’s what I promised you at the start of this post, so let me deliver it.
One: Yes, ideally, a child …especially a son, benefits from having a stable, positive, provision modeling male in the home. The research on father absence and its impact on Black boys is real. Boys who grow up without fathers are statistically more likely to struggle academically, financially, and emotionally. That matters. We don’t have to pretend it doesn’t.
Two: And …that is not the hand every family was dealt. And lamenting the ideal while failing the child in front of you is not faithfulness. It’s avoidance.
Both of those things are true.
We can grieve the absence of what should have been and still show up fully for what is. We can want a provider husband for our sons to watch and be the one who teaches him to provide. We can hold the theology and hold the household.
Because one thing about Black women, we have always been asked to do the impossible. And we’ve always found a way.
The question is whether we do it consciously or whether we keep doing it with a blind spot that costs our sons.
What Provision Education Actually Looks Like
If we didn’t get it, we have to go get it so we can give it. That’s the whole circle. That’s what becoming is. You don’t wait until you’re fully healed and fully equipped to start showing up differently for your children. You become in real time. You learn and then you teach.
If you’re a single mom or a mother in any household where this education isn’t happening, here are real, tangible ways to start:
Financial literacy starts at 5. Give him an allowance with structure. Three jars: spend, save, give. Name them. Explain them. Let him make decisions and feel the consequence of them.
At 10, he should know your household runs on money you manage. Not to burden him … to demystify it. “We have a budget. This is what we spend on groceries. This is what we can’t spend this month.” Normalize the conversation.
At 13, teach him to cook a full meal. Not as a favor to his future wife. As a life skill. As dignity.
At 16, he should understand credit. What it is. How it works. What it costs you when you don’t have it.
At 18, he leaves your home with financial literacy, not just a high school diploma. Because the world does not grade on a curve for Black boys who weren’t taught.
This is not a man’s job to give him. This is your job. Right now. In this season.
The Legacy Question
Iyanla Vanzant said something years ago that stayed with me: “You can’t give what you don’t have.”
That’s the root of this entire conversation.
The stat we keep ignoring is this one: Boys raised by single mothers who are intentional, who teach both hard skills and emotional intelligence, who hold high expectation alongside deep love, those boys do well. That’s not anecdote. That’s documented.
You are not a deficit in your son’s life.
But you have to show up as the provision model you’ve been waiting for someone else to be.
That is the work. It’s unglamorous. It doesn’t get as many amens as talking about what we deserve.
But it is the work.
Let’s Keep the Conversation Going
Drop in the comments: What did you learn about money and provision growing up, and what do you wish you’d been taught?
And if you have sons: What are you intentionally teaching them that you had to learn the hard way?
This is a circle. We don’t process alone.
References & Scholars Cited:
- Dr. Joy DeGruy — Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome
- Dr. Na’im Akbar — Chains and Images of Psychological Slavery
- Dr. Jawanza Kunjufu — Countering the Conspiracy to Destroy Black Boys
- Dr. Obery Hendricks Jr. — The Politics of Jesus
- Howard Thurman — Jesus and the Disinherited
- U.S. Census Bureau — Single-parent household demographic data
- Iyanla Vanzant — speaker, author, life coach
Leave a Reply