"In Michigan, nearly 500 youths age out annually, usually at 18. A study of 264 former foster children, released in October by psychologists at Wayne State University, showed how poorly many had fared.

Youths from Detroit and two surrounding counties who aged out in 2002 and 2003, mainly African-American, were surveyed three and a half years after they left care. Seventeen percent had stayed in the streets or in shelters for an average of two months each. Some 33 percent had spend long periods 'couch surfing' with friends or relatives.

Four in ten were high school graduates. The average youth had been unemployed half the time since leaving care; most jobs were in fast food, averaging just $600 per month. More than one in four males had spent time in jail."

"When current and former foster children formed a group to help youths who had turned 18 and were 'aging out' of the system, one of the first things they did was hold a luggage drive.

'We saw that a lot of the kids were taking their clothes out in garbage bags,' said Chilton Brown, 23, a former foster child who spent ages 3 to 18 as a ward of the state, bouncing around 15 family homes or group residences.

A life contained in green plastic bags: it is the kind of humiliating detail that hits home hardest among foster youths themselves. It is also a telling sign of how unprepared many of these 18-year-olds are to live on their own, without families, jobs or school diplomas to shore them up.

Though progressive intellectuals branded Daniel Patrick Moynihan a racist when he issued his famous 1965 report on The Negro Family, the evidence continues to mount that he was absolutely right to have sounded the alarm about the baleful consequences of the breakdown of black family life.  The latest evidence vindicating Moynihan's prescient report appears in a study recently published in the Journal of Marriage and Family by researchers at the Universities of Washington and Michigan.  Based on national probability data collected for African Americans ages 15 to 54 between 1990 and 1992, this new study clearly indicates that blacks who lack the protection of wedlock are particularly exposed to financial and psychological distress.

In their overall analysis of the data, the Washington and Michigan scholars reach an unsurprising conclusion: "As predicted by the process of social stress theory, financial strain and traumatic events had adverse effects on mental health status."  But more careful parsing of the data reveals that not all African Americans are equally vulnerable to stress, trauma, and psychological malaise. "Compared to married [African American] individuals," the researchers conclude, "unmarried persons report both more financial strain and traumatic events, more negative interactions with relatives, and more depressive symptoms."

The finding that unmarried blacks are subject to more financial strain, more traumatic events, and more depression than married peers would hardly have surprised Moynihan.  And the finding that unmarried blacks experience distinctively more negative relationships with their relatives than do married blacks casts serious doubt on an argument often advanced by progressives who discounted Moynihan's report.  For that finding undercuts the argument that black extended families have compensated for the disappearance of intact black nuclear families.  It would appear that even in their relationships with their extended families, divorced and never-married blacks are significantly worse off than their married black peers.