The Mothering Factor

The Boy Who Became President

On February 12, 1809 a baby boy was born to Nancy Hanks Lincoln and Thomas Lincoln. The boy was born in poverty in a single room log cabin in the Kentucky backwoods. A few years later, the boy named Abraham, his sister, and mother and father moved to the wilds of Illinois where his mother soon got sick and died and his father left the children and went and married a widow named Sarah Bush Johnston. Abraham became close to his stepmother who encouraged him to educate himself and avidly read every book he could get his hands on. He became a shop keeper. He went into politics. He was elected to office. He became the sixteenth US President.

The Boy Who Became a Brain Surgeon

On September 18, 1951 Benjamin Solomon Carson, Sr. was born to parents Robert Solomon Carson and sonya Carson. Robert was a Baptist minister but later became a Cadillac automobile plant laborer. Carson’s mother was thirteen and his father twenty-eight when they married. Ben’s older brother Curtis was born in 1949 and Ben two years later in Detroit, Michigan.

When Ben was five years old, Sonya learned that her husband had another family and had not divorced his first wife so in 1959 when Ben was seven, his parents separated and he, his mother, and brother moved to Boston. There, his mother worked as a domestic worker and moved back to Detroit when Ben was ten. Back in Detroit, Carson and his brother had poor academic performance, but they both improved when their mother limited…