During the two years that I taught in an urban public school here in America, I saw my students waste educational opportunities that I couldn’t dream about when I was growing up in a village in Ghana. Constant disciplinary problems meant that most days, I could barely teach. Many of the students, as I quickly found out, came to school completely unprepared to learn.

My daughter Jennifer was born in Ghana a little less than a year before I came to America. She lived in Ghana with her mother until they joined me in the U.S. when she was ten years old. When they arrived, I was just about to begin my graduate studies at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. We rented an apartment in nearby White River Junction, Vermont and enrolled her at the local public school.

Because Jennifer started school a year early in Ghana, she was about to enter fifth grade at the time. With such a drastic change in environment for her, my wife and I both thought about having her start in fourth grade at the school in Vermont. But after the principal and the teachers reviewed her report card from Ghana, they suggested that we let her begin in fifth grade. We could pull her back into fourth grade a month or two later if she couldn’t handle it. To our collective delight, she quickly adjusted to her new surroundings and successfully completed fifth grade at the end of that academic year.

We moved to Wyomissing, Pennsylvania after I finished business school. Jennifer entered seventh grade at the local public school. Six short years later, my wife and I were beyond ecstatic when she was admitted to Princeton for her undergraduate studies.

Jennifer graduated from Princeton at the tender age of twenty-one. My wife and I were always proud of her throughout her years in grade school and college, but I was suddenly reminded of the magnitude of her accomplishments one week before the commencement ceremony at Princeton.

Ever since I left teaching, I had grappled with a lot of questions that were spawned by those classroom experiences. I knew all along that I would at some point explore them in a book, but I was never sure when I could do that. I was always either a busy graduate student, or a full-time worker with little spare time. With Jennifer’s upcoming graduation, it dawned on me that I couldn’t wait any longer. That week, I began writing what became my memoir, The Boy from Boadua: One African’s Journey of Hunger and Sacrifice in Pursuit of a Dream.

The pervasive sense of hopelessness in America’s minority communities is familiar to everyone in this country. Poverty, racism and many of the other socio-economic problems that people face in these communities can crush souls. Quite unfortunately, that fatalism filters through to the young children who live in those environments. It is the reason many of them don’t see the point of education. If the future is that bleak, why bother learning anything?

While I acknowledge the extreme difficulties that most adults in minority communities face in their lives, I have always found it inexcusable that so many fathers in those areas abandon their children. Being poor should not mean that one cannot be present. Disadvantaged children are too often left in the care of overburdened mothers, sometimes grandmothers, who cannot adequately provide the resources that children need to succeed in school.

It is absolutely necessary to highlight societal problems and demand action from government to address them, if that is where responsibility lies. But it is the case that the roles played by individuals, families and communities in shaping children’s life outcomes can often be of even greater importance than anything government does. We do disadvantaged children a great disservice by constantly shining the spotlight brightly on government and not looking inward sufficiently.

My life journey, and that of my daughter, have convinced me of the absolutely vital importance of the home environment on children’s life outcomes. I have written and spoken frequently about how my poor and illiterate father’s relentless work ethic and optimism taught me that I could, to a considerable degree, take my destiny into my own hands. That mindset has carried me to some previously unimaginable places.

Without knowing it, I imparted those values I learned from my father to my daughter. I was a poor, overwhelmed graduate student during her first two years in America. We had one car so I woke up early in the morning to drive my wife to work, take our young son to daycare, before rushing off to classes. I repeated those driving duties in the evenings before going to study group meetings and then doing my readings and assignments for much of the night. I barely slept in those days. Jennifer must have quickly learned that you simply work hard in life. Her work ethic, acquired through osmosis, is what got her into Princeton. And without it, she wouldn’t have survived at Princeton, a rigorous institution filled with academic superstars from elite private schools.

Although I was hungry and poorly clothed during much of my childhood in Ghana, I always took great comfort in the knowledge that I had two loving, supportive parents around me who offered guidance through the way they lived their lives. Jennifer has been extremely lucky in that sense. She has a mother who took great care of her while I was away during her early years, just as my own mother did for me and my siblings while my father toiled away in a jungle for much of my childhood.

I was a supremely proud parent that week as I prepared to travel to the beautiful Princeton campus for the commencement ceremony. But I felt a tinge of sadness. A young girl had traveled from a distant land to America and within such a short period of time, was about to graduate from one of the country’s premier institutions of higher learning. She had all of the promise that such an education brings. I was reminded that most of the children I taught, who were born in this great country, would likely face all kinds of insecurities for the rest of their lives because of that crucial missing ingredient—the insufficient adult presence during their formative years.

I always have those children on my mind. Because of them, mentoring has become a particularly important endeavor for me. I am always looking for opportunities to impart some of the lessons I learned along my life journey to youngsters who are at risk of succumbing to fatalism.