Gee, I wonder if Ms. Stacey could possibly have a vested interest in this subject. Call me cynical, but I get the feeling that Ms. Stacey wouldn’t report anything but the notion that two lesbian parents might be better than married heterosexual parents. After all, her career revolves around gay rights and the “changing family structure.” She doesn’t exactly come across as an objective, unbiased researcher, does she? To say that children do best living with married, heterosexual parents would contradict her entire career.
Can we really trust a gay rights advocate’s study about how great gay parents are? Can that possibly be objective? I highly doubt it. After all, there probably wouldn’t be an assertion that mothers are unnecessary following some over-hyped study saying that two gay men make better parents than a heterosexual couple. This vitriol is reserved solely for fathers, who for inexplicable reasons, have come under attack in our culture today.
As for Pamela Paul’s assertion that children of single mothers are less likely to become delinquents or engage in substance abuse, I’d love to see where she got her information. Because unfortunately for her case against fathers, her facts are patently untrue. As I noted earlier this week, fatherlessness is devastating to children.
Daughters of single-parent households (read: fatherless households) are more likely to marry as teenagers, are significantly more likely to have a child out of wedlock, are more likely to get divorced, and are more likely to be teenage parents. Children in fatherless homes were more likely to suffer child abuse and live in poverty as well.
90% of all children who are homeless and runaways come from fatherless homes. 71% of high-school dropouts come from fatherless homes. 63% of youth suicides come from fatherless homes. 80% of rapists come from fatherless homes. And 85% of all youths in prison are from fatherless homes.
Children from fatherless homes are 9 times more likely both to drop out of high school and to end up in a state-operated institution. They’re 32 times more likely to run away and 20 times more likely to have behavioral disorders. They’re also 10 times more likely to abuse chemical substances (ahem, Ms. Paul). Single-parent families are also substantially more likely to live in poverty.
So, I’m curious: exactly where does this idea come from that children don’t need their fathers, that fathers are somehow unnecessary?
The answer is the male-hating gender feminist goal of feminizing our children, and especially the boys. Consider this little gem from Judith Stacey’s study:
liz says: Isn’t the original comparison children in a home with no father vs. children in a home with no mother? Usually the reasons for no mother in the home involve serious drug abuse or prison, which right there puts the whole family at risk and means the father figure probably has some issues of his own if he ended up with her in the first place. I know a very successful family where the mother died when the children were in middle school and both boys graduated from high school with 4.0 gpas and they are very close.
Smithwick says: Every study I’ve seen has shown that kids of single mothers are more likely to be low achievers, not graduate highschool, get pregnant at a young age (or get a girl pregnant), end up in correctional institutions, and generally be a drain on society.
Not all of course. But in general they are worse off on all key indicators on average than kids with two parents.
If men are so useless, maybe women should stop asking for alimony and child support. Something tells me, though, that these differences are due primarily to the fact that single dads are working full-time (and then some) to support the family, whereas a lot of single moms are working cute “mother’s hours” and supplementing her income with 30% of her ex-husband’s paycheck. Yeah, it’s not hard to be attentive to your kids when you don’t have to work, but that’s not an argument for single motherhood.
Now I’m confused. I thought that Scientific Research had conclusively proven that men and women are exactly the same, and that to even suggest that one sex or the other might be inherently better at something was sexist, outdated, and ignorant.
Once you start saying that women are better at parenting then men, then by definition that means that the two are different. And if women are naturally better at some things, then maybe men are naturally better at other things. But of course, that very line of thought is ridiculous. Just ask Larry Summers.
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