Two women who chose to become parents together seemed to provide a double dose of a middle-class ‘feminine’ approach to parenting… [o]ne could argue that two women parent better on average than a woman and a man, or at least than a woman and man with a traditional division of family labor.
Right. “Feminine” parenting is best, because children don’t need a strong male role model in their lives. In their minds, we have to overly feminize our boys in order to destroy the latent chauvinism that all boys possess. It all boils down to a simple hatred of men, as usual.
The author of this drivel, Pamela Paul, is basically arguing that men are useless in a family, but women keep them around simply because, in her words, “we’ve gotten used to them” — not because they have a role to fill in the structure of the family.
The bad news for Dad is that despite common perception, there’s nothing objectively essential about his contribution. The good news is, we’ve gotten used to him.
Nothing objectively essential? I guess that explains why children who grow up without fathers end up so well-adjusted. (Oh, wait…)
The reality is, children desperately need a good male role model in their lives, and that needs to be their father. This doesn’t mean that they need their mothers any less, which is what enraged gender feminists take this as. It never seems to occur to them that children need both their mother and their father. Mothers and fathers play different, but equally important, roles in their children’s lives. The evidence is overwhelming. Fatherless homes usually end up with children desperately trying to find a substitute for what’s missing in their lives. We aren’t doing our children any favors with this masquerade that fathers are unnecessary.
And what are we teaching our sons, the future fathers of America, by telling them that children don’t need fathers? That dads aren’t necessary? Are they likely to become good fathers if this is what they’ve been indoctrinated with, that they’re a useless part of the family? We are basically giving boys the permission to grow up to be bad husbands and fathers. Why should they bother trying? Fathers are unnecessary.
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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