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Feminism’s opposition to motherhood makes children less moral

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Are you appalled by the way that children are behaving these days? Blame feminism. (H/T Ruth Blog)

Excerpt:

Many of today’s kids seem to be flunking the daily moral tests of life.

James, a teacher-friend of mine, lamented recently how “morally challenged” his high school students seem to be. “They don’t think twice about lying or slamming someone’s reputation. Cheating on tests is no big deal. They only worry if they’ll get caught.”

Recent headlines and the latest studies paint a dismal picture of cheating, bullying, sexual experimentation, on-line exhibitionism and “cyber-stalking.” College students show declining levels of empathy—a quality viewed as the foundation of ethical behavior. And the problems start early. A quick snapshot of the playground culture captures younger children who bully their way to the top of the slide or push past a crying child to reach the swings first, classic examples of self-absorption and lack of compassion.

What—or who—is to blame?

Here’s the author’s answer, which I agree with:

But new research from Notre Dame Professor Darcia Narvaez suggests that current parenting practices are the more likely culprit. The “moral sense” of children—now and in times past–hinges on whether they learn empathy and concern for others, particularly in the early years of life. ““Our work shows that the roots of moral functioning form early in life, in infancy, and depend on the affective quality of family and community support.” And the problem, according to her research, is that today’s child-rearing practices make that increasingly difficult. The result: “The quality of our cultural moral fiber is diminishing.”

The specific problems with childrearing today might be summed up by what’s missing: time together, physical closeness, and adult responsiveness. In particular, Narvaez contrasts the “emotionally suboptimal day care facilities with little individualized, responsive care” to the optimal situation that keeps children close to mom, encourages parental responsiveness to infant needs, and offers parents and children strong support from extended family and the community.

She cites a specific set of “ancestral” practices that cultivate strong family bonds—and consequently support moral development, particularly compassion and concern for others. These include:

  • Plenty of positive touch (cuddling, carrying, etc.)
  • Parental responsiveness to the child’s needs.
  • Extended breastfeeding (2-5 years)
  • Natural child-birth (which provides a hormonal boost aiding newborn care)
  • Lots of unstructured playtime, with children of varied ages.
  • The presence of additional adults (typically dads and grandmothers) to love, care for, and guide the child. Mom is not alone.

A child’s capacity for morality is grounded on the ability to feel empathy for others. And capacity is built up in the first two years of the child’s life as it bonds to its mother. But what if the mother isn’t there because she is out working? (Either because taxes are too high for just the man to work, or because there is no man in the home at all)

Basically, feminists want women to act like men, and that means that they must work. The way that feminists go about making women work when they would rather stay home is by passing policies that undermine traditional marriage. Things like increased sexual education, no-fault divorce, legalizing prostitution, anti-male divorce courts, replacing men with social programs, increased social programs to replace fathers, higher taxes to force women to work, taxpayer-funded contraceptives, taxpayer-funded abortion, taxpayer-funded IVF,  same-sex marriage, domestic violence fears, rape fears, abuse fears, etc. Anything to get women to think that men are unreliable, that marriage is impossible and that women have to have jobs in order to be full members of society.

The result is children who don’t develop a conscience. Nowhere is this more apparent than in single mother homes, where the generous welfare benefits that left-wing parties provide allow women to have sex with anyone they want without caring about what kind of father and husband the man they have sex with would be. If women don’t have to care about finding a man who can provide, and if the government provides day care, health care and everything else that a man provides, then all the incentives are there for the woman to let the state raise her child. It’s not the man’s job to support her while she raises the children – it’s the states job to raise children. Her job is to work like a man, and pay the state to raise her children for her. Blech!

17 thoughts on “Feminism’s opposition to motherhood makes children less moral”

  1. Tragic, isn’t it?

    I’ve worked at preschool care centres in my younger days, and at the time I decided that if at all possible, my kids (when I have children) will never be in one. Kids need a mother’s love, not a chaotic enviroment where each women is responsible for 30+ kids, where the women in the baby classes smoke when there are no mums near, where it is likely for a well-behaved preschooler to go all day without the teacher making eye contact once, without the adult speaking one sentence with him/ her.

    Kids in even the best schools and preschools learn relationships are temporary, “loving” teachers (and sometimes your best friends too) are moved to another group of kids next year, that kindness now don’t mean long term commitment. If mum has a new boyfriend every 6 months, the message is strengthened at home too.
    It is no surprise that people who grow up like that cannot commit in marriage.

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  3. Daycare for small children is far more damaging to children than parents and media dare admit. My daughter and I volunteered once a week for two years to read to a 3 year old toddler class in a Christian daycare. After reading I would sit and watch while my daughter played with and entertained the kids. The level of cruelty to each other and their understanding (at such a young age) that they needed to hide their cruelty amazed me. These three year olds had clever ways to hurt each other to get their way or to get retribution that the teachers never saw and when the teacher’s noticed a problem they put on blank masks of angels who didn’t know a thing. In daycares there are just too many children and the teachers just don’t have the vested interest in making sure the children grow up to be good people-they have no obligation to teach morality or empathy. The teachers just have to keep the children from doing serious harm to themselves and each other and get through her working day.

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  4. Excellent post.

    Modern feminism teaches women that motherhood is not real “work” and makes women who do pursue motherhood as a vocation feel inferior. It undervalues what is an extremely important job. It also teaches this to children concerning what their mothers do in parenting them – which contributes to a contempt for parental authority in children.

    Feminism is not pro-woman. It’s only pro a certain kind of woman. And I say this as a childless, single woman who works in a mainly male industry.

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  5. Mary, can you please provide support for your claim that “Feminism is not pro-woman”? Which feminists? Can you offer a name that I can look up?

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    1. I know you want MARY to respond, but until she does, am I allowed to reply?

      Look, here is arch-feminist Maureen Dowd, hater of men and despiser of children, screeching like a harpy in the radically leftist New York Times, and citing the statistics that prove Mary’s point.

      Story:

      Quote:

      In the early ’70s, breaking out of the domestic cocoon, leaving their mothers’ circumscribed lives behind, young women felt exhilarated and bold.

      But the more women have achieved, the more they seem aggrieved. Did the feminist revolution end up benefiting men more than women?

      According to the General Social Survey, which has tracked Americans’ mood since 1972, and five other major studies around the world, women are getting gloomier and men are getting happier.

      Before the ’70s, there was a gender gap in America in which women felt greater well-being. Now there’s a gender gap in which men feel better about their lives.

      As Arianna Huffington points out in a blog post headlined “The Sad, Shocking Truth About How Women Are Feeling”: “It doesn’t matter what their marital status is, how much money they make, whether or not they have children, their ethnic background, or the country they live in. Women around the world are in a funk.”

      That’s just for effect. The real data is here in this UK Times article. (which Mary sent me)

      Source:
      http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6395879.ece

      Quote:

      After 40 years of fighting for equality, it seems that women are no happier. In fact, women in many countries have been growing steadily unhappier compared with men, according to a study published this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research in the United States.

      In The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers of the University of Pennsylvania, begin by noting the gains.

      “By many measures the progress of women over recent decades has been extraordinary: the gender wage gap has partly closed; educational attainment has risen and is now surpassing that of men; women have gained an unprecedented level of control over fertility; (and) technological change in the form of new domestic appliances has freed women from domestic drudgery,” they wrote.

      Yet Stevenson and Wolfers have found that in America women’s happiness, far from rising, has fallen “both absolutely and relatively to that of men”. Where women in the 1970s reported themselves to be significantly happier than men, now for the first time they are reporting levels of happiness lower than men.

      In Europe, people’s sense of happiness has risen slightly, but less so for women than men. In 12 European countries, including Britain, the happiness of women has fallen relative to that of men.

      The authors readily admit that measuring happiness is necessarily a subjective task, but the overall trend from the data, compiled from social surveys conducted over many years, is clear and compelling.

      I hope that will hold you until Mary can give you her answer.

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    2. Thanks, Wintery! Yes, feminism has NOT succeeded in making women happier. It has made them less happy instead.

      McS, I referred to modern feminism. This is not the feminism that allows you and I to vote, but the feminism that tells us to hate men and regard motherhood as a burden.

      Wintery has given excellent evidence of how feminism is making women miserable. I’d like to supplement that by giving you a specific example.

      Let’s look at feminist icon, Alice Walker. She’s best known for her book, “The Color Purple”, which was a prescribed setwork for me at university. This book is horribly distorted. Every man in the book is either a wife beater, rapist, child molester, or some combination of these.

      I suggest reading this article from Alice’s daughter, Rebecca Walker, on what it was like growing up with a radical feminist for a mother:
      http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1021293/How-mothers-fanatical-feminist-views-tore-apart-daughter-The-Color-Purple-author.html

      Read the whole thing. It’s shocking.

      Here is Rebecca’s assessment of feminism:

      “Feminism has betrayed an entire generation of women into childlessness. It is devastating. But far from taking responsibility for any of this, the leaders of the women’s movement close ranks against anyone who dares to question them – as I have learned to my cost. I don’t want to hurt my mother, but I cannot stay silent. I believe feminism is an experiment, and all experiments need to be assessed on their results. Then, when you see huge mistakes have been paid, you need to make alterations.”

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      1. Thanks Mary.

        If the goal is to strengthen marriage, then I recommend that we pursue policies that will strengthen the position of men in their roles as husbands and fathers – exactly what feminists are trying to undermine.

        First of all, you have to read feminists to understand that they think women are weak and that they can only be validated if they are identical to men. Their goal is the obliteration of all sex differences. That means making women act like men, and making men act like women. It also means making it unsafe for women to trust men by destabilizing marriage with left-wing Democrat initiatives like taxpayer-funded contraception, sex education in public schools, taxpayer-funded health care for STDs/IVF/abortions, co-ed schools, title IX, no-fault divorce to create a divorce epidemic, manufacturing crises about rape statistics and domestic violence and false accusations of child abuse, high taxes, welfare, speech codes, anti-male courts, lenience to female violent offenders, misandry in advertising, etc. Everything to scare women into careers and to reduce men to the level of irresponsible sex-crazed raping beasts. That’s feminism, and it is the official platform of the Democrat party.

        The reason why women cannot find men who are willing to take care of them is because feminists DON’T WANT men to take care of women. The way to fix the problem is using policies. The stupid, ignorant Mark Driscoll solution of nagging men to be better husbands is really just another way of insulting men after their capability to be husbands and fathers has been destroyed with bad feminist policies.

        Either marriage-minded women will denounce feminism and socialism, and lobby for changes in policy, or they can remain single and “marry” the secular-leftist state and have babies out of wedlock who will be raised by the state. Insofar as 77% of young, unmarried women persist in voting Democrat, they really are saying that they don’t want men to take care of them – they want GOVERNMENT to take care of them, because they prefer to use men for amusement rather than to love them and serve them. They don’t want the moral obligations of a relationship with a man and children, they just want sperm donors and wallets. That’s where women are today – drinking themselves into a stupor and hooking up with strangers then depending on government to raise the children out of wedlock. THEY DO NOT WANT TO THINK ABOUT WHAT POLICIES MAKE RELATIONSHIPS WORK. THEY DO NOT WANT TO THINK ABOUT THEIR MORAL OBLIGATIONS IN A RELATIONSHIP TO MEN AND CHILDREN.

        I think marriage-minded women are right to want nothing to do with the feminist mistake.

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        1. Very black and white thinking.
          Very all-or-nothing thinking.

          I totally get that there is an extreme in feminism that I don’t like.
          I also agree that this branch of feminism mixed with the over-the-top porn culture is death and moral decay.

          However, sometimes the cure is not always well thought out.

          Rather than finding the goodly balance that benifits both, both sides broad brush each other and rush to their own extremes. And neither extreme is healthy.

          I’m all for policies that help men. I’m also all for policies that supposedly help women, but actually hurt them to be dismantled.

          But I’m very much against the frothing at the mouth hatred you have towards these women and holding them solely responsible for the ills of our culture.
          They contribute, to be sure. But they didn’t start the fire. It has always been burning since the world’s been turning.

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          1. Rrrarrr! I’m a meany! I was a bit mean, but that’s the depth of what I really think. It’s not any worse than that, at least. What I would like is to find nice wife who understands all of this and to carry her off to the woods somewhere where I can work from remote doing bug fixes and just raise our kids without having to have our lives interfered with by social engineers and the violent kids they crate with their fatherlessness-encouraging. I would like to make some woman who understands very happy, but where can we go to escape the people who want to break us up and indoctrinate our kids into moral relativism and sexual libertinism? They are so anxious to escape traditional values that they have no respect for me earning to pay to do things MY WAY.

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        2. Er, Wintery… Now you just heard me say that feminism is messed up. But when you blame ALL of the problems on feminism, it’s a bit extreme – as Mara points out.

          This paragraph is the one that irks me:
          “The reason why women cannot find men who are willing to take care of them is because feminists DON’T WANT men to take care of women. The way to fix the problem is using policies. The stupid, ignorant Mark Driscoll solution of nagging men to be better husbands is really just another way of insulting men after their capability to be husbands and fathers has been destroyed with bad feminist policies.”

          Throughout history there have been evil governments with bad policies. But that doesn’t give us an excuse to take our lead from their policies. Especially those of us who are Christian and answer to a higher Government. Yes, we should try as hard as we can to change those bad policies. I agree with you 100%. But it’s still not an excuse for bad behaviour. The apostle Paul wrote to people living under a pagan government that was profoundly anti-Christian, but he didn’t say “oh well, the government is bad so you must just fix that and if they won’t listen you now have an excuse”. On the contrary, he told them the following: “Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.” (Romans 12:1-2) The apostle Peter told Christians the following: “Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.” (1 Peter 2:12)

          By your logic, bad men are not responsible for their bad actions and the corollary is that bad women are not responsible for the evils they commit in the name of feminism either. If bad men are just being bad because feminist policies discourage good behaviour and encourage bad behaviour, then bad women are being bad because feminist propaganda (which women are fed by feminist teachers at all-girls schools – I know because I went to one) discourages good behaviour and encourages bad behaviour. You’re starting to sound like those people who want to blame every criminal’s evil actions on some lack of love in his childhood. It’s a combination of bad influence and evil in human nature. We need to attack the bad influences AND combat the sin nature.

          So the “stupid, ignorant Mark Driscoll solution of nagging men to be better husbands” is actually not so stupid and ignorant after all – unless you consider the apostles Paul and Peter to be equally stupid and ignorant. He’s telling men not to conform to what feminism tells them they should be. And he’s telling women to expect men to behave like men, not like the feminized creatures that feminism tells women that men should be. I don’t agree with everything Mark D says, but on this issue, I think he’s right.

          Do you really think this is the only time that it’s been this bad? I think that when you read the epistles you need see that they’re written to people living in a culture a LOT LIKE OURS – worse in some ways. The West is increasingly moving towards neopaganism, with its mother goddess ideologies (feminism gone religious) and its all-religions-are-one monism. Read Peter Jones (www.truthxchange.com).

          We should try to change the culture and evil laws, but we shouldn’t throw in the towel when it comes to living life and think we have an excuse because the world is bad. Of course the world is bad! It hates Christ. Jesus told us it would hate us too because it hates Him. We shouldn’t be surprised. We’re “strangers and aliens” (in the words of Peter again). This is NOT our home. When we die we’ll go home. We shouldn’t expect this world to be comfy. We’re on a mission for Jesus, in enemy territory, fighting the prince of this world, and winning others to our King. Life isn’t safe. It hasn’t been since the Fall. It’s dangerous. We need to prepare ourselves, to arm ourselves spiritually, to do what we can to build forts, and stop the advancement of the enemy. But we should expect a spiritual war zone. And we should expect to have to deal with enemy propaganda. And we can’t blame the enemy alone when we listen to that propaganda, because we should know better! But in the middle of all the mess, we can fight with confidence and fearlessness because the victory has already been won by Jesus.

          Oh and I think you make a really good point that feminists think that traditional women are weak. They underestimate the way in which women can fight as women instead of trying to be men. Women can do amazing things by raising godly children. Winston Churchill got it right: “The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.”

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          1. Thank you, Mary, for saying so well what I didn’t have time for. Thank you for understanding when I slapped the Billy Joel song on the comment above, what that meant.

            Please note:
            Winston Churchhill was also not opposed to women taking up arms against the Germans. He told some younger female relative (can’t remember if it was a daughter-in-law, niece or what) at the dinner table that if the Germans set foot on their island, every man, woman, and child needed to take up whatever weapon available and fight to their last breath.
            He understood the evil.
            He understood the need.
            He knew women had power, both in cradle rocking, and in knock down, drag out, never surrender defense.

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          2. Agreed! Women can do anything they want if there is the need to, but I don’t want them to be forced to just for ideology. I like taking care of women, and being kind to them. As a man, I have talked to women about hopes, dreams, fears, and feelings for an extended period with eye contact. It makes them cry. Women are not like men and you have to give them what they want, not what they are told to want which makes them miserable. Don’t coerce them into having sex like men and working like men if they don’t want to. Give them love and time to relate to children if that’s what makes them happiest. Protect them, provide for them, love them. Am I crazy to think this?

            That’s why I recommended the policy changes to empower men and to make men capable of doing what men do.

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          3. Wintery, you are NOT crazy. What you want is good. And we should pursue better policies. But just because the government has some crummy policies it doesn’t excuse us from making good decisions in spite of them.

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          4. The question is whether I can do better for the Lord by committing 100% of my effort to non-family tasks instead of splitting my time between Christian duties and fighting against the state. If I have $1000, and I spend $1000 on Christian speakers, isn’t that better than spending $500 dollars on Christian speakers and $500 on private school tuition, because I can’t send my children to public schools to be indoctrinated by Kevin Jennings at age 5. That’s the trade-off. What is the right answer? I don’t know.

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          5. Oh I hear you. Schooling ain’t what it used to be. :-P No 6 year old of mine is getting taught that stuff. And it’s a pity that one has to spend money because the public schools are rotten, but you have to do what you have to do. And it’s no good getting Christian speakers to speak to other people’s kids and your own kids get fed mental dross. So protecting your kids’ education is an extension of you apologetics ministry – just within the home and primarily a parental responsibility.

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