Tag Archives: Fatherlessness

Podcasts

Are two mommies as good for a child as a biological mother and father?

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Cloning her would solve the marriage problem
She protects men and children

Another podcast featuring Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse. This one is a must-hear for men, especially men who feel threatened, unappreciated and fearful about the way that their importance is minimized by the culture.

The MP3 file is here. (11 minutes)

Topics:

  • A new study claims that two women are better for a child than a opposite-sex parents
  • The author of the study thinks that mothers and fathers are interchangeable
  • She doesn’t think that a biological mom and dad are better for children
  • The headlines claimed that two moms are better
  • The research seems to argue that heterosexual fathers are worse for children than mothers
  • The study claims that children benefit when there are no heterosexual men in the home
  • The study claims that gay men are better parents than heterosexual men
  • The study argues that gender roles are a bad thing
  • The goal of these scholars is to abolish distinctions and roles based on sex
  • Th study implies that heterosexual men can be marginalized and excluded from the family
  • This is made worse when courts are able to declare who is a parent and who isn’t

A caller to the show talks about how damaging fatherlessness is for male and female children, too. She refers to what we can see today in the inner city where fathers in the home have been replaced by checks from the government. Dr. Morse mentions that this is also occurring across all races among the lower income classes in the UK. She is concerned about the damage that can result if men lose their traditional role in society, and in the family.

Dr. Morse also wrote an article with more details here (this is mentioned in the podcast).

Excerpt:

Instead allow me a few quotes, from “How Does the Gender of Parents Matter?” to illustrate my point that fatherhood itself is at stake in the same sex parenting debate.

[…]“If contemporary mothering and fathering seem to be converging,… research shows that sizable average differences remain that consistently favor women, inside or outside of marriage.”

See what I mean? Men and women are identical, except women are better.

“Gender nonconformity” used to be considered a negative trait, something, which if found, provided an argument against same sex parenting. But listen to Stacey and Biblarz turn “gender flexibility” into a positive trait.

“12 year old boys in mother only families (whether lesbian or heterosexual) did not differ from sons raised by a mother and a father on masculinity scales but scored over a standard deviation higher on femininity scales. Thus growing up without a father did not impede masculine development but enabled boys to achieve greater gender flexibility.”

“If, as we expect, future research replicates the finding that fatherless parenting fosters greater gender flexibility in boys, this represents a potential benefit. Research implies that adults with androgynous gender traits may enjoy social psychological advantages over more gender traditional peers.”

[…]The bottom line is not really that mothers and fathers are interchangeable, but that masculinity is a bad thing.

Can you imagine if the left gained power and this “research” became the basis for laws? What if these views were pushed on impressionable children in the public schools? What if people who believed things like this were nominated to high positions (let’s call them czars, say)?

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News

MUST-READ: How the feminist welfare state causes generations of fatherlessness

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Minette Marrin

Story by Minette Marrin here from the UK Times.

Excerpt:

In a study presented to the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), the sociologist Geoff Dench argues from the evidence of British Social Attitudes surveys since 1983 that there is a growing number of such extended man-free families: “Three-generation lone-mother families — extended families without men — are developing a new family subculture which involves little paid work.”

The culture is passed on, as you might expect. Lone grannies are significantly more likely to have lone and workless daughters than grannies with husbands or employment, and the same is true of their daughters’ daughters. Baby daughters (and baby sons, too) are imbibing with their mother’s milk the idea that men, like jobs, are largely unnecessary in any serious sense.

The problem with this new type of extended family, Dench says, is that it is not self-sustaining but tends to be parasitic on conventional families in the rest of society. In fact, it appears to lead inexorably to the nightmare of an unproductive dependent underclass.

Clearly one of the worst problems with such a subculture is that although it’s not self-sustaining it has a powerful tendency to replicate itself. A boy in such an environment who grows up without a father figure is much less likely — for many well documented reasons — to turn into the sort of young man a girl could see as a desirable husband. A girl who grows up without a father never learns how important a man could be in her own child’s life. She will not see her mother negotiating an adult relationship with a male companion, so she won’t know how to do it herself or imagine what she is missing.

Before anyone starts to point the finger of blame at such girls, it’s worth remembering that many of them are simply making a rational choice. Badly educated at a rough sink school, facing a dead-end, low-paid job that won’t even cover the cost of childcare, such a girl will naturally decide to do what she wants to do anyway and have a baby to love. She knows she will be better off having welfare babies than stacking shelves and better off, too, if she avoids having a man living with her, even supposing she could find one from among the antisocial, lone-parented youths on her estate. That is because the state subsidises this rational choice, disastrous though it has proved, and has done so for decades.

Women quite understandably now talk of such lifestyle choices as their right. They’ve been encouraged to. And the state has actually made poor men redundant.

Please read the whole thing, this may be the most important thing I have ever posted on this blog.

I want to suggest that it is women’s embrace of radical feminism that has caused the shortage of men. The “compassion” (just give bad people your money!),  and moral relativism (don’t judge me!), etc. that young, unmarried women seem to like so much these days are in direct opposition to marriage, family and parenting. It undermines the reasons why men marry in the first place. And I’ll explain why.

First, moral relativism. Women today seem to have lost the ability to filter out men based on whether they can commit and fill the role of father and husband. They prefer to “have sex like a man” and to not judge anyone. But the reason why they refuse to make moral judgments is because they don’t want to be judged themselves. Instead of learning how to be a wife and mother, women have embraced partying and hooking up. But hooking up (and friends with benefits, and cohabitation) DO NOT result in a man committing to a woman as a husband and father for life.

Second, big government. The solution that women embrace because of their fear of abandonment by men is to lobby for more and more government programs to give them security no matter how they choose. They don’t want to restrain themselves in order to avoid causing expensive social damage, e.g. – STDs, abortion, divorce, etc. They just want to do have fun and then have someone else pay the costs. But if working men have money taxed away to pay for things like abortions and welfare, then they cannot afford to form families on their own – especially if they want to raise Christian children outside the day care/public school system that they are paying for but won’t use.

Could it be that the reason that men are no longer suitable for marriage is because the incentives they had to marry (regular sex, the respect of filling the role of protector and provider, being able to lead the family spiritually in the home, and having well-behaved hand-raised children) have been taken away by moral relativism and big government? Could it be that the man shortage is caused by women who CHOOSE to be irresponsible about who they have sex with, and who CHOOSE to rely on bigger government as a fallback for their poor decision-making?

You all know that I want to fall in love and get married. This is probably the number one thing stopping me from doing that. The feminist idea that men are evil and can be replaced with government programs is now dominant in the West. This basically means that my children will be less prosperous, less free and less secure than I am. I do not want my children to have the poor character that results from being dependent on a secular left government for their livelihood. And I am also concerned about the kind of world the children will live in as the traditional family, which is a bulwark against state power, declines in influence.

I wish women started to think about how marriage and parenting really work. Instead of thinking about recycling and vegetarianism, women should be thinking about forming their own character for the role of wife and mother. They should be thinking about how to strengthen men’s roles instead of weakening them through premarital sex and big government. They should have the attitude of wanting to learn about obstacles that will prevent a good marriage – and not just ideas but threats to the finances and liberty of the family. They should not believe that “everything will work out as long as we love each other”. Love takes preparation and work.

By the way, this article from the libertarian Cato Institute explains more about how the government creates financial incentives for people to break up families and harm children.

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Commentary

A father explains what it is like to grow up fatherless

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Post here on the Goranson family blog. (H/T Caffeinated Thoughts)

Excerpt:

I grew up fatherless.  I saw my dad a few times growing up.  I knew his name and whereabouts.  I spent about two weeks with him in 1991 and he was always very kind to me when we saw each other.  I got cards most birthdays and christmases.  But he wasn’t a part of my life, was never married to my mother, and we lived many states away from each other most of my childhood.  It wasn’t until I was 17 that I began to get to know my dad and to develop the friendship with him that I am grateful we still have.  We are a testimony to genetics and I’m proud to be his son.  My mother was young and I was a surprise.  I never wondered if she loved me but I also knew she struggled in many ways raising a son by herself.

The path of fatherlessness was a long and painful road shrouded in insecurity for me.  It is a path so far off the one God meant for families that I didn’t know I was even on it until I had my own kids.  I knew it was better to have a mom AND a dad but I didn’t understand what I was missing.  As I’ve been reflecting on my role in my own kids’ lives, it’s proven to be extremely painful for me as I look back on my childhood.  So I figured I’d write a bit about it…

What potential in me was lost not having a father and being exposed to men who were perfect losers?  What struggles would have been overcome earlier in life or avoided altogether?  What could my father and I have learned from each other?  How much less equipped am I to be a father and husband having [grown up?] without many positive male role models in my early childhood?  How much relational heartache could I have avoided?  How many unhealthy situations as a kid would have been avoided?  How did the fear and insecurity that plagued my childhood affect me today?

This is a shot in the arm you all you Dads out there who wonder whether anyone understands and appreciates the sacrifices you’re making to be a good husband and father. This post made me feel really sad. I’m always pretty emotional when it comes to things like this, but this one really hit me hard. (Especially the “But can you ever truly recover…” paragraph)

I think that people think that I am super-focused on apologetics, but that is only because I don’t know many people who are dealing with health struggles, family struggles and money struggles. I think that when I take time to read things like this, it helps me to be more alert about taking the opportunity to weep with those who weep. If you have trouble understanding what it is like to be without a father, then read the post and let your heart be informed and softened.

Maybe those of us with intact families should be more interested in opening up our homes to troubled kids to come over and experience life in a healthy family? It seems that being able to observe love in action would really have a big impact.