Tag Archives: Marriage

Polemics

New Oxford University study links non-family day care to anti-social behavior

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From the UK Telegraph. (H/T Dina)

Excerpt:

Academics at Oxford University discovered that exposure to some forms of early education contributed to bad behaviour and could be linked to emotional problems.

The study, based on an analysis of infants from almost 1,000 families, showed that the strongest influence on children came from within the home itself.

Children raised in poor families with high levels of parental stress or mental health problems were most at risk of developing emotional problems by the time they started school, it emerged.

The research also uncovered trends relating to children who were in formal child care — away from their parents.

The disclosure will revive debate over the best way to raise children amid a surge in the number of under-fives enrolled in nurseries and with childminders in the past 20 years. Figures from the Department for Education show that 441,000 children under five are in day nurseries while another 272,000 are being looked after by childminders.

[…]In the Oxford study, researchers recruited 991 families with children aged three months. Mothers had an average age of 30.

Researchers assessed children at the age of four through questionnaires about their behaviour and emotions completed by teachers and parents. They also observed care provided by mothers and observed non-parental care for at least 90 minutes for those children placed in formal childcare settings.

The report, published in the journal Child: Care, Health and Development, said that “children who spent more time in group care, mainly nursery care, were more likely to have behavioural problems, particularly hyperactivity”.

The study, led by Prof Alan Stein, of Oxford’s Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, found that “spending more time in day care centres, over the total period was a predictor of total problem scores”.

“Children who spent more time in day care centres were more likely to be hyperactive,” it said. “Children receiving more care by childminders were more likely to have peer problems.”

The authors added: “The findings in relation to childminding suggest that it might be out of home care rather than group care that raises the risk of behavioural difficulties.”

The researchers also tracked other forms of early years care and found benefits to different approaches.

They found that children who spent more time in pre-school playgroups – normally for a few hours a day, rather than a full-time nursery – had fewer problems.

More time with a nanny in parents’ own home predicted higher levels of “pro-social behaviour”, showing willingness to help others, it emerged.

The study said: “These findings suggest that interventions to enhance children’s emotional and behavioural development might best focus on supporting families and augmenting the quality of care in the home.”

A study like this will be useful when debating people with open minds, but hardcore feminists and socialists, who want women to work in order to fund bigger government, will not be moved. Because for them, it’s not about evidence. It’s about ideology. That’s why we have to be careful about letting people like that get elected.

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Commentary

Readers vote: who is to blame for this problematic marriage? The wife or the husband?

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Please read the excerpt from the article BEFORE you vote in the poll at the bottom of the post! Thanks.

Letitia the Damsel posted this article from the UK Daily Mail on my Facebook page. The article is written by a woman who rejects the traditional roles and responsibilities of women in marriage.

She writes:

My husband is the kindest, most considerate man in the world. During the seven years we’ve been married, Ben has done most of the cooking, cleaning and ironing without ever being asked.

He brings me an organic buffalo milk cappuccino every morning in bed and once spent hours making fresh syrup from rhubarb to add to my favourite champagne after I’d given birth. And yes, he works full-time.

But for all he does for me, anxious to make everything in my life better, he gets a raw deal in return.

I am shamefully neglectful of my wifely duties. In fact, I am the anti-wife.

The trouble is that I just can’t do the subservient partner thing. Ben is more likely to arrive at our home in Twickenham, South-West London, after a hard day’s work and find me having a manicure or checking Facebook than slaving over a hot stove.

This may make me sound selfish, but I’m just being honest. At 39, I’ve never ironed a single item of my husband’s clothing. I rarely cook for him either. Why would I bother when he’s so much better at it than I am?

Last Christmas, he produced a lavish three-course lunch and booked a 15th-century cottage for our whole family to eat it in. All I did was hold out my champagne glass for him to refill while saying: ‘Well done, darling.’

And if you think I reward his sterling domestic efforts with treats in the bedroom, I’m afraid I fail in that department, too. Intimacy is reserved only for his birthdays – and then just the ones with a zero.

I felt occasional pangs of guilt about our unusual dynamic during the first year of our marriage, but now I find it liberating. He even refers to me as the ‘household manager’ because I’m an expert in the art of delegation.

Recently, Ben’s job for an organic fruit and vegetable box delivery scheme meant he was away on business for three weeks.

Before he left, I found him packing the freezer with organic ready meals and ringing round for short-term nannies to take care of our children, Ronnie, six, and Stanley, two.

The truth is that I’m just too busy and involved in my career as a writer to be a traditional, caring wife.

I work from home and, like most self-employed people in a recession, I push myself to the limit. I set my alarm for 6am so I can squeeze in an hour of work before the school run and I often write until midnight.

My job often means being away from home during the evenings and weekends, which means the lion’s share of the childcare falls to Ben. Even when I am home, I keep one eye glued to my iPhone for fear of missing a work call.

Ben bemoans my inability to achieve a work/life balance. He sees the word ‘driven’ as a negative, while I think I’m aspirational and ambitious. Now, I know what you’re thinking – that I must earn more than Ben. But no, I don’t.

He’s the breadwinner and a domestic god. But my work is so all-consuming there’s little of me left to go round by the time I switch off my laptop. Don’t get me wrong – I love Ben very much and regard our marriage as happy. And he could never claim breach of contract because he always knew I was a workaholic. 

[…]When we began dating in 2003, I was helping to launch a woman’s magazine, which required me to be at work from 8am until 11pm.

It was Ben’s touching gesture of sending boxes of Krispy Kreme doughnuts to the office that made me realise what an excellent husband he’d make.

But when, in the early throes of our relationship, he mooted the idea I might one day be a ‘stay-at-home mum’, I bristled. ‘But my mum stayed at home for the first five years of my life,’ he said. 

‘That’s never going to happen,’ I replied sharply. The matter was never raised again.

[…]It’s my fault that he returns home to find no dinner and our children running amok.

But I work hard, too, and that changes everything. While I love my children deeply, wiping noses, bottoms and encrusted beans off the floor doesn’t inspire me in the way my work does.

I’m too busy to share the chores. After a day of writing, I feel happy and complete; after a day with the children, I am frazzled.

After the birth of our first son, I went back to my £60,000-a-year job as deputy editor of a national magazine and put Ronnie full-time into an eye-wateringly expensive nursery.

I felt guilty about it, and working 8am to 6pm every day and barely seeing my son just compounded that guilt. But I didn’t want to give up work.

You might think me self-obsessed, but that’s a price I’m willing to pay for my happiness.

Just before the birth of our second son, I decided to leave my job and pursue a career as a writer after being offered a generous redundancy package.

But instead of relaxing into my new job, I allowed work to seep into all areas of my life.

That is why I ignored cripplingly painful contractions ten minutes apart and carried on writing to meet a deadline.

I was back at work just two weeks after giving birth to Stanley, breast-feeding while conducting tricky phone interviews.

Now that you read the excerpt, please vote in the poll:

I’ll vote and comment later tonight to say how I voted.

By the way, if you like the articles that Letitia finds, you can hear her on her Visible Conservative podcasts on Fridays. Here’s the most recent one and the opening monologue transcript is here on Letitia’s blog. If you’re like me, and you like hearing conservative women talk passionately about issues that matter, you’ll love this podcast. I never miss it.

UPDATE: I voted and my vote was to blame the man entirely. He chose this woman to marry and to mother his children. He knew she was unqualified to be a wife and mother and married her anyway. It’s ALL HIS FAULT. She is completely innocent because she was bad BEFORE the marriage and he knew it.

You cannot blame a bad woman for continuing to act badly after you marry her. If she is bad before, she’ll be bad after. If she has no moral standard for marriage before, then she’ll have no moral standard after. She doesn’t BELIEVE that she is doing anything wrong – either before or after marriage. You can’t blame her for acting according to her own feminist worldview. It’s the MAN who is to blame for choosing her.

The man shouldn’t even be opening his mouth to complain about her after he chose her. He chose her, and he has no right now to blame her or complain about it. You can’t expect traditional wife and mother behavior when you marry someone who explicitly repudiates those roles. Blame the man 100%. And what’s more he is EVIL to have inflicted this on his children.

You can’t go to the pet store and pass by all the cats, dogs and birds and buy an alligator then complain when you get the thing home and it bites your arms off. It’s a freaking alligator, and you knew that when you bought it. It’s your fault.

News

How do children end up fatherless? One woman’s story

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Dina sent me this revealing article from the UK Daily Mail. It tells the story of a woman whose children are fatherless.

Excerpt:

My marriage ended, without rancour or argument, 18 months after it had begun. There was no recrimination, just a realisation, as sharp as physical pain, that we would never — could never — agree on one fundamental point.

I wanted children; my husband Anthony did not. You may think we should have resolved this crucial issue long before we bought a house and vowed to spend the rest of our lives together, but love had a way of blinding us to the depth of our disagreement.

[…]Today, I am 37 and a single mum to gorgeous three-month-old twin boys Charlie and William. They were conceived through IVF, using my eggs and sperm from an anonymous donor, and the love I feel for them is all-consuming.

[…]Anthony, a policeman, was easy and fun; we chatted comfortably together, and when we started dating I was impressed by his integrity. He had passionate views about fairness and loyalty. He was attractive, too — tall, dark hair, blue eyes — and I felt we could build a loving relationship together.

It seems to me that many women tend to prefer the wrong kind of men these days when it comes to marriage and parenting. Marriage requires a man to have a strong moral compass. That way, he can be expected to behave morally, himself. A man with a strong moral compass fuldills his moral obligations, but he also makes moral judgments. And women need to prefer men who make these moral judgments. The woman’s phrase “Easy and fun” tells me that her choice of man was not a good one. A man who is easy and fun does not make divisive truth claims, does not make moral judgments, and does not set up moral boundaries. He can’t be trusted to honor moral obligations. He can only be trusted to be “easy and fun”. But marriage is not for men who want an easy life, nor a fun life. Marry requires self-sacrificial service. She should not have chosen an “easy and fun” man to have children with. That would be like me choosing a Paris Hilton and expecting her to be frugal and homeschool our kids. It’s not going to happen. But many women these days are so clouded by “tall, dark hair, blue eyes” that they cannot connect what a man can do to what a man is supposed to do in a marriage. So long as he looks good, then he is good.

More:

After a month or so, our physical relationship began, but we did not rush things. It was a couple of years before he moved into my flat in Crawley, West Sussex, and I expected we’d eventually marry and have kids.

Looking back, I suppose I should have heeded the warning signals. When I broached the subject of children, he stalled. His stock reply was: ‘We’ll have them later.’

So although he was non-committal, I loved him and assumed that his paternal instinct would kick in as he grew older. But the years passed and I was not reassured.

She thinks that a man who agrees to recreational sex after a month and then agrees to cohabitation after two years is the kind of man who is capable of making a lifelong commitment to be faithful to her and to raise children. That strikes me as equivalent to saying that a man whose favorite movie is Top Gun would also make a good airline pilot.

More:

And then I reached 30. My friends were marrying; settling into comfortable domesticity, preparing for parenthood, and Anthony and I were still in this limbo.

[…]Then my best friend announced she was pregnant and the joy I felt for her was tainted by Anthony’s absence of commitment to the idea of having children with me. So we had another discussion — this time, it was a passionate one. ‘It’s a deal-breaker,’ I said. ‘Much as I love you, if you don’t want children we can’t carry on.’

But, again, he assured me that it would all happen. I just had to bide my time.

So I waited until Anthony was 30, an age when I felt he was old enough to settle down. We loved each other whole-heartedly; we’d bought two successive homes together and the understanding was implicit: my future was bound up in his.

[…]I wanted so much to believe he would warm to the idea, but Anthony equivocated. He still wasn’t ready, he protested.

[…]But then Anthony demonstrated just how strong his aversion to babies was. We were visiting a friend who’d recently given birth and, when her baby cried, Anthony made his excuses and went home.

‘I just can’t stand the sound of that crying,’ he said testily when I confronted him later. ‘If we had a baby, I’d have to move out for the first six weeks.’

It wasn’t a propitious sign, but eventually he seemed to soften.

‘If we’re going to have children, we’ll have to get married first,’ he said the next time I raised the subject, and for once I agreed absolutely. We should get married; by making a public commitment to stay together for the rest of our lives, we would be taking the first step towards establishing a secure home for our future babies.

[…]After six months as man and wife, there had been no mention from Anthony of children. So one day, as we walked home from town, I broached the subject again.

‘We can’t afford to have children,’ he responded sharply and, rather than discuss the topic further, he marched off ahead of me.

[…]This was not the life I had planned for myself: for the first time I started to feel anger towards Anthony. I felt he had forced this situation onto me.

The woman went on to have fatherless children using taxpayer-funded IVF.

What I find troubling about this story is that the first instinct of women – Christian women – and Christian pastors – is to blame men. Those rotten, no-good men. With their tallness, blue-eyes and dark hair! They are “easy and fun” one minute, and then the next minute they are… easy and fun. Yeah. Good-looking men who are easy and fun cannot be assumed to be good at marriage and parenting. They cannot be assumed to be good providers. They can’t be assumed to be good protectors. They can’t be assumed to be moral leaders. They can’t be assumed to be spiritual leaders. The faster that we learn to judge women who make poor decisions with men, the better it will be for children who need to 1) not be killed in the womb and 2) not grow up fatherless. The loving thing to do is to hold women accountable for making decisions about men with their eyes, instead of with their minds.