Tag Archives: Parenting

News

How mistrust of men prevents fathers from parenting daughters

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Stuart Schneiderman explains how the war against men has made it harder for fathers to parent their daughters.

Excerpt:

In today’s America a man knows that he can be sued for workplace sexual harassment if he looks at a woman in the wrong way, if he makes a sexually suggestive remark, or if he touches her inappropriately.

He also knows that children, especially female children, are strictly off limits. Speak to his daughter in the wrong way and a man can find himself charged with child molestation. Even when the charges are false, it is very, very difficult to restore a reputation tarnished by the suspicion of child abuse.

It isn’t easy being a man in America today. The culture has made men into a threat, into the enemy of women and girls.

Not everywhere, not for everyone, but enough of the time for men to be wary in their dealings with female children.

The attacks on men, the stigmatization of men, the distrust about their motives have created a cultural miasma. If you were a father living in such a culture, would you want to talk about sex with your preteen daughter?

The toxic environment produced by the war against men has made men more likely to shut down lines of communication with their daughters.

Then, these same men are criticized for being too reticent, for not opening up, and for not expressing themselves.

The culture strongly encourages girls to discuss intimate matters only with other women. Who but a woman would understand a woman’s experience?

Of course, this deprives girls of a good relationship with the most important man in their lives. And it also tells them that the only people they should listen to are people who are just like them.

His post was linked by Instapundit and Helen Reynolds. It’s a great post. Some women are so busy bad-mouthing men that they don’t realize that men shut down and withdraw from family life unless they get encouragement and respect. Men rise to the expectations of women.

Commentary

Barbara Kay explains the coming demographic crisis

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Here’s Barbara Kay explaining the relationship between feminism and the coming demographic crisis. (H/T Andrew)

Excerpt:

The causes for the coming demographic crisis are not in dispute: improved longevity, urbanization and rising female education. The United States’ total fertility rate is relatively high at 2.06, but when you break it down, the American women with the highest fertility rates are those who have no post-secondary education. The rule is unvarying: The more educated the woman, the fewer her offspring.

If any. Voluntarily childless couples (oops, make that “child-free” couples), once uncomplaining outliers from the matrimonial mainstream, now confidently assert the superior moral standing of environmentally-friendly “hedonic” marriage, in which shared interests and pleasures rather than children form the relationship glue. Some exhibit overt disgust at “breeders” and “moomies” (nursing mothers).

These righteous depopulators are indifferent to the big picture. An article entitled “The Old World” in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine paints a grim demographic portrait of the developed and developing world’s future. By 2018 65-year-olds will outnumber those under five, “a historic first,” and by 2050 the median age–now 28–will be over 40.

Autocratic governments can make people have fewer children, but they can’t make people have more. Singapore tried. While modernizing in the 1960s after gaining independence from the British, Singapore’s newly minted Family Planning and Population Board launched a billboard campaign, messaging “Stop at Two” and “Small Families Brighter Future.” Abortion and sterilization were encouraged at the government’s expense. Maternity leave was denied after two children.

It worked. Singapore reached its fertility rate target of 2.1 in 1976, a 53% plunge over a decade. But it didn’t stop declining, as women’s education rates went up. A reverse strategy was implemented. Abortion wasn’t banned, but pre-op counselling is now required for women with three or fewer children. The billboard and media messaging was changed to “Have Three or More Children if you Can.” But no dice. Singapore’s fertility rate in 1960 was 5.45. Today it is 1.1.

I would like my wife to have advanced degrees to be able to write and speak so she can protect the family by advocating for good policies that will enable us to have autonomy from the government and taxes and politically correct fascism. I think getting an education is an excellent thing for a woman. And she can complete her education by the time she is 25. It’s having a job outside the home when there are young children that is problematic for me. A writing career is an excellent option since research and writing can be done from the home.

The real concern I have about this is children having a lower standard of living than we do. Because of these massive government pension programs (Social Security in the USA, Old Age Security in Canada), children will taxed at very high rates. Either these entitlement programs have to go, or children will be poor. These redistribution schemes cause people to depend too much on the government and not to plan ahead for their own needs (retirement, health care, etc.). It’s immature to expect other people’s children to pay for your health care and retirement. You have to pay – you have to earn and save your money to pay for what you need.

I was reading recently about how George W. Bush, a fine President and a good man, thought that his greatest success was keeping us safe (true) and his worst failure was the failure to privatize Social Security (also true).  It’s the Democrats who are telling us that Social Security doesn’t need reform, just like the Democrats told us that Fannie and Freddie did not need to be regulated and reformed. Until we get serious about keeping them out of power, it’s not really safe to marry and have children.

UPDATE: Alisha found this story about a woman who focused on her career and his now marrying HERSELF.

Commentary

How do you persuade people to get married for the good of the children?

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Here is an interesting interview with David Popenoe from CBC News. (H/T Andrea)

Excerpt:

AB: I’m wondering though if marriage is indispensable. I’ll quote you back to yourself if you don’t mind:

‘Although there are many caring and responsible non-resident fathers, the alarmingly simple fact is that men are much less likely to stay close to their children when they are not married to their children’s mother.’

Now in Quebec for instance, the last 2001 census, some 30 per cent of couples are living common law. Are we talking about a father’s presence in the hosuehold or are we talking about a father’s presence in the household while he’s formally married to the children’s mother?

DP: You know the problem with the cohabitation alternative, is that the break-up rate is so high. Even in Sweden, where cohabitation is as established a solution as it is in Quebec, the break-up rate of families with children who are just cohabiting is twice what it is for married couples. Sure they can raise children, but the likelihood of that child not living with two parents goes way up.

AB: So what do we do about this? Do we compell people to marriage? Do we offer disincentives to those couples? Do we return to the era when a child born out of wedlock is illegitimate? How do we persuade people who believe that they’re in the social vanguard, socially progressive, living without benefit of matrimony, that they ought to get married?

DP: It’s a hard question, and probably none of the things that you suggest does anybody want to do. But the first step is to realize that the decline of marriage is harmful for children. And then we have to look at culture and what’s causing the decline. After all, most cohabiting couples eventually get married.

I think it’s a question of putting children first. I don’t see any other way of bringing marriage back. But I do think marriage is very important for children even though it may be an inconvenience for a lot of adults. Incidentally, studies in the United States and other countries show that people who are married are much happier than people who are living apart or living single. And of course those are generalizations…

Does anyone have any ideas about how solve this problem?

I think that the problem of fatherlessness can be lessened with the right policies – tax incentives, the repeal of no-fault divorce, family court reform, domestic violence reform, the enactment of shared parenting laws, etc. And maybe churches could be more effective at applying Christianity to the areas of marriage and parenting so that at least Christians will understand what they are supposed to be doing with their spouses and children. For example, churches could work harder at convincing parents that they should focus more on raising the next generation of scholars, scientists and ADF lawyers.

But I think that people need to understand that feminism is the real problem here. If men are not going to be given a special role in the home, and if wives are going to compete with husband for the provider role by earning about the same or more as the man, and if judges are going to be overturning groundings on behalf of child-plaintiffs, then men are going to disengage from marriage and parenting. Until we as a society understand that men and women are fundamentally different, and that males need SPECIAL encouragement and respect for deciding to get married and to become fathers, then fatherlessness is going to remain a huge problem.

Consider this essay by Stephen Goldberg about men, marriage and family. (H/T Mysterious C)

Excerpt:

FEMINIST “theories” deny the physiological roots of maleness and femaleness. In doing this they persuade the contemporary woman not merely that she can have it all (an eventuality impossible for those with male physiologies to believe about themselves), but that marriage can ignore crucial differences between males and females, differences that (if acknowledged at all) are incorrectly alleged to be “merely cultural” and, therefore, amenable to elimination.

Most wives of fifty years ago understood that men were just men, and that men cannot be expected or socialized to be anything else. This made the marriage agreement a realistic one that was not inherently enraging to the woman (in the way it is when there is a pretense that men are simply less lumpy women who could just as easily accept an “egalitarian” role).

The woman of the contemporary ideology–unlike all the women of all other societies that have ever existed-no longer recognizes this. When wives have expectations of an “equality” that demands not merely equal reward for different behavior, but equal reward for the same behavior, marriage as an institution is in trouble, and would be even were there not numerous other forces tending toward this end. (There is, to be sure, a range of possibilities in practical terms; the treatment of women in the United States is different from that in Saudi Arabia. But the core statistical male-female differences of cognition, temperament, and behavior are the same everywhere: no society–and only a feminist sub-culture in ours—claims to believe that women could be as aggressive as men or men as nurturing as women; no society fails to associate dominance and crime with males or familial stability and child care with females.)

Similarly, the conflicting demands of feminine attractiveness and the maternal disposition, on the one hand, and success in the public arena, on the other, have generated a feminist psycho-social view of the world as protective armor. For example, it is received wisdom among the more feminist-oriented career women that men are threatened by female success, and there is no doubt a great deal of truth to this. Unexpected competition from former allies always causes anxiety, even if the new competitors do not add to the competition one faces.

But the deep cause of the feminist emphasis on this male anxiety is the realization that even those men who are not threatened by female success are not especially drawn to it. While the perimeters of conceptions of femininity vary from time to time and culture to culture, the core behavior that defines the feminine and attracts males everywhere and at all times does not much vary. And dominant behavior is not a vital component of this femininity. Women through the ages knew that males are drawn to the feminine and that characteristics not disproportionately associated with the female elicit, at best, a male lack of interest.

But women through the ages were not told that they had to exhibit these male characteristics. Contemporary women are told that their status will, to a great extent, be determined by their ability to mimic qualities associated with the male, and women know that these are, at best, qualities that do nothing to attract males. Males have never faced an analogous conflict because women everywhere have–for reasons rooted in female physiology–been drawn to men who exhibit dominance. Despite contemporary values claiming the desirability of males with a female portion of sensitivity and nurturance, the actual behavior of even those women who give lip-service encouragement to men who claim to agree casts serious doubt on the attractiveness to women of such men. The change in the attitude of each sex toward the other is at the heart of the matter. As women have come to have less use for men, and have refused to grant their husbands the special position both sexes once took for granted, men have come to have less use for women. Both look for satisfaction on an occupational playing field on which, statistically speaking, men as a sex cannot lose and women as a sex cannot win.

Steven Goldberg was the Chair of Sociology at City College, City University of New York from 1970 to 2005.