Tag Archives: Stable

News

MUST-READ: How divorce courts destroy the lives of fathers and children

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Consider this story from the Herald Sun in Australia.

Excerpt:

A mother found by the Family Court to be violent, untruthful, lacking moral values and responsible for the psychological and emotional abuse of her children has been given custody of them.

The father, deemed “principled” and with “much to offer his children”, has been effectively banned from seeing his daughters.

[…]The father… is described by a Family Court judge as no threat to his daughters, a successful parent who is “courteous” and “intelligent”.

The same judge found the mother… abandoned her first daughter at two and spurned the child’s subsequent attempts at reconciliation, had displayed “dreadful”, “cruel” and “malicious” behaviour.

But the judge still ruled that because of time spent apart, the children had become estranged from their father and it was in their interests that “the children spend no time with the father”.

Time spent apart? Why would a loving father willingly spend time apart from his own children?

Bill has not seen his daughters since April and has not spent extended time with them since August 2005.

He says the estrangement was largely a result of false allegations of sexual abuse of the children made against him by his former wife.

The custody ruling in the Family Court last month came after a seven-year battle over access to the girls, now aged nine and 11.

It followed a criminal trial in 2007, when Bill, 55, was cleared of the sexual abuse allegations. The trial judge found them totally false and threw the case out.

The ordeal has cost Bill his home, his job and about $450,000 in lost income and legal costs. He has faced court 70 times to clear his name and try for some form of access to his children.

“It has been a nightmare. All I wanted was to be part of my children’s lives – to try to give them a good start in life,” Bill said.

“But I am denied that because of the malicious way in which my ex-wife has acted and because of the credence the legal system has given her lies and falsehoods.

“The family law system needs wholesale change. There appears to be no testing of evidence in court and it seems that often lies and fabrications are immediately accepted as fact.

“It’s a disgrace and, as far as I know, it doesn’t happen in any other legal sphere.”

Bill’s case follows the case of “Steve” last year, in which the court accepted his good character, but banned him from seeing his daughter for seven years because it was believed the mother would “shut down” emotionally if he were allowed to see her.

In another case last year, a father, “Mick”, was jailed for sending a birthday card to his daughter in breach of a court order and was locked up again for taking a walk in a park – near where, unknown to him, his daughter was playing.

False allegations of sexual abuse are standard operating procedure in divorce courts in order to get custody of the children, and the child support payments that go with the children. The legal stakeholders in the divorce racket have every reason to help to the woman to make these false charges, because the father usually fights for custody, which is what keeps them all employed.

Further study

To find out more about the horrors of feminism and unilateral divorce, consider reading something by Stephen Baskerville and something by Jennifer Roback Morse. This podcast by Jennifer Roback Morse explains some of the threats to traditional marriage – it’s my favorite podcast ever. Women need to do a better job of understanding men, and understanding what has to change to make marriage attractive and appealing to men. That may involve changing laws to make these unfair divorce courts stop doing what they are doing.

One last thing. Most of my readers know that I am chaste, and so I have never been married or divorced. My parents are have been married for 40+ years. None of my immediate family is divorced. And none of my Christian friends are divorced. In fact, I have never experienced a divorce even vicariously by being friends with someone who was going through a divorce. And the point of this is to show you how Christians can become sensitive to an issue just by studying it. And this is what marriage-minded Christians need to do.

Christians need to study to understand the many serious problems that divorce causes for men and children. We should understand how marriage acts as a buffer to state power, thus protecting religious liberty. We should know how feminist policies weaken marriage and parenting. And we should understand how a stable marriage benefits children, and ultimately, society. When Christians inform themselves about these issues, it becomes easier to put ourselves second and act to preserve the marriage. Knowledge binds the will.

News

Scientists discover how fathers improve brain development of children

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Story from the Wall Street Journal. (H/T Andrew)

Excerpt:

Dr. Braun’s group found that at 21 days, the fatherless animals had less dense dendritic spines compared to animals raised by both parents, though they “caught up” by day 90. However, the length of some types of dendrites was significantly shorter in some parts of the brain, even in adulthood, in fatherless animals.

“It just shows that parents are leaving footprints on the brain of their kids,” says Dr. Braun, 54 years old.

The neuronal differences were observed in a part of the brain called the amygdala, which is related to emotional responses and fear, and the orbitofrontal cortex, or OFC, the brain’s decision-making center.

[…]The balance between these two brain parts is critical to normal emotional and cognitive functioning, according to Dr. Braun. If the OFC isn’t active, the amygdala “goes crazy, like a horse without a rider,” she says. In the case of the fatherless pups, there were fewer dendritic spines in the OFC, while the dendrite trees in the amygdala grew more and longer branches.

A preliminary analysis of the degus’ behavior showed that fatherless animals seemed to have a lack of impulse control, Dr. Braun says. And, when they played with siblings, they engaged in more play-fighting or aggressive behavior.

In a separate study in Dr. Braun’s lab conducted by post-doctoral researcher Joerg Bock, degu pups were removed from their caregivers for one hour a day. Just this small amount of stress leads the pups to exhibit more hyperactive behaviors and less focused attention, compared to those who aren’t separated, Dr. Braun says. They also exhibit changes in their brain.

The basic wiring between the brain regions in the degus is the same as in humans, and the nerve cells are identical in their function. “So on that level we can assume that what happens in the animal’s brain when it’s raised in an impoverished environment … should be very similar to what happens in our children’s brain,” Dr. Braun says.

Read the whole thing.

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Commentary

What causes women to become single mothers, and how are children affected?

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alvare_h

Here is an article on single mothermood. It is the first in a series by law professor Helen Alvaré.

First, she writes about the number of out-of-wedlock births, and the effects of single motherhood on children:

The recent news of the nearly 40% out of wedlock birth rate in the United States should pretty much rock our world as citizens and as Catholics. According to the Centers for Disease Control report, this means 1.7 million children were born to unmarried mothers in 2007, a figure 250% greater than the number reported in 1980. The implications for our society loom large. According to empirical data published over the last several decades in leading sociological journals, these children, on average, will suffer significant educational and emotional disadvantages compared to children reared by their married parents. They will be less able to shoulder the burdens that “next generations” traditionally assume for the benefit of their families, communities and their country. They are likely to repeat their parents’ behaviors. The boys are more likely to engage in criminal behavior and the girls to have nonmarital children.

And then she explains what causes women to do engage in this behavior:

First, the researchers concluded that the majority of children born to lone mothers could not correctly be deemed “unplanned.” Rather, many were planned or actively sought. And the majority were somewhere in the middle between planned and unplanned. In other words, many of these very young couples (it was not uncommon for the mothers to be 14 or 15 years old) explicitly or implicitly wanted a baby in their lives. Their reasons by and large would be familiar to anyone who has ever hoped for a child. They wanted someone who was an extension of their beloved, a piece of him or her.  They wanted to love another person deeply.

[…]What is different about very poor mothers’ desires for children seems to be related to their relationally, financially and educationally impoverished circumstances.  Relationally, the authors described these young mothers as existing in an environment without close, trusted ties.  In particular, the men in their lives were considered to be highly untrustworthy and worse.  Infidelity seemed almost a universal problem among the fathers. Drug and alcohol problems, criminal behavior, and domestic violence were extremely common.  Motherhood provided a chance for these women to “establish the primordial bonds of love and connection.”

So, these women are looking to children as a way to establish lasting relationships. They want to have children, and they don’t believe that they are hurting the child by having the child without a father.

You can read the rest here.

I think this is interesting because what it means is that young women are viewing children as means to their own happiness, regardless of the effects that single-motherhood, with all that it implies, has on the child. It strikes me as incredibly selfish. Just like when children demand pets and promise they will take care of them, but then the adults end up taking care of the pets because the children aren’t mature enough.

Maybe those antiquated moralistic prohibitions on pre-marital sex were there for a reason? Maybe morality should not have been shoved aside by the secular left so hastily?