A gay person ADMITS that opposite-sex parents are better!

Great Debates
81

I’ve also observed - anecdotally only - that parents tend to fit into different roles regardless of their gender. I’ve seen male-female parents where the woman is the one who does the rough play and is stricter, and the man is more into art and stuff and is an easier ride - definitely not conforming to gender stereotypes but still being of different genders.

Female-female parenting couples, IME, tend to conform to gender stereotypes somewhat, too, just because you tend to get one person who’s more, say, into rough play than the other, and that role gets extended so that they’re also the parent who takes the kid out on a bike for the first time, and so on. It’s not necessarily a ‘butch-femme’ thing, either. (I don’t know any male-male parenting couples personally). It’s just about personality.

Basically, in any parenting couple you tend to get one parent who has certain characteristics and one who has the opposite, even if they started out pretty much equal before they had kids.

In any case, if you want a variety in a kid’s life when it comes to rough play vs. gentle play, caution vs. gung ho attitude, hair care vs. playing with guns, and whatever other gender stereotypes there are, parents will still never be the only gender role models in any child’s life.

I can see a few advantages to biological parenting as opposed to adopted parenting. There are the little things about inherited diseases and tendencies, and, for many people, there is also just an extra connection - though that probably goes more for the grandparents than the parents.

But those advantages really are tiny (when talking about adopting babies or toddlers, at least - adopting older children is different, obviously). It’s like comparing yourself with the most perfect parent in the entire world: you’ll always fail by comparison. With parenting, you can’t realistically aim for the ideal, just the best that you can do. After all, you don’t expect your child to be perfect either - or, at least, you really shouldn’t.

82

What am I to conclude? That a majority of divorced fathers are dead beat dads?

83

What’s going on here. Are you posting as a mod or another poster. Seriously, you are hijacking this thread by making it about me. Your negative opinion of what I’m thinking is completely irrelevant. Your comments do nothing to address the actual discussion. Let me suggest you dial back this power trip you are on.

84

No. You got snotty and, as a poster, I suggested you had no reason to behave that way. Now you want to get on your high horse and claim, “Look at me! I’m being oppressed! Oh! Come and see the violence inherent in the system!” and then pretend that I am hijacking the thread.

meh

85

The problem is that there is no such thing as all other factors being equal. A parent is more than a sum of socio-economic and cultural factors. Being a good parent is actually not about the parents at all, but about the child. Every child is different, and the bottom line is that parents who fully accept and support their children in a loving and nurturing environment will be good ones, regardless of external factors.

86

There’s some lovely filth over here. :slight_smile:

Quoting Python always makes me laugh.

87

First off, quote a statement of mine you regard as snotty prior to your intervention.

Secondly, even if you have an opinion on what is snotty or isn’t, what the hell does that have to do with the discussion?

Thirdly, what does polygamy have to do with child rearing and where did you get the idea that men are preferred for child custody awards in the US?

I strongly suspect all this is a result of your attempt to distract us from a couple of ill informed statements on your part.

88

Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for you stop being so “distracted” to actually respond to my post. Here it is. Again:

89

My “intervention”? All I did was post an opinion in regards to the thread. :rolleyes: Your initial statement to which I responded was posted without context or explanation and I noted that posters were inferring different meanings from that, indicating that a bit of explication might improve the discussion.
And the following whole paragraph is unnecessarily snide:

Since the discussion was fairly even-keeled at that point, I was hoping that a bit of civility would keep it that way–something that seems to be beyond both your understanding and your capacity to carry out, judging by how you insist on keeping that issue alive.

Polygyny, not polygamy.
You made the claim that courts across the world supported single mothers over single fathers and then invoked a claim for biology to support that position. I noted that the trend has been strongly shifting away from that presupposition in the courts, (and I never claimed that men were prefered, noting only that in my anecdotal experience, if men chose to stay involved, they had a slightly better chance to get custody). I further noted that there is no such thing as “single parenting” among primates, rendering that appeal irrelevant.

As to the number of times when custody is awarded to mothers over fathers, my guess would be that the “70%” figure is heavily skewed by the number of times that either the fathers have left the family or the number of times that the father and mother both agree, for whatever reason, that the children should stay with the mother. (E.g., father has better income and mother has better resources for child-rearing if supplemented by father’s external income.)

At any rate, I am willing to concede that the divorce courts have not come as far as I had believed and that courts still tend to award custody to mothers.
That actually says nothing about whether biological parenting “trumps” adoptive parenting. There are many biological parents who simply fall into the position of parenting merely by engaging in sex. One could, (although I would not), make the case that adoptive parenting might generally trump biological parenting because adoption is always a deliberate choice while biological parenting is often an accident.

I suspect that either generalization is silly. Humans become parents for a wide variety of reasons at the personal level and once they find themselves in the roles of parents, many do outstandingly well and many do extremely poorly, (regardless of their original motives), and most fall between the extremes. Making claims about one method of becoming a parent “trumping” (whatever the heck that means), another method of becoming a parent are nothing more than WAGs that are irrelevant to a discussion of whether same sex parenting is “better” in some vague and undefinable way, than opposite sex parenting–particularly when neither opposite sex parenting nor same sex parenting is limited to either procreation or adoption. Children enter both OSM families and SSM families through both procreation and adoption.

90

sorry about my getting distracted

Yes. My guide holds biology as a powerful incentive for nurturing. YMMV.
And I respect your opinion as well and have seen many examples of adopted children raised with the utmost love and care as well. Simply put though I surmise that these specific adopting parents would exercise at least the same love and care for their own while I know that loving and caring biological parents don’t or can’t always treat their adopted children as well.

And , moreover, what child would not prefer that his loving parent was connected to him by blood.

You are ascribing way more importance to my list than I ever intended. I just wanted to get my opinion out there.

91

But do you have unbiased evidence? You could just as easily argue that kids who are adopted are happier because they feel they were chosen. I’m not saying that argument is valid, I’m just saying there’s no evidence for either way being better, necessarily. Like, your list of best parents in an ideal world that starts out with two biological parents–is there any support, or is this just your opinion of what is best?

92

Frankly, I have nothing better to support my statements than what I’ve already provided.

93

But you haven’t cited any evidence for your list of the ideal parents.

94

You don’t have to accept my list.

95

My apologies if this is what you mean by your later point, but; doesn’t the fact that adoptive parents have had to go through a rather rigorous process involving paperwork, a lot of other people, along with checkups and so forth, as opposed to biological parents whose one bar is having sex, indicate that adoptive parents are more likely to have a desire to nurture?

I mean, even with your powerful incentive, it seems to me what you’ve got is a predisposition matched up against actual worked-for evidence of commitment. I mean, it’s sort of like looking at two sportsmen, one with an Olympic gold and the other with an athletic physique, and declaring that the latter wants success more.

96

Okay…but this being great debates, what’s the point of putting up a list if it’s just your opinion?

97

See, to me, it seems that parents who go through the complexities and hassles of adoption have a much more “powerful incentive for nurturing” than a great number of biological parents who, through the vagaries of fate, find themselves with child. I find the very idea that a single parent would be a better parent than two adoptive ones to be untenable.

That preference doesn’t even come into consideration until the child is into their teens. Infants, toddlers, and a vast majority of those under 13 don’t even understand the difference between biological and adoptive parents (outside of names on the playground).

Good to know. If only the majority of “social conservatives” out there ascribed the same level of importance to their own opinions, we’d be in much better shape.

98

Completely anecdotal, small sample group . . .

All the adopted kids I knew and know have awesome parents and are pretty well adjusted. I can’t say the same for . . . god . . . seems like at least half the kids of bio parents I grew up with. And I don’t know any children of divorce who aren’t/weren’t noticeably worse from it. I would tentatively put adoptive parents right next to biological parents in a tie for first place.

99

I’ll have to concede to you and Revenant on this one. Still, I can’t wrap my head around the idea that being adopted is a preferred situation.

Putting it that way, I’d have to agree. My list isn’t solely based on better parenting, but more so on my perception that being cared for by a biological parent is an inherent value to the mental health of the child, once they are able to understand their situation relative to others.

I’m not a social conservative if that is what you are implying.

100

Yes, but i’s a question of whether it’s nature or nuture. Yes, there have been plentyof socieities with gender roles, but there have also been tons of people who buck the gender status quo