Why is being ridiculed inherently a bad thing? I think the most bigoted people are those who have never felt bigotry against them. Those that are spoiled by having the “perfect parents” don’t have a clue how to empathize with others that were not in that situation.
Thus, I think the idea that kids need 100% perfect parents is misguided in and of itself. The flaws are necessary.
I have sometimes thought that, if anyone decides to bully my daughter, they might focus on the ‘gay mum’ thing, and that wouldn’t be nearly as bad as being bullied for something more intrinsic to her own identity. As it goes, she mostly gets teased for wearing glasses. You can’t plan for every negative aspect in a child’s life.
Holy shit! Now I know what happened to me! I’m so stealing this!
OTOH, I believe a child needs a balance. A child needs two. Whatever those two are are up for debate, I suppose. Having been raised by a single mother, with an absent/abusive father, I do believe that two parents are better. Two sides to a story, two perspectives on an event, someone else to turn to when the creature that is responsible for feeding you is pissed.
We forget how very, very small children are. And how scary a world this is. Realizing that having one person be able to say “I brought you in to this world, I can take you out.” While the other one says “Oh just try it!”
Black, white, purple, gay, straight, Muslim. I’ll take two please.
Yeah, I agree. It’s funny how all these conservative politicians are out there shouting, “don’t watch porn. Don’t have anal or oral sex. Don’t use dildoes. Don’t be gay. Don’t be promiscuous. Don’t look at Janet Jackson’s nipple.” How come no one is saying, “think long and hard before having kids with that person. Work your ass off to make your marriage work if you have kids; compromise.”? Divorce used to be too hard to get and too shunned in this country. Now I think the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. Marriage and divorce are jokes now, and people hardly stop to think what it does to the kids involved.
Is anyone else bothered by the title of this thread? Does it matter that it’s a gay person who thinks opposite sex parents are better? If a black person thought that parents who were the same race as their kids were better, would that be more relevant somehow?
My son is adopted. He is from South Korea where the social situation for unwed mothers and children without fathers is pretty bleak. Its very unlikely that had he stayed in Korea he would have gotten much more than an eighth grade education. Had he stayed with his mother, she would likely have been disowned by her family (which was small and poor to start with). It may be possible that my son eventually regrets being adopted - but right now he is enjoying the privileges of being an American kid in a middle class family - baseball practice, riding bikes through the woods with his buddies, a college fund. Things he would be unlikely to get if his birthmother had chosen to raise him. I have a bio daughter as well by the way. And while I’ll admit to loving them differently, it is because they are different children - I don’t love one or the other more. And being a bio kid has baggage he doesn’t have to carry - when she is infuriatingly stubborn - that is her father! When she is ditzy and daydreamy - she is the worst of me. There are parts of having a bio kid that you love because they are continuations of what you love about yourself and your partner - but the flip side of that is that those flaws you both have are reflected back at you as well. She is the one that gave me stretch marks and a bad back. He, on the other hand, is nothing but potential. When surprises come up (he is musical! we aren’t musical) they are HIS, not reflections of us.
My father is adopted. His mother had him when she was 15 during WWII. His biological father and her were married, but the marriage didn’t last. He was adopted by my grandmother’s second husband, who had two additional children. My father never felt like his Dad treated him any differently than his bio sons. Since the marriage dissolved and his parents lived hundreds of miles away from each other - one adoptive parent was a preferable situation - a situation his bio dad was brave enough to understand and not contest. My Dad has no regrets over the situation - his mother, father and birth father did the best they could by him.
My husband has a full bio sister who was placed for adoption as a baby. While his mother really would have loved to raise her, his father was not ready for children and pushed through the adoption. The result was that she grew up with two very supportive parents that she loves who loved her (they have both passed on) - and my in-laws stayed married for another nearly twenty years and had two more kids eventually before divorcing. (Yeah, my father in law was an ass). My mother in law, I think, has her regrets about the situation, but since it resulted in her two sons that wouldn’t be here otherwise, they are tempered. My pseudo sister in law is rather happy about the outcome.
While it would be nice if all bio parents were emotionally stable and mature, maintained positive long term relationships with their co-bio-parent (even if that isn’t a two parent household) had a supportive system of relatives and friends and society around them, had a means of supporting themselves and their children - the reality is that many bio parents are not up to handling the challenges of parenting and make other choices. And there are people out there who are up to handling the challenges of being a parent - who WANT those challenges and therefore make better parents than people who don’t. You can find people who are discontent about their adoption - you can find people who are discontent about being born to start with.
I have two other friends with the adoptive/bio combination set of kids - and this topic has been a frequent one among us. None of us love our bio kids more - we acknowledge that reflecting own own selves back on us is as much a burden as a blessing for our bio kids. Interestingly, we all have boy/girl pairs as well - and the gender difference plays a much bigger part in your ability to treat your kids equally than the manner in which they arrived in your family.