Okay, say said child is being raised by a same sex couple. How does that rule out interacting with role models of the opposite sex? What about grandparents and uncles and aunts and cousins and family friends?
Don’t be deliberately obtuse, Crafter_Man. You know very well that a gay / lesbian couple or a single parent is not setting out to deliberately rob the child of a mother / father.
If couples or single people of any sexual persuasion want to have kids, and they are willing to love and care for the kids, then there’s nothing else that matters, including your opinion.
I’m of the opinion that the “all other things being equal” is a cop-out. As John Mace points out, all other things are rarely or never equal.
I think I’d have phrased the question differently. I’d maybe have asked “Do children benefit from having within the scope of their lives someone they can see as both a mother-figure/female mentor and a father-figure/male mentor (or at least sibling-figures/friends of both genders)”.
To that, I believe no matter the type of parenting arrangement, a child can, without question, benefit from being exposed to positive role models of both genders, and to have people of that scope in their children’s lives in whatever fashion suits their lives best.
I don’t really see where you need to limit possible parenting situations though, as long as the parent or parents make a sincere effort to present positive role models of both genders for the child to learn from, and the child or children know how much those people love and care about them, and want them to prosper.
I know kids from single-parent homes that turned out great, and people from two-parent homes that were some of the most screwed-up people I’ve ever met…and I don’t necessarily always discount myself off that second list.
The relevant point is the capacity of the person or people to be good parents, not their gender.
My parents are seriously screwed up. My father married for the sole purpose of having a kid, and divorced five years later. I have since lived with my mom, who is bereft of common sense; she dragged me into the Church of Scientology when I was eight, which pretty much ruined my health via the ‘purification rundown.’ I’ve been chronically ill in one respect or another as a result for the past decade and may well remain so for the remainder of my life. My dad has been around sporadically, but I have no respect for him as a human being.
Frankly, I probably would have been better off raised by a reasonably well-adjusted same-sex couple. One can argue that this may or may not be an optimum family for a child until one turns blue in the face - but many people grow up with much greater problems than this, like me or friend Aldebaran. When those are sorted out, perhaps this will be a reasonable topic to debate. Until then, this discussion is the equivalent of a surgeon dedicating his attention to a patient’s hangnail when the patient has a gangrenous limb.
I grew up in a single-parent family, and I never wished for “both a mom and a dad”. I wished for both my mom and dad, but that was impossible. I certainly didn’t hope for a new stepparent or anything like that. As a child I would have been opposed to the idea of a new parent-figure of either sex joining the family all of a sudden, but I think I’d have been happy if my family had always contained two moms or two dads – provided they were nice and loved me and got along well with each other. Sounds like a better deal than plenty of kids get.
What really disgusts is your presumption. Your arrogance ranks up there.
Some sperm donors are unpaid, though they just shirk responsibility rather than firing up a turkey baster. Just because some schmuck with an XY chromosome pair makes a delivery doesn’t mean being in the life of the by product of their loins is a good thing for the child.
I was brought up by a single mother for the first nine years of my life. The penis support system she married was almost as worthless as the one who helped manufacture me. Wait. MORE worthless. The genetic donor loved to read while the stand in for the male role model loathed it and criticized me for it.
I didn’t grow up looking for a real father… I didn’t miss out. Unless I had been adopted by sane parents that had actually WANTED a child.
So, which one is lesser than the other?
:dubious:
It doesn’t rule it out. Though in the United States these days we don’t tend to live with extended families and may in fact live quite far from other relatives. We can all point to non-familial role models from our youth but I think our parents had the greater influence on our lives. For many of us we first learn how a man and woman function by watching our parents and to a lesser extent our siblings. All things being equal I’d favor a man and woman over a same sex couple.
Marc
Some nice holes have already been poked in this biased comment, but I’m not sure why you’ve lumped lesbians into this group and left out gay men (there are more of them than there are lesbians, it seems).
I have one friend who said she was glad her parents were divorced because she couldn’t stand either one of thme.
I don’t see how a child can deserve parents. Merit isn’t involved here. Every child could be said to deserve lots of things- a first-class university education, a family that’s never in financial straits… but they don’t all have them. I don’t think there’s any parental arrangement that’s objectively better for a child. Single moms do seem to have a harder time financially, but it’s the struggle to support themselves that strieks me as the bad thing, not the lack of a man.
CM: My contention is that every child deserves a mother and a father. And that it’s potentially harmful (and certainly disadvantageous) to the child for him/her to grow up without a father.
Cite? The very article you linked to in your OP (which btw is only about lesbian parents, not heterosexual single moms) says that studies don’t bear out the claim that the children of lesbian parents are harmed by not having a father in their lives:
CM: . My point is that I find it rather repulsive to know there are people who purposely see to it that a child grows up without a father in the first place.
Count me among your readers who find this a bizarre response. Dude, we’re talking lesbians here: what they want is to have a child with the person they love and are sharing their lives with, same as you and your wife do (assuming you have and/or want kids). This is not some kind of evil feminazi plot to make men fundamentally irrelevant or anything like that. I think it’s safe to say that lesbian mothers in general are not opposed to fatherhood per se; many of them, for example, greatly love and value their own fathers. But if lesbians want to have a child with their life partners, that adds up to 2 mothers and 0 fathers. That’s just the way it works. Don’t take it personally.
If you’re really worried about a social epidemic of paternal irrelevancy, though, I recommend that instead of picking on female couples who are simply trying to be good moms to much-wanted and dearly-loved children, you start a refusenik campaign against sperm donorship. After all, if men refuse to surrender their sperm except in exchange for full fatherhood rights and privileges, there won’t be all these fatherless kids being born.
So get out there and convince the guys that they’re undermining the structure of society and irresponsibly condemning children to fatherlessness by donating sperm. That’ll keep you occupied, I reckon.
I could add here that if men would stop making women pregnant and then drop her, there would be uncaountable less children who are deprived of a father.
This whole discussion of a child “needing” both parents is utterly denegrating for the millions of women who raise children by their own without any help or input of the biological father. And do a great job on that.
I should say that a child that is raised by a same sex couple = people who really wanted the child = people ready to love and care for this child, has a lot more reasons to be happy then a child that was abandoned by its father even before it was born.
Salaam. A
Can you please elaborate on that? What ways?
Let’s look at all the Dictionary.com definitions for EQUAL, shall we?
- Having the same quantity, measure, or value as another.
- Mathematics. Being the same or identical to in value.
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b. Being the same for all members of a group: gave every player an equal chance to win.a. Having the same privileges, status, or rights: equal before the law. -
b. Adequate in extent, amount, or degree.a. Having the requisite qualities, such as strength or ability, for a task or situation: “Elizabeth found herself quite equal to the scene” (Jane Austen). - Impartial; just; equitable.
- Tranquil; equable.
- Showing or having no variance in proportion, structure, or appearance.
None of these definitions of equal support your post, Edlyn. Men and women are equal, what they aren’t is identical. The two words mean different things, that’s why they’re different words.
You can be a single parent and employ “father figures” or “mother figures”, which, by the way, most divorced parents do anyway. I see no “necessity” for both parents – only a necessity for love.
That’s the thing. And I agree. I’d favor a man and a woman over a same sex couple as well.
No one’s doubting that a useless male role model or father figure is, well, worthless. Who wants that? Who feels that such a person’s influence is worth much? Of course someone is better off (or at least no worse off) if such a man is absent during their upbringing. Of course.
And no one’s saying that without a father figure that a kid’s destined to be messed up. We all know that’s not true. Some of my friends are from single-parent homes or from homes where the dad wasn’t 100% there (either in body or in mind), and I don’t notice any special brand of “messed up” coming from them. But these friends looked at my family life, with my dad (old goat that he was) so totally devoted to his family, and I know that they wanted that too. They told me so.
Seeing him in the home every day, seeing him interact with my mom, day in, day out, seeing his steadfast devotion to his family, is far different then seeing a “male role model” now and then, on weekends, or whatever. It’s the constant, daily exposure. The little things. Being able to have a man and woman in the home, raising me at the same time, was a good thing.
Cities arn’t such good places to raise kids. They lack safe places to play, good schools and good old fashioned outdoor fun. Likewise, deep rural areas arn’t so good for kids. They are too isolated, lack cultural facilities and the sorts of oppertunities that a somewhat more dense environment can bring.
Doesn’t every kid deserve the best life possible? A visit to the park now and then or a school field trip to the city isn’t going to do it. Growing up in cities or rural areas can cause irreperable damage. Imagine the young prima ballerina wasting away on a farm where she can never develop her talents! Imagine the kid that has never climbed a tree! It’s not right to bring a child in to a situation like this.
We need to restrict or even ban people living outside of suburban environments from adopting. There should be heavy cultural disapproval of city-dwellers and country folks that choose to have kids in these environments where their kids could lose so much. Doesn’t every kid deserve a big backyard with a BBQ grill and enough neighboring kids to hold softball tournaments with? How could anyone be so selfish as to raise their kids differently?
FWIW, I was raised pretty much without a father. My dad wasn’t the best dad, but he wasn’t completly abusive or anything outright horrible. I never really missed having him around- most of what I remember about him were fights, money problems and mom crying because she didn’t want to be with this low-grade lout. Perhaps I am unusual in that most of my peers also were raised without fathers, so I never really considered anything else. I especially remember feeling lucky because I didn’t have to spend my school breaks visiting my dad in far-flung places like Idaho and Arizona and I didn’t have to deal with bizarre step-parents and byzantine custody arrangments like everyone else I knew. It was a nice clean break and I never thought much of it.
As far as male role models, my wonderful uncle took on the role of daddy and big brother all in one. He still is my hero, and I can’t imagine a shiftless semi-alcoholic father somehow doing a better job.
What I did miss was having more people my age in the family. I was the only kid, and the company of grown-ups all the time can by trying and wierd. I think every kid is going to have something about their family they’d change. It’s impossible to reach and ideal, and I think instead we should focus on doing whats best for each kid with what we’ve got.0
But as you said earlier, they were comparing your two parent/different gender home with their single parent home. Might you have gotten different comments from kids with two parent/same gender houses?
That’s not the impression I got at all. They craved a male role model, and they didn’t have one at home. One girl, who lost her father, said, “There’s just something about him, being a man, that my mother, no matter how wonderful she is, can’t duplicate.” She emphasized it was a father thing—a male thing. When my father died she sympathized because she knew that the lack of male presence in your life and your household was a major loss.
And when my dad was 12 his dad (my grandfather) died. There were plenty of relatives around, but they were all female. He craved male interaction, so much so that when he was drafted in the Army, he considered it one of the best times of his life, because all of a sudden he had all these “brothers.” I’m certain that you couldn’t have convinced him that all his female relatives compensated for the lack of his father—a male influence.
Look, I know that all sorts of family situations arise and we all make do with what we’ve got and every family has its shortcomings. Sure, I had a devoted father figure while others around me didn’t, but they had things in their family life that I didn’t. No one’s got it perfect. But if asked, I’d have to say that I’d prefer a male/female combination for my upbringing. To say otherwise would be disingenuous, feeling the way I do and experiencing what I’ve experienced. I believe there’s a difference and I don’t believe that it “doesn’t matter.” It does.
But, as others have already pointed out, there is no such thing as a perfect family situation. We all have inequities and flaws in our home life. There were plenty of things in my upbringing that sure as hell could have been better. Life wasn’t perfect for me simply because I had a strong father figure in the house.
A few questions that I have yet to hear a good answer for:
- What, specifically, are the appropriate gender roles?
- Why are they important to have?
- Why would it be easier to develop appropriate gender roles in a family with two parents of different sexes?
- If a child has an inappropriate gender role, does that mean the parent or parents have failed?
Look—I think some of you are making too much of this.
Did my dad “fail” as a parent because he married and made children with a woman who is an eccentric crackpot? Would I have been better off (or at least less irritated) if my mom wasn’t such a loon sometimes? Sure. But I wouldn’t have had it any other way. But on paper, in a sort of clinical, academic way, I can agree that yes, it would have been “better” for me and my sisters if my mom wasn’t so eccentric. Her somewhat depressive attitude certainly weren’t the highlight of my childhood either. But that’s the way it goes, you know?
Same with my mom. Did she “fail” as a parent because she married and made children with an eccentric old goat? Sure, once again, it would have been better if he hadn’t had all the flaws that he did. But he did. Because he’s human and life isn’t perfect and we all deal with this kind of stuff.
No one’s family life is perfect. People would be right in saying that I probably would have been better off if my parents weren’t WHACKED in the way that they were. Oh wait—people have told me this! Because it’s the truth! It’s the truth for all of us! But that’s how it goes. The good parts outweigh the bad parts—at least in my childhood. Having a male and female raising me = good thing. Sorry, that’s how I see it. But that doesn’t mean that I had it made, or that this one detail (male + female parents in home) trumps everything else.