Have no stong male presence in a broken home= Bad thing?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I was wondering if people in broken homes (such as myself) have negative aspects to not having a strong male presence in the house. I ask this because from what I have witnessed, I do think that children, especially males have alot more confidence when their father is around.
Ok, personal experience has me guessing this is true when my dad left at 10, I noticed a big change in my character, I became more violent and went off the tracks alot…I think sometimes this was to cover something that I didn’t like about my family breaking up, although I don’t know what it is yet.

Anyways, I get to high school, and in the immediate first year I totally withdraw into myself, and don’t go out much and socialise…

I pretty much dislike my dad and never talk to him.

But I think now, because I don’t regulary see my dad at all, is it effecting how I am, how I act around people, how confident in social situations.
I’m confused so HELP!

2

I think worse is when women hook up with a series of bad guys under the guise of having a “strong male for the children”. Just MHO.

3

I think that it’s good for kids to have a strong male presence in their lives, but having such a figure actually in the home isn’t necessary.

I’m having a hard time making much a causal connection between “my dad left us” and “four years later I became a hermit.”

4

I had this talk with my son last night a matter of fact. I am separated with two kids. He spends 70% of his time at his mother’s house and 30% with me.

I have been extremely accomodating of changes in the schedule he or his mother desires, and I feel this spirit of accomodation is now coming around to bite me in the ass. He just turned 13 and indicated in strong terms that the decision of who spends time with should be entirely his. I told him, that while I would like to accomodate him, my time with him is precious to me and I will not flex myslef into any lesser time with im until he turns 16, at shich point he can make his own “stay with” decisions.

Beyond my own selfish desire to spend time with my son I have very substantial and concrete fears about him spending too much time with his mother. My ex is a caring mother, but is a completely and utterly ineffectual disciplinarian, and I get 2-3 calls a week with her raging (literally) about the latest travesties that my 16 year old daughter (who is with her full time) and my son have committed, and she puts me on the spot to be the “enforcer” in these situations - TALK to YOUR Son" and “TALK to YOUR Daughter”. When I go over there to pick him up he is trying (and often succeeding) in controlling his mother by yelling and raging and talking to her like a lower level peer, or being snide and snotty with no repercussions. She complains loudly about this and how unfairly and disrespectfully she is treated by both of them, but they both ignore her, until she occasionally winds herself into frenzy and sends him to his room with him kicking the hallway and the doors on the way to his room.

Having said all this he sounds like a little monster (well at 5’9" with a size 11 shoe and weighing 140 lbs, not so little anymore) but he’s not. He’s actually a pretty sweet and self effacing kid. The dynamic at my ex’s house (I think) is that he has become,(in some form or fashion, the “alpha male” of that household even though he is the youngest and smallest. (His mother and his sister are 6" tall and 5’11" respectively) but he is by far the fiercest and he seems to intimidate them in some way.

When he is with me there is none of the yelling and raging if I’m not onboard with what he wants, as he is extremely well aware that daddy’s tolerance for that is approximately minus zero, but there is lots of hyper emotional frustrated crying. It’s like he switches gears completely with me. After a few days with me is more like a “boy/man”, the snottiness disappears and there is very little of the crying and hyper emotionalism that he has coming out of his mother’s house. He’s my “pal”, and we enjoy doing things together as father and son.

When I deliver him back to his mother’s house you can almost watch his brain morph back to being king of the roost, and I can tell he wants me to leave ASAP, and he gets highly agitated if his mother and I have and extended conversation that delays my departure.

I am convinced it would be a highly dysfunctional situation for him to be at this mother’s 24/7 and he would wind up with a very skewed idea of what being a man encompasses, especially with respect to how to control his emotions behave respectfully in social situations. Boys look to their fathers for social and behavioral cues, and if they are not properly provided (even by on site dads) you can easily produce little self absorbed savages that try to rule the household.

5

I’ve seen what happens when a male child lacks a father’s presence, and it results in the poor kid being completely feminized. I don’t know how female children are affected, as I haven’t taken particular notice to anything peculiar (though I’m sure there’s something I’m missing). Anyways, I’m convinced the most healty homes are ones with both parents.

6

It may not be PC, but I think there’s something in it too. It’s taken me three years to get my stepson on the level. There was no “series of bad boyfriends”, luckily. There was simplynobody - only mum. The young fella was a screaming, out-of-control brat.

Now, he’s not.

7

I’m female and grew up without a dad (in fact I just met him this past August). I think it causes enormous damage, whether you’re a boy or a girl. Anyone who says a father isn’t necessary is FOS, in my opinion.

Yes, it’s bad when women hook up with bad guys, but women like that aren’t doing it so their kids can have a father figure, they’re doing it so they can have money/sex/drugs/etc. Just because some women bring home bad guys doesn’t negate a child’s need for a father.

8

Could you be more precise about what you mean by “feminized” and in what way you see that as being bad?

9

He could be more precise and it’d still be a blatantly ignorant generalization.

Ideally, all children would be raised with two biological parents in the home providing wonderful examples of how adults should act. Since that’s rarely the case, I don’t think demonizing divorce is particularly helpful. Good parents will be effective whether they share a household or not, eh?

10

The sociologists and psychologists do find evidence of negative effects of divorce. (To Queen Tonya’s point, obviously these are general findings and divorce or single parenthood may be the better option for individuals.) Google or go to the library or bookstore to see what the people who study this have to say in detail.

On a more personal note, a lot of people (everybody?) feels very down and insecure at the age when they are starting high school. This is Really Really Normal. You can’t change the past, but a positive step would be to build some positive relationships with friends your own age and adults, like sports coaches or teachers.

If your parents are doing negative things, like using you as a go-between to send messages or putting each other down to you, asserting yourself and saying you don’t belong in the middle of that would be another good step.

11

nah, they don’t do that, me not seeing my father was a personal choice of mine, which I stuck too. I will see him eventually, when I feel better about him.

12

Weird as this sounds, my son is actually doing much better scholastically, behaviourly, and socially with me as his sole parental figure than he was either when he lived with both of us or with his father. He’d always been a so-so student, achieving B’s and C’s and occasional D’s when we were all together. After we left, he went to A’s and B’s. When he was 15, he decided he wanted to move in with his father. That lasted approximately two months, at which point his grades had deteriorated so much that he was failing all of his classes. He now has very little contact with his father, which is his decision (Long story there that I won’t go into here).

Even if his father is not a significant male role model at this point, he does have others. One of his best friends is being raised by his father, with no mother in the picture. My son is able to hang out with them and do guy things, and in turn, the friend is able to hang out with us and do stuff that his dad would never think to do.

I do think it’s important for a child to have both a male and female role model present. Ideally, these role models would be their parents, but it’s not an ideal world here and sometimes parents really aren’t the best role models possible.

13

This is something I keep hearing over and over, and I still don’t understand it. Why is it important to have both a male and a female role model? As I understand it, the purpose of a role model for a child is so that he or she grows up to be a good person. Are males and females good persons in different ways?

14

Kids need to have good men in their lives. They don’t need to be dads necessarily; they can be uncles, grandfathers, teachers, ministers, friends of the family, etc., but they need to be there.

matt_mcl, I’m not just a person; I’m a woman. That figures into my identity pretty strongly. It’s been helpful beyond words to have good, brave, honest women in my life to serve as examples. I imagine it’s much the same for men.

And I think people often underestimate how important it is for little girls to grow up knowing good men. The older I get, the more I realize that my ideas about masculinity and what it means to be “a man” come from my dad and my uncles. Fortunately, they are all kind, generous, good-hearted, square-dealing men who treat women well. The men I choose to have in my life now–my husband, my male friends–also fall into this category.

If I’d grown up with a father who was mean, dishonest, manipulative, or hateful towards women, I would have a very different idea about how men were supposed to act. Purely anecdotal, but as a teenager, my girlfriends who most often got into bad relationships were the ones whose fathers were absent.

15

Mothers and fathers usually bring different things to the table. Some single parent situations have the right combination of circumstances and personalities that the absence of a father or mother is not critical to the proper socialization of the child, but in others (IMO) it is critical.

For (some) male children, especially “A” type boys with aggressive personalities, it is important that they have a good, functional behavior model to look to, of how to properly behave as a man, toward other people. Even for boys who are not particularly aggressive, it is important that they be able to make critical judgments about how to behave. A lot this learned behavior is observational and involves feedback over a long period of time. It’s not something an uncle or male friend can sit down and install in an afternoon or a few playdates.

There are boys who are self centered terrors who are literally begging for a disciplined male example to show them the way, and I have seen the kinds of men these boys grow into when they don’t get it. It’s not pretty, and these boys often have absolutely no respect for women other than as things to be manipulated and used.

Regarding girls, good dads (IMO) give a girls a touchstone in how to deal confidently with men and have natural confidence in themselves. Having a good dad behavioral role model also instructs daughters in what types of male behavior are acceptable and not acceptable in potential boyfriends. A daughter with a good father is not going to put up with nearly as much behavioral nonsense in a potential date/mate as one without this model, because she knows she doesn’t have to, nor should she be expected to.

Men and women tend to have different strengths and in the best of possible worlds the limitations of one can be buttressed by the strengths of the other and vice versa. Having said this, it may well be preferable not to have a dad (or mom) around who is dysfunctional, but even the notion of what is, and is not “dysfunctional” can be somewhat situational, depending on the specific personality interaction of the parent and child.

16

Are women incapable of setting a good, functional behaviour model for a boy? Can they do so for an aggressive girl?

In what way?

17

It has been helpful to have good, brave, honest women in my life.

It would be useful if someone would please provide me the list of things that my father was supposed to be my role model for, and likewise for my mother. If they provided them in a different list, was this bad? Would it have been bad if instead of a father, my mother had raised me with a woman with the same attributes?

I guess I don’t understand the linkage between virtue and gender.

18

I struggle with this.
Especially being a Christian.

Especially wehn doobs like James Dobson claim that a boy without a father grows up to be a hoodlum etc.

My son is 10, and has NEVER had any man to be an eample for him.
No guy has wanted anything to do with me for 9 years in any way.
I’ve been going to churches and men there are SUpposed to help our in such situations to be a godly example.

I’ve had to stop my son from putitng on nail polish etc. because I am the only person he’s ever hung around with.

19

I think it depends on the individual situation.

However, I know that in my dad’s case, he was very adversely affected by the sudden death of his dad (my grandfather). My dad was 12 years old when his dad died (I think he died in their living room) of a heart attack. So there was my dad, age 12, with a mom and two sisters. All women. He desperately needed a male influence in his life, but his mom never remarried. (Though there was a guy that would have probably married her, but she wasn’t interested.)

My dad said that his time in the Army was one of the best times in his life, because he finally got to have some “brothers” and some male influence in his life.

Fast forward–he marries and has three daughters. My poor dad. Destined to be surrounded by estrogen, I suppose. Oh well. At least he was never shy about buying Midol or Kotex for us. He was used to doing that for his sisters and his mom, I guess.

20

I wish I had grown up without a father. My mother bought into the ‘divorce will irreparably harm your children’ crap they were spewing and so she stayed with a domineering abusive bastard because she felt that was better for us.

She’s finally divorced so that I wouldn’t completely disown her but she’s not happy about it. The ‘strong male presence’ in our house beat my brother (he tried to emulate the cocky kick ass and care not for the consequences persona our father portrayed and is now in jail) and taught me everything about sex I never wanted to know.

I think kids need someone there for them who is consistent and reliable. I understand that my husband and I each bring something different to what we teach our kids but that really isn’t mandated by our genders. We also work really hard to be identical on the important issues like discipline and our basic philosophies for kid raising are the same. I think our differences come up more in our interests and what we will teach the kids and not in how we will raise them.

I’m not sure if that makes sense to anyone but me … I hope it does … I shouldn’t be posting sleep deprived. :slight_smile: