Originally posted by Walloon
Children raised in father-absent homes will much more likely experience poverty than children in two-parent families.
Regardless of your perspective on father/no-father issues Wallon’s statement is a hard, real world, economic fact and is not a “bs statement”. To say that poverty is mainly a function of household income is quite true, but it’s also sort of tangential to the point that Wallon made, that statistically, single parent, female headed households are more often the bottom of the family income pile than other types of family structures. It’s simply a socio-economic statistical fact.
You can count me as saying it’s a good thing to have both a father and mother.
My home wasn’t ‘broken’, but my father was much older than most – he was 66 when I was born. As such, I didn’t really have a father figure: my father was an old man who couldn’t teach me things like working on the house, who never played catch with me because of his arthritis, etc.
I do feel this was somewhat a hindrance. Absent a father figure, my mother was pretty much my whole parental influence, so I spent a lot of time in my adolescence and young adulthood figuring out how the heck I was supposed to behave – it was very difficult to find a way to react to conflict in a way that pleased my mother, but also met with peer approval. As such, I had alternating phases of being very introverted and pacifist and very obnoxious and macho.
I was very lucky to have stumbled onto male role models outside the family. (These included teachers, coaches, etc.) And I think I might have turned out much worse without these influences.
My problem is that when this is discussed, it’s often done so with some variant on “he needs to grow up with proper ideas about how men and women are different/what it means to be a man/how to treat women properly,” which rather puzzles and concerns me, since it seems rather hetero/gender-normative, and since nobody can seem to tell me exactly what they mean by it.
I have no problem believing its a statistical fact. Single-parent female-headed households are more prevalent in lower-income areas. However, I don’t believe that these people experience poverty solely because of their single-parent status. If Walloon had backed up his statement with a “Statistically speaking”, or a “studies in lower income brackets have shown”, he’d have a much more valid statement. Single parenthood is not a non-stop one-way street to financial ruin.
It is my belief that poverty encourages single-parent families. Why, I’m not sure, but its a lot more common there than in my income bracket.
Okay, matt_mcl: Some positive male traits: goal orientation (vs. process orientation), aggression, stoicism, athleticism.
No, not all men have these traits, and yes, women have many of these same traits, and yes, sometimes these traits can be negatively expressed (e.g. aggression as violence instead of leadership or healthy competition).
I absolutely believe a child of either gender should have good role models of both sexes. Obviously, in an idea world that would include the child’s parents, but very often it doesn’t. But that’s the ideal that I personally aspire to and, having been raised in a loving two-parent home with a father who was and remains my hero, it is my personal decision not to have a child outside of marriage because I will not intentionally raise a child without a father. (I am not commenting on anyone else’s choice, but this is mine.)
That being said, I think the idea that a horrible dad is better than no dad is obviously false. (Just as the idea that a horrible mom is better than no mom is also false.) The idea that mothers and fathers tend to bring different skills and gifts to parenting presumes that the parent in question is bringing some skills and some gifts in the first place. Some people just don’t have any.
So if my life unfolds that I find Mr. Right and we have kids, but then something happens – he dies, or flakes off, or whatever — I certainly think I could do a very respectable job raising my kids alone, and I would hope they would turn out well. But raising kids alone is not something I would do by choice, and the absence of a positive male role model is precisely the reason why.
And here’s purely anecdotal evidence to back up what WALLOON and ASTRO have said:
My mom’s a pretty firm lady, but when my brother hit adolescence he just sort of decided that he wasn’t going to listen to her anymore. I don’t think he consciously decided this, but he was suddenly taller and heavier than she so, practically speaking, what could she really do to him? Plus, he knew that he could exploit her great affection for him as her only son and make such a pain in the ass of himself that she would sometimes relent in order to avoid conflict with him – and generally speaking, negotiation and avoidance of direct conflict are common feminine traits.
My father OTOH, quickly let my brother know that while his mother might put up with some level of shit from him, the level my dad would tolerate was, in ASTRO’s words, approximately minus zero. Further, my father had pretty firm ideas of how men were expected to treat women and, more particularly, how a son should treat his mother and, more particularly still, how my father expected any person to treat his wife. None of these standards allowed my brother be an aggressive, disrespectful PITA to my mother. And while my mother might let my brother slide, because he was her baby boy, my father rarely did. He expected my brother to learn that you have the power to choose your own actions, but then you have to live with the consequences of those actions. Don’t like them? Suck it up and deal with them. And, next time, don’t do it again. Could my mother have taught him the same lessons? Maybe. But maybe not, and certainly not as effectively.
At the end of the day (or the decade), my brother may have ended up the same decent man he is today, even without my father’s influence. But his teenage years would have been a heck of lot harder for him and for my entire family, because when he began testing the limits, the person both setting the limits and allowing him to figure out what the were and what they meant, was my father.
Okay, I’ll bite, but remember I’m only speaking for myself. I’m sure I’ve used a phrase similar to “He needs to learn what it means to be a man” at one point or another. I mean he needs to learn that men take responsibility, help support their children, etc. They don’t forget they have children just because they break up with the other parent. They don’t spend their evenings doing whatever they want, thinking they shouldn’t be disturbed by the kids because that’s their wife’s job.I don’t mean he needs to learn about the difference between a man and a woman, but rather about the difference between a man and a boy.
I suppose it is a little hetero-normative in a way, but then again, I’ve never said it in reference to families with two parents of the same sex. Mostly because to me, it doesn’t seem to be an issue there. Take a family consisting of two men and their son.The two men break up, and the one who leaves wipes the child out of his life (something I don’t really imagine happens as often as it does with hetero couples) Okay, the kid has one bad male parent role model. But he’s also got a good one to make up for it. Similar situation with two women and their son- he doesn’t have a bad male parent role model to be neutralized.
My farther already had a son. He just wanted a girl, and instead he got two more sons along with her. I understand being the middle child meant I was left out of a lot of stuff and I didn’t get the attention I would have otherwise, but this was an exception. He never really loved me. He hardly ever went to my stuff. Eventually he just stopped making excuses and sometimes I didn’t even tell him. Why bother? My mom most of the time found a way to get there. For years I would never get any kind of real attention from him unless it was negative in some way. That’s not all, man. But that’s all I want to say. I hate him.
So basically, I had a dad guy there but he was never really a ‘father’ to me. Look how I turned out. Heh.
On the other hand, I still found other male role models who became father figures and older brother figures who were a great impact on my life.
Maybe it’s because of my anger at my father, but lately I’ve had this desire when/if I give up my nomadic life to raise a son and teach him stuff, and be a good dad. The funny part is I don’t think I’ll ever stop being afraid of girls enough for a wife. But I bet I’ll have some female friends who’ll be good role models.
I don’t think it’s necessary to have a male (father) physically in the home, but I think it’s very important to have a good relationship with your father.
Like many others, my parents were divorced. In my case, I was about 10 years old. Since my dad was much older than my mom, he decided to move to Florida and retire, over 1,000 miles away. I would never have heard from him again if I hadn’t made the effort (at 10 years old, mind you) to stay in touch. I was able visit him for a week or 2 during a few summers, but it was nothing like a father/son relationship is supposed to be. It was more like visiting a relative you hardly know.
I hated him for abandoning me. Even at 10 I couldn’t understand how a Dad could just up and leave like that. I’m now 32 and married with a 2-year-old son of my own, and I understand it even less. I’d move to friggin’ Neptune if that’s what it took to be near my son.
My father has been dead for about a year, and my feelings of bitterness have not decreased at all.
He did do one thing for me: He made me absolutely determined to be the best father I can be. My son will never hate me.