Strange question, I know. But I wrote this this morning, and it got me wondering:
But thinking on it more, I realize that I myself have given him some decidedly mixed signals in this department. His own father is a “deadbeat dad”. Of course, I took to heart the parenting advice of not “bashing” your child’s other parent. When he was small and asked me why his father wasn’t around, I gave him the boilerplate non-answer of, “You father simply wasn’t ready to be a father. It’s a shame he’s missing out on what a wonderful person you are.”
I’m not sure I like that answer. I wonder if that answer, and ones like it, have unconsciously encouraged our sons to consider fathering optional. If they’re “not ready for it” or if they “have other stuff” or if there’s any reason given other than, “because he’s an irresponsible selfish asshole,” given to spare the child, is that in fact giving that child permission to likewise “not be ready” for fatherhood and duck out on their responsibilities in turn?
What could we do different? How can we express our disapproval in a meaningful way so we can break the cycle - without damaging our kids by “bashing” their absentee parent?
ETA: And I suddenly profoundly wish I’d used the term “deadbeat parent” instead of “deadbeat dad” in the title. Gender isn’t relevant here, although it was a dad that inspired the question. But I can’t edit the title now.
I got in a big argument with Farmer Jane about this at one point: I felt she was putting so much effort into understanding and accepting her boy’s father’s decision to entirely reject any sort of relationship with his son that she was effectively sending the message to her son that it was an acceptable, rational choice.
I do think some single parents who have been entirely abandoned deal with their emotional reaction by lowering their expectations for the entire gender. It makes what happened to them less personal, and hence less painful. However, in the case of deadbeat dads, it leads to moms who over-indulge their boys because they don’t expect much from them in terms of self-control or unselfish behavior, and who do not steer their daughters away from destructive, exploitative relationships because they, themselves see such relationships as inevitable because it’s the inherent nature of men.
“Mommy, why is that man yelling at the waitress?”
“Because he is a mean person.”
We don’t hesitate to describe undesireable behaviour in other situations…
I think the hesitation might come from not wanting to shatter the child’s dream that someday they will have a father, or not wanting to tell the child that their father (someone who should love them unconditionally) doesn’t love them.
I can’t put my finger on exactly why, but I don’t think that teaching a child this stinging lesson will prevent them from going on the shirk their parental responsibilites in the future. At least, nowhere near as much as being a strong role model as a dedicated and loving parent would.
I shy away from describing people as being a certain way, especially my kid’s dad. I don’t have as much of an issue with saying someone is acting badly, although I still don’t badmouth their dad.
I think it’s ok to say, for example, “You dad had other things in his life and decided not to be a dad. I don’t agree that that was the right or fair decision for our family” because that makes it about dad’s behavior, which I condemn, but not the man who he is, which is also (to some extent, especially in my son’s mind) the person my son is. You know? If dad (or mom) is “bad” then the kid often feels they must also be “bad” because, well, that’s my dad! But if dad made bad decisions, well, my son can make better decisions.
ETA: I feel compelled to say that my ex is in no way, shape, or form a deadbeat, but of course other disagreements come up, and I try to deal with them like this.
Maybe it was a rational choice, acceptable or not. Can’t pretend that men who don’t want a family are crazy, any more than the woman who has an abortion for the same reason.
Yes, if a mother doesn’t have a moral obligation to accept the natural outcome of conception I don’t think the man does either. I don’t think people who don’t want a child and accidentally create one are really great candidates for parenthood. I’m fine, morally, with a father who says “I don’t want to be a father so I reject that role.” But I do think you have both a moral and a legal obligation to fulfill any court ordered child support and even a greater moral obligation to probably go above and beyond court ordered child support. Especially for large incidentals and things of that nature that may fall outside the scope of the agreement.
I think a parent should instill the values important to them in their children. If you have accepted the responsibility of being a parent I don’t think there’s anything wrong with saying, “Your father did not want to be a parent. I don’t agree with that decision, and I think you have a responsibility to support your children. It’s also why I think you need to understand contraception and how to avoid having children you do not want or are not ready to have.”
Thank you. I like this answer a lot. Now if I could just find a TARDIS and go back for a do-over… Ah, well. He’s a good, responsible person despite my early clumsy attempts at parenting, and I do think he’s gotten this message from me in other conversations, so all I can hope is that no long lasting harm was done.
I paid 15 years of child support for 2 kids. During that time I was in the same area as my kids, made a variable middle class income as a sales person and remained single. My CS, not including the many, many other thousands I spent on lifestyle and extra curricular expenses for the kids probably amounted to about 25%-30% of my total income. I never missed a payment, but at times it was serious struggle.
If I had remarried and taken on more kids the CS I owed and paid would have been a lot more problematic than a “struggle”. If I was not fortunate enough to be continuously employed the CS may well have been impossible to make. And finally, if my ex moved away and the kids were not proximate, or my ex had remarried or gotten new on site boyfriend and the kids had (effectively) a new on-site daddy or had tried to seriously impede access to the kids I can’t say if my attitude might not have changed.
My ex had absolutely no inclination to ponder what I went through getting that check to her. I was effectively an ATM. There was no acknowledgement whatsoever or appreciation ever expressed that the checks came like clockwork. It was just expected that it all magically happened. I can assure you if I was a day or two late poo and fan would have made acquaintance.
Men who can pay and do not should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, but having been on the other side I can see how some men, in some situations might say “fuck it”. It would not be right, but I can see how some men, even otherwise decent men, can get to that point through their own bad decisions or through unfortunate circumstance.
In the end re criticizing daddy to the kids the ex needs to decide if the father is a good man or not. If he is a good man who is struggling then giving him the benefit of the doubt, on the other hand if he is not a good man the kid needs so know this. In the end your ex is the man you thought was a really, really good bet at some point. He is the man you choose so what is that saying about you?
Women think with their pussies as often as men think with their penises, when choosing people to mate with it might be best to take step back sometimes and think about our choices on the front end. A little common sense observation over time will usually tell you who someone is.
Insulting someone’s mother is practically the definition of fighting words. I don’t think you can criticize a parent without implicitly insulting the child.
My father was absent in spirit but not body, and it made me more determined to be there for my own kids. YMMV.
I was raised by my mother after my parents got divorced and my mother did badmouth my father loudly and often. She wasn’t wrong in the facts but her motivation was to hurt him more by turning his kids against him and it worked at least partially. That is one of the most common reasons that people bash their ex’s to their kids and I consider it to be a form of child abuse on its own no matter who else did what. Turing me and brothers against my father didn’t do anyone any good. We weren’t dumb and saw what had happened as well as anyone but he was still our parent and we are half of him. There is no way out from the child’s perspective and it is unfair to burden them with it.
It isn’t the mother (or the father’s) job to try manipulate their kid’s opinions about the other parent. It goes without saying that anyone in that situation has some less than flattering thoughts about their ex. As the parent, share that drama with your friends, on message boards or wherever else but spare the children from any manipulation no matter how much you think it is deserved. It is impossible to be both completely innocent yourself and unbiased when you are the parent in such a situation so that is just not a wise game to start.
WhyNot, your son and his father may have a real relationship sometime in the future and it is not fair to sabotage the chances for that before it can begin. You may think that it couldn’t happen in your case but I reconciled with my father after nearly two decades of sporadic contact only and it has done both of us a lot of good. My mother is still my closest parent but she did the wrong thing by driving that wedge hard for so long.
My kid is no longer really a kid, so it’s water under the bridge at this point.
They do have, kind of sort of, their own relationship now. His father Friended him on Facebook when he was 15. They’ve seen each other twice in the last 5 years, when the stepmother my son didn’t know he had arranged the meetups and came out and picked him up and drove him to visit and brought him back home. *She and his stepsister *came to his 18th birthday party; no sign of Daddy. No one came to his graduations.
But this is why I like Martin Hyde’s phrasing. It’s actually more honest than what I was able to come up with on my own. I worded it as if it was an inability, but really it was an unwillingness. It wasn’t “He wasn’t ready to be a father,” (which, let’s face it, turns out to be a terrible answer when your kid finds out his father has married and had other children that he *does *parent.) It was “He didn’t *want *to be a parent.”
It’s no excuse for bashing, but it’s exceedingly difficult to be both honest and gentle with your kids about your ex’s poor behavior. It’s the apotheosis of “I’m not mad, I’m disappointed.”
I think I managed to do it, but I don’t think I managed to do it without underminding my other messages about parental responsibilities. That’s the part that just occurred to me, and I don’t think it’s confined to just me and my situation. We’ve seen the harm that comes from bashing, and so we tell single parents not to bash, but I wonder if the pendulum has swung too far to the other side, where we’re not only sparing our children, but making parenting seem like a hobby that you can pick up and drop at whim.
That is a valid academic viewpoint but I don’t think it is all that relevant in these types of cases. Kids are a lot more perceptive about these types of issues even from a young age than many people realize. The goal of the other parent shouldn’t be to lay out everything as honestly possible. You can’t do that perfectly anyway as the other parent because your perception is inherently biased based on your own perceptions. The child will figure that out on their own no matter what you say. The goal should be to set an an example of what a good parent is on your own and not cause any additional harm by badmouthing someone that they have no choice in being associated with in some way for life.
I tell my daughter that her absent biofather didn’t think he’d be any good at being a father and didn’t want to try because he was scared he’d get it wrong. Then we talk about how important it is to do things even if they scare us because some of the best things we’ll ever do are scary. I also let her know that I think he’s silly for not trying, and that I think he made a mistake. I tell her I was a bit scared too because I’d never been a mummy before, but I love being her mummy and I’m so glad I was brave. I also tell her how much her stepfather loves being her daddy even though he’d never been a daddy.
It’s tricky. I struggle to come up with age appropriate answers on the fly as these conversations are always led by her and come up infrequently and at the most random times. I’m trying to convey a message that he’s not a bad person, but that I think he made a bad or silly decision. The story will continue to grow in complexity as she gets older.
I was just trying to determine what kind of deabeat your ex was is all. The type where he wasn’t ready for it, and failed to fall in line when you chose to have a child. Or he flaked out, took off and didn’t support you at least financially type of deadbeat.
The type where I was 17 and he was 21 and our three forms of birth control (sponge, spermicide and condom) failed the first time I had sex and he proposed marriage and promised to support me and the baby and then didn’t. I took him to court a few times for child support, which he promised to pay and then didn’t. Eventually he told the judge he got fired from his job and didn’t tell the judge he began working for the same man for cash so he didn’t have a paycheck to garnish. (And no, my son, now 20, still doesn’t know that last part, because he doesn’t need to. That’s how careful I still am not to bash - even just the facts sound like bashing, so I don’t go there.)
But what made me stop taking him to court where his broken promises to the kid to come pick him up and spend time with him. Those promises only happened (and were broken) when I’d recently seen him in court. I decided the theoretical money wasn’t worth continually breaking my son’s heart. When my lawyer stopped calling him, our phone never rang again.
Really, we were both kids. Stupid kids, perhaps. But yeah, if he’d been up front about not wanting to be a parent, I’d have maybe made some different decisions. But I can also understand how a 21 year old kid fresh out of the army would maybe not have the personal insight to be honest about such a socially incorrect feeling. But I gotta tell ya…my advice to pregnant young women now always includes some sort of, “Can you do this alone? I know he says he loves you and he’ll be there, but he could get hit by a bus tomorrow, and then what’s your plan?”
(Sorry if I sound defensive, but I am. That’s at least two posters who seem to have assumed I was a conniving gold digger, as if it had anything to do with the question. Is that enough personal revelation to address the topic at hand now?)
I agree. I think a lot of women are very vague about the subject of absentee fathers because they don’t want to admit to their children they choose to have a child against their partner’s wishes. I had an acquaintance that did this for years basically traumatizing her son with stories about how his father would soon realize how important he (the son) was and come back to them. Before he was out of his teens this boy had been arrested multiple times for harassing his biological father and the man’s family. It was an R.O.T.C. instructor who finally managed to get his head straight with a brief lecture of “suck it up your dad doesn’t want anything to do with you, so grow-up and act like an adult”. Another acquaintance of mine completely freaked out when her daughter choose to have an abortion rather than destroy her marriage like her mother did. She couldn’t understand that her daughter considered her husband’s love and companionship more valuable than any potential children.
Ah, well. He’s a good, responsible person despite my early clumsy attempts at parenting, and I do think he’s gotten this message from me in other conversations, so all I can hope is that no long lasting harm was done.