A married man was going to divorce his wife if she carried their baby to term?
Yes, they agreed to be childfree, but had a birth control failure.
I’m old school - sex is a reproductive act, and part of “being responsible” isn’t just using birth control and avoiding disease, but accepting that those measures might fail and dealing with the results when they do. Doing that can be tough, but what course a person takes when things get tough says a lot about them. A person that doesn’t support his/her kids is a deadbeat, and part of being a deadbeat is living with your kids knowing you’re a deadbeat. Sucks, but life’s tough when you’re a deadbeat, deadbeat. What one does is more important than how one feels about what one does, so I’ve little sympathy for bad actors that want their actions swept under the rug so they can tell themselves they’re nice or look nice to others. All that gives us is a slew of cheerful deadbeats, and they’re more annoying than the miserable ones.
That said, I’m not for endless rants at the kid about what a deadbeat the parent is - it should be stated factually and unemotionally. But I’d want my kid to have the same values as me, and that means not sugar-coating the fact that being a deadbeat parent is as bad as any other behavior where someone doesn’t take responsibility for their actions because the consequences were more than they liked. And if the deadbeat wanted to tell their lame excuse-ridden side of things, my child and I would discuss their pathetic rationales. Most likely, the deadbeat would counter to our off-spring that I was a hard-ass with ridiculously high expectations for people’s behavior, to which I would reply “Yep. Keep that in mind.”
I wasn’t thinking at all that you were a gold digger. Based on the details I was trying to determine whether it was" I’m having a child whether he wants it or not, and hope he falls in line. Or he flaked out, and didn’t live up to what he promised." It is now clear it’s the latter in your case, which I agree with you is a shitty thing for him to do. At the very least there should of been financial support.
My father did the same. Our mother never told us, but she didn’t have to . We knew he wasn’t there for us in every sense of the phrase.
If anything is encouraging “deadbeat dads”, it’s mothers raising their children to hate and fear their father and keeping them from seeing him as much as possible. And by doing so, preventing him from forming a real paternal bond and therefore from having any sense of paternal responsibility; they aren’t his kids emotionally speaking, they are hostile strangers.
“Sparing kid’s feelings” about their father appears to be a rarity, from all I can tell. Demonization of the absent father appears to be the norm. My mother never did that, but even then I considered it unusual of her.
Truth.
How old are the subject children? Three, Eight, Sixteen?
Are people forgetting that a three year old asks ‘where is daddy’ more out of curiosity and less out of concern?
Three year olds are fairly easy to subdue, heck if they see something shiny, they’ll be indisposed for the next two days.
This should be no different than any other awkward questions parents fear their children asking.
Sparing the kids’ feelings is more or less a growing parenting trend because they’ve got some notion that children may resent them; which suggests a selfish act by the parents - not one born out of longterm concern of the child. Conversely, selfish parents will bash their ex spouse, using the disposition of their family’s status to further impose their malice - “your father is an a**hole and we wouldn’t be in this mess if it wasn’t for him!”
However I would err on the side of caution when describing an absent father with a negative connotation. Eventually children pick up on these things and WILL resent you for it.
Eh, I look at it this way. I’ve heard many a bigot say: “I can’t help it if I’m racist. I was raised this way.”
No asshat, you’re an adult now with your own set of critical thinking skills. You don’t get a free pass because Mommy and Daddy never taught you to NOT hate black and brown people.
The same applies here. Only except at least now the parent is telling white lies for good reasons. If it’s OK to tell our children the bull shit lie that Santa Clause and The Easter bunny are real, just so they can be happy, I don’t think it’s such a big deal if we neglect (which, really isn’t even a lie) to tell them what a DB dad they have. They can come to this conclusion when they get older and develope their own critical thinking skills.
My oldest child, who isn’t my bio child asked me about his dad once and why he wasn’t around. The best I had to offer was “I don’t know son, that’s something you’re going to ask him yourself when you get older.”
He seemed OK with that.
Also, hats off to Astro, I agree with everything he said.
Deadbeat parents are people that don’t pay child support, period. It’s got nothing to do with anything else. You’re not buying visitation rights or good publicity from the mother or fiscal oversight of another household (“she spends my money on herself! Look at her shoes!”) - you’re meeting your legal obligation to a child you brought into the world. The stuff you posted is just the bullshit rationalizing people use for being deadbeats, and has no relevance to paying child support. If they are valid concerns, hire a lawyer and arrange custody legally, rather than try to “get back” at the mother thru illegal acts like a dumbass.
In my experience, it’s often the opposite. Grown-ups tend to have a grasp of complexity, and can see the good and bad in a person. SIngle mothers with deadbeat ex-partners often have some warm memories of courtship, and often have real affection for the deadbeat dad.
It’s the kids who never get the good times to go along with the bad, and they don’t have the emotional complexity to grasp that the deadbeat in question screwed up royally, but probably isn’t an entirely terrible person.
I don’t agree, I went through this the first year of my divorce and just ignored it and kept the money comming in. Once she had a new boyfriend she eased up and the relation ship with the kids went back to normal. Some men and women spend too much time fighting at the kids expense. Men need to keep their side of the street clean and support the child period!