Everyone who has been a parent knows more about it than you do.
This does not compute. First of all, I am a parent, which gives me perspective that you don’t have, and second of all, the issue is YOU pronouncing all monogamous parents as being inferior to this tool with a harem. YOU are not qualified to have any opinion at all about parenting.
How do these cases make you more knowledgable about parenting than those of us in this thread who are parents?
Amen. Stoid does not seem to regard the man’s relationship with either his kids or his baby mamas to be very important. Actual love doesn’t seem to count for much.
A: I don’t respect Kody Brown, but not because he has 13 kids and courted a new wife, but because I think he’s an idiot. I think he’s emotionally retarded and clueless and I find his personality thoroughly grating.
B: Boatloads of Daddys are absolute shit parents, polygamy has nothing at all to do with it. Boatloads of moms are shit parents. The structure of a marriage has nothing to do with it.
C: Because I like to keep things accurate, your representation is not. Kody Brown’s courtship of his fourth wife is hardly the crime of the century, considering that for 16 years before that it was him and three wives…taking a few months out for the fourth relationship is no big deal. But his work kept him from his kids for a long time because the distance from his work to his home was so great, which is why they bought a new house much closer to his work, and the result was his spending a great deal more time with his kids.
So you admit he’s a shitty father, yet you still maintain that this is an “excellent” arrangement for children?
Of course they do… I will never know what it is to be a parent, which means having a child.
What it takes to raise a child well, producing a happy, emotionally healthy and well-adjustd adult human being is something that is must be learned, and far too few people ever do, because the mere having of children does not teach it. Having children just gives you something to practice on if you actually do learn anything.
The fact that you impregnated your wife, kept the child, and have managed to keep it alive is a minimal accomplishment, and in no way demonstrates that you have good parenting skills.
A: I don’t know whether he’s a shitty father or not… According to his wives and his kids, he’s a great dad, but since I personally find him so obnoxious it’s difficult to give him any credit for anything.
B: Even if Kody Brown were the world’s worst father…that would mean he’s the world’s worst father, not that having multiple wives made him that way.
If the parents are good parents, and they are comfortable with polygamy, I think it’s better than monogamy. If the parents are shitty parents, polygamy won’t fix it any more than monogamy will.
Not that anyone will pay attention to an outsider this late in the intimate flagellating tête-à-tête you have going for yourselves but;
This issue seems no different then prostitution. Does society have the right to limit women they believe are harming themselves or do women have the personal right to do whatever they please.
It’s possible to argue misogyny for proponents of both viewpoints.
You don’t know what it takes to raise a child. You don’t know what you’re talking about and I do. You should listen to people who know more than you. I gyuarantee you, I am a much better father and husband than the douche on that show.
I do.
Especially since his girlfriends only say what they’re programmed to say.
His being a shit head is the reason he has multiple baby mamas (they are not wives), and if he’s the world’s worst father, you can’t really say that’s an “excellent” situation for the children, can you?
And that is a stunningly arrogant and ignorant assertion on your part (especially since this “family” has at least one manifestly shitty parents and several unhappy moms).
And yet you are advocating polygamy to fix it.
Your imagination again.
Your judgment about polygamy, it has nothing to do with facts.
I didn’t say “Being Kody Brown’s child is an excellent way to raise a kid” nor did I say “Being Kody Brown’s child is an excellent situation”.
Pay attention, please.
Nope, just an opinion.
Only in your head, where no one lives but you.
Not even close.
It’s really strange the way you make things up to argue, Dio. I don’t understand what the point is.
Maybe you are, maybe you aren’t. I only know what you say about yourself. You also think you a walking encyclopedia of Rock N Roll that’s never heard of Joe Tex or Laura Nyro. If your assessment of your parenting skills is anything similar, I have to say I’m skeptical.
Hmm. I’d be interested in the argument that women having the personal right to make their own choices is misogyny. I’m not saying it can’t be made, I’m just saying I can’t think of how it would operate.
They aren’t making their own choices and a man who views them as unequal by virtue of their sex is misogynist by definition. They are married to a misogynist.
(Frankly, at this point I’m just ignoring Stoid and Dio. Even though one is clearly right and the other is clearly wrong (;)) they both ran out of new things to say about 50 posts ago.)
Sitnam’s is an interesting question because I think the parallels between prostitution and polygamy are quite strong in this case. Just as there are different kinds of prostitution (on one side Eliot Spitzer high-class generally non-coerced prostitute and on the other a human trafficked sex slave) there are different kinds of polygamy.
Polygamy as it’s practiced by Fundamentalist Mormons in the United States is much further toward the human trafficking side of the scale. Now, this family seems less coercive and apparently doesn’t live in a compound, but it’s still a disturbing lifestyle that relies on religious fanaticism, insularity, and often, outright coercion to sustain it. Once these problems are addressed, I’ll be open to consensual Fundamentalist Mormon polygamy. Not before that.
Someone paying child support to women who are raising their biological children… that is in fact a concurrent relationship. It may not be a concurrent sexual relationship (or actually, it might very well be), but in every other respect it is entirely concurrent and polygamous.
However I do believe it was mentioned that in general the plural marriages have each mother and child/ren in their own apartment/house.
How is it good for the kid to know that he only gets Daddy 1 or 2 days of the week, no matter what they would prefer or need? Is it fair for daddy to unilaterally change the schedule to be there on their birthday instead of at the normally scheduled home? Who’s school play does he go see? Who’s soccer game? Somehow it doesn’t seem like a fair shake for the kid/s to me. What id the woman is having a bad patch, I can at least depend on mrAru holding me and snuggling me when I am sick or in pain. She would have to either get him to interrupt the schedule, or get one of her sister wives to interrupt HER life and come over unless one of the kids was old enough to help out. Last time i had surgery, mrAru took the week off and when I had a tumor removed and needed the bandages changed several times per day for the first month, he took leave from the Navy and was there for me every day, 24 hours a day [unless he was out getting a prescription or groceries] and he didn’t have to interrupt any schedule with anybody else.
Sorry, he is pretty much that scum that the unmarried slum dwellers call a baby daddy. He wants to dip his wick in as many women as possible and have minimal interaction with each one.
Stoid, all the text formatting in the world won’t erase the fact that they chose this because they believe that it’s a woman’s role to share a husband, and not the husband’s role to share a wife. I don’t give two flips if they chose the lifestyle, it’s still sexist bullshit.
Sure, that was what we agreed to, we both agreed to it, that’s the point. And there’s nothing in our relationship that’s been decided based on the fact that I’m female and he’s not. Except childbirth and breastfeeding. I must confess that I was stuck with those things.
Of course they’re entitled to it, but that doesn’t mean I have to think it’s a good choice. Look, a woman can choose to have 20 children and make tater tot casserole on TV. A woman can choose for her husband to beat her every day. A woman can choose to shoot smack. A woman can choose to do a lot of things that aren’t particularly healthy.
Here’s a key, though. We made our decisions, and we can unmake them if need be. Can these women?
I DO think other people’s can differ without being bad. But in the case of polygamy, I think it’s really really hard for it not to be bad, and I think the Brown family is not a case where it’s proven to be good.
I think we’re watching a different show. I think it’s fairly obvious that Christine doesn’t like Robyn and didn’t want her in the family. I think it’s obvious that because of the arrangement and the TV show, she didn’t have much of a say in making it not happen. I think it’s obvious that Meri needs a shrink. I think Janelle seems pretty happy, I’ll give you that one, but really I think it’s because she doesn’t care. She’s the one who’s a career person, and she’s out of the house 12 hours a day. Where you get this idea that this show portrayed minor bumps in the road, like everyone else has, I do not know.
After the first episode or maybe even the second, I was positively disposed to this family as you seem to be. Here, you’ve maybe hit on the true niggling, underlying reason that I was turned off. Kody DOES seem like a clueless idiot in a lot of ways. He DOES seem emotionally stunted, much like he’s one of the kids. And I don’t think this something you want to model for children, either. My personal conclusion is that the complicated power dynamic is BOUND to result in something that’s not ideal. Either the man has to be a very dominating person in order to maintain any kind of presence in the household, or the women collude together (consciously or unconsciously) to make him irrelevant, which is kind of what has seemed to happen here. I don’t think either of those outcomes is acceptable within a family dynamic. It’s not good for the adults, and it’s SURE not good for the kids. And, true, every relationship has power struggles of some kind, but when the players start out equal, they have a chance of keeping it equal in the long term.
Well said.
Sounds very reasonable. Are you sure you are in the right thread?
I agree with the assessment that Fundamentalist Mormon polygamy is unhealthy.
However, I don’t know if it’s possible for Fundamentalist Mormon polygamy to solve these problems. Mainstream Mormonism in the 1800s was fairly similar, and most of the women did not like it. It look the Federal government to abolish the practice, and I can’t see how it could have been reformed.
Not as a member of the Mormon Church, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints aka LDS. How do I know this? Becuase if she had, she’d have been a Member* up to the day she openly admitted she practiced Polygamy, and then she’d have been excommunicated from the Church. Since this show is a Media Circus, can you see any way such a public announcement and excommunication would not have made it into the news? **“Sister Wife Excommunicated by Church!!!” **would be in the news in minutes. Like I said, she was likely a member of one of the other small “mormon Fundamentalist” cult offshoots, all of whom practice poly to some extent- that’s why they left in the first place.
(*It’s hard to unilaterally drop your membership in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints aka LDS, they will often consider you a member even after you may no longer think you are)
They have seemingly picked this family- and perhaps Kody was even “volunteered”- for that very reason. This is not a typical “mormon fundy” family- the wives aren’t all wearing gingham, they aren’t all living in a compound, there’s no apparent incest and certainly no pedophilia evident. It’s as “normal” as a “mormon fundy” poly family can be. I think the idea was to try to get a somewhat “normal” family out there to fight the very poor (and well deserved) PR rep the “mormon fundy” folks got due to those raids and stuff.