The idea that men can’t adopt a ‘full maternal role’–whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean–is bullshit. Men can be loving, and caring, and self sacrificing. Kanicbird and all else who adopt this position, you’re perpetuating archaic and self-hurting stereotypes. Why do you think so few dads even try, hmm? Maybe it’s because everyone’s telling them, ‘Oh, you’re a guy, you can’t be a real parent!’. Fuck you! Stupid stuff like this only hurts the children involved, and the sooner we realize that one’s parental instinct isn’t dependant on the chromosones in one’s body, the better. You people are the reason there are so few male elementry teachers. You people are the reason kids don’t feel safe around men. You people are the reason so many brothers and uncles don’t feel safe babysitting for no good reason.
It’s interesting that kanicbird’s post makes just as much sense if you replace ‘female’ with ‘white’ and ‘male’ with ‘black’. Tune’s the same, just transposed five decades back.
Ah. OK. I guess I stopped reading before I got to that part of the stupid. It still intrigues me how similar the anti-gay marriage arguments are to the anti-interracial marriage arguments of not that long ago. “It’s unnatural!” will condemn a multitude of unpopular practices.
My husband has many faults, and I have described some of them on these boards. However, I will be the first to say that he has always been a very loving Daddy to our daughter. He’s always indulged her too much, and that’s the worst flaw he has as a parent. He’s always spent a lot of time with her, and when she was an infant and I breastfed her, he frequently took on the diaper duty, just to be able to do more of the parenting. He would hold her and cuddle her after I fed her. When she got older, he’d watch over her in the yard, and let her “help” him tinker with the car. He DIDN’T potty train her, or instruct her about menstruation, or about birth control, or proper female hygiene. If I had died, or we had divorced, I’m sure that he would have done so, or had a trusted female explain these things to her, though.
In other words, my husband is a better mother than about 90% of the women I see in public with kids. He would make a dandy day-care attendant, I think, if he was willing to take a steep salary cut. He loves little kids, in the same way that I love kittens, and enjoys their company. His nieces and nephews, and now his great nieces and nephews, have all enjoyed spending time with Uncle Bill, who would take them to the circus and the zoo and the farm. He’d sit down and play house or trucks with them. Most important of all, he’d listen to them.
I think that our society is much poorer because we are not as willing to acknowledge that men can be excellent parents and uncles and teachers. It’s a disservice to the men (who could get some fulfillment from being in a child’s life), it’s a disservice to the kids (the boys could learn to be caring men, and the girls could learn that there ARE caring men), and it’s a disservice to the women (who would probably welcome more help with child care).
Not black people that I remember, but IIRC there have been several historic incidents where the children of American Indians and Australian Aborigines were forcibly taken and put in white Christian, English speaking homes, allegedly because it was better for the children. Not quite the same thing, but similar.
Well said Lynn - my husband wasn’t about to learn how to plait down our kids hair - he smoothed it off with a scrubbing brush (I kid you not) and off they went. He did give the indepth menstruation chat too. Guys do things differently and often better and definitely as good as in their way. I’m so sorry to see how they are marginalized in child care - let the guys do it their way.
I am not really in agreement with the thrust of what Kanicbird said, but in examining the development of children raised mostly by women (as in single-parent households) including myself, I think there definitely needs to be a gender balance in the influences on the children throughout their development, whether it’s from parents or some other source of input (like relatives). Whatever “role” either parent adopts, whether the couple is gay or straight, a man is not a woman, and vice versa. There are some things that are unique to each gender that are probably best learned from that gender. Men can give an “indepth menstruation chat,” but that’s not exactly carrying the same weight as it would coming from someone who has experienced it first-hand. As for a male child, what could his mother really tell him about wet dreams, or all the unwritten codes of competition and jockeying for dominance that teenage boys expend so much energy on?
Theoretically, a parent of either gender could learn about a subject and know it well enough to teach the child about it, but a lot of things are theoretically possible that rarely happen in reality. Sometimes the world just doesn’t fit our utopian social ideals of perfect equality and equanimity. I would want any child of mine to be as well-rounded as possible, and that means being exposed to as many sides of life from as many points of view as possible.
Out of the handful or two of the couples I think I know well enough to “judge”, I say for about half of them, the mother or the father could/would do about equally well raising a child/children by themselves.
On the other hand, for the other half, the men would probably do okay, but if left to the women, the kids would be lucky to either not have major issues or be fairly sucessful/normal adults.
So, from my limited experience, not only is it a stereotype, its downright lieing propaganda.
My mom didn’t do the hair thing either. My hair was washed, combed and brushed daily, but beyond that there was no braiding and barrettes and that when I was a little kid. Then I went to the barber shop with my dad and convinced them to give me a boy haircut. I grew it back 5 years later and again found that mom was pretty useless in the ‘how to braid hair’ category.
Neither one of them did the big in-depth talk about the menstruation. I read some books when I was 8 and figured it out.
The only real difference between my mom and my dad was that she used to try to force me to wear dresses, and he only asked that I wear clothes that were clean.
My parents gave me children’s books about human anatomy and reproduction from the get go. My mother told me where the tampons and pads were kept. The thought of either of them having some kind of “in-depth” discussion of menstruation is not something I really need. It’s a biological process, and frankly, as a subjective experience, differs from woman to woman. A non-squeamish bloke should be just as competent to field the issue.
I think that if a child has one or more loving parents, that’s doing pretty good. I had the supposedly ideal arrangement, one mother, one father, and frankly in spite of their best efforts they still managed to leave me with massive issues. (In the words of Phillip Larkin, ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad.’)
You’re not misremembering. Some Indian children were sent to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, located at Carlisle Barracks. Visitors to the Barracks drive past a small graveyard that houses the graves of children who died there. It’s especially sad when you consider that those children had no reason to be there in the first place but for the “beneficence” of the white man.
Oh, I think that a girl needs to know just what’s happening and how to deal with it. She needs to know how to buy, use, and dispose of the various feminine products. Or how to clean them, if she chooses to use cloth pads or the cup. She also needs to know how to recognize a yeast infection, to get to the doc and have it diagnosed the first time, so that she will know the symptoms and how it feels. This is all stuff that my husband not only does not know, but he’ll use the Brain Bleach if he’s accidentally exposed to it. He will buy feminine hygiene products, as long as he can grab them quickly and ignore them while they’re in the basket until he checks out.
I also gave her a copy of Our Bodies, Our Selves, and let her keep it in her room. She was very embarrassed by the fact that she might have a body with sexual functions, and if I’d done a lot of sex education, she’d have died of shame.
I did do SOME sex ed with her. I talked to her about various birth control options (even though she had the book), and I bought some condoms and demonstrated how to put one on a broomstick handle. And I made her put one on that handle, too. Then I gave her the rest of the packet, and told her that if she wanted more I’d buy them for her, if she didn’t want to buy her own.
My problem with this whole line of reasoning is it sets up an entire class of children for failure. “You need a dedicated woman to be successful in raising kids.”
I have a brownie troop. One of my brownies - a very sweet nine year old girl does not have a mother. She died. Her dad is doing his very best raising two kids.
It also ignores individuality. A single Dad dedicated to parenting is a way better parent than a Dad trying hard, but burdened with a spouse who abuses drugs, is physically or emotionally abusive to the children, or is just extraordinarily self centered an not interested in raising her own children or helping her spouse raise them.
Until you look at each situation minutely, and few of us have the opportunity to see inside someone elses family life in the way that makes judging appropriate, it can’t be judged.