In one of my many blog readings, I found this little gem of an article:
…Dads, we tell our husbands, are essential influences on children, the source of unique benefits.
There’s only one problem: none of this is proven. In the February issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family, Judith Stacey, a professor of sociology at New York University, and Timothy Biblarz, a demographer from the University of Southern California, consolidated the available data on the role of gender in child rearing. As Stacey and Biblarz point out, our ideas of what dads do and provide are based primarily on contrasts between married-couple parents and single-female parents: an apples-to-oranges exercise that conflates gender, sexual orientation, marital status, and biogenetic relationships in ways that a true comparison of parent gender—one that compared married gay-male couples or married lesbian couples to married heterosexuals, or single fathers to single mothers—would not. Most of the data fail to distinguish between a father and the income a father provides, or between the presence of a father and the presence of a second parent, regardless of gender.
Drawing on reliable comparative studies, you could say this: single moms tend to be more involved, set more rules, communicate better, and feel closer to their children than single dads. They have less difficulty monitoring their children’s whereabouts, friendships, and school progress. Their children do better on standardized tests and have higher grades, and teenagers of single moms are actually less likely to engage in delinquent behavior or substance abuse than those of single dads. Go, Murphy Brown.
The quality of parenting, Biblarz and Stacey say, is what really matters, not gender. But the real challenge to our notion of the “essential” father might well be the lesbian mom. On average, lesbian parents spend more time with their children than fathers do. They rate disputes with their children as less frequent than do hetero couples, and describe co-parenting more compatibly and with greater satisfaction. Their kids perceive their parents to be more available and dependable than do the children of heteros. They also discuss more emotional issues with their parents. They have fewer behavioral problems, and show more interest in and try harder at school…
You know, before I dismantle some of this nonsense, I have to say that I attended a memorial service last night for a man who probably was one of the best fathers I’ve ever seen. While memorial services say a lot of good things, this man raised several children, including some who were not his own having adopted his own nephew, and even had a teenage son when he died at the age of 66.
This article attempts to dismiss the notion of what a solid male influence provides in a household. It was released shortly before Father’s Day no less. If this had been a study done on mothers and written before Mother’s Day, does anyone honestly believe that there wouldn’t be a huge controversy in all the media outlets?
What the study is used to prove is that fathers are not necessary. But what they seem to list as necessary are nothing more than what a mother would normally do anyway. To me, it seems that these elites have no idea of what a father is there for.
The last paragraph quoted really grated on me. The idea that mothers spend more time with their children than fathers is not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe the father is out working more in order to provide more. If anyone has read Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man's Soul, you’d know that fathers are less nurturers, as this article tries to paint them as.
Look, I’m no expert on all this crap. But I will say that most of the public figures I’ve seen who are immoral, corrupt, or just downright crazy often have severe daddy issues. The ones who are sane are often the ones who have had good fathers.
God made us male and female for a reason. In a family dynamic, we were meant to fulfill two distinct purposes and these so-called experts are merely coming to conclusions that they desire.
One thing that can be argued is that any field of knowledge you encounter will always have a bias to it. This means that anyone who is teaching or researching any subject will slant in a certain direction and the natural tendency of people is to fit the observable data into the their own belief system. Everyone does it, it’s just that those who do it with this concept in mind tend to be more honest.
Personally, while I was annoyed by this article and its obvious fallacies, I’m not too worried about its impact on our culture. The damage is largely already done and it’s only a matter of time before a massive pushback occurs. You see, we’ve been living under this ‘progressive’ culture for nearly a century now and the end results are showing up. I beginning of next century will have any similarity to this one, culturally speaking.