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Families
I am beyond tired of the old “children need a mother AND a father” insult.
It says to all people that they should not hope to ever be an effective parent to a healthy kid unless paired up with the “right” co-parent. It says that no amount of compassion, devotion, competence, or love by a single parent or a gay/lesbian couple can be good enough to create healthy family space for a child.
The argument also strikes at the heart of the “traditional” families it supposedly promotes:
Men, you’d better be the fully masculinized parent, and women, keep your feminine cred front and center. God only made two kinds of people, and if you want to be a good parent, you’d better be true to your type.
The message to LGBT youth, especially in churches and strong families where this stuff is being spouted, is particularly heinous. It starts here:
Hey, kid… you may be figuring out that you’re a little different from your straight family members… you may be struggling with or worrying about what that means for having a family of your own some day… you’ve been wonderfully loved by your parents and extended family, inspired to think about being that kind of parent yourself some day.
Then it gets darker:
But let me stop you there, kid.
You may have learned love and compassion, leadership and discipline, from your family. You may have seen that the men and women in your family aren’t limited by gender stereotypes when it comes to parenting. You may think that you have it in you to be a solid parent some day.
But you are wrong.
There is nothing you can do to create a family that shares the love you have received from your parents with children of your own. If you have a child some day, it will not be possible for you and your beloved to give her the full range of parenting skills, aptitudes and resources that she needs.
And it wraps up with:
Your family will be less than your siblings’ families, and God will not be pleased.
That’s where the “mother AND father” argument lands, right?
It says to LGBT parents:
If you think you’re doing well for your family, you are wrong.
You may believe you are providing the full spectrum of nurturing, guidance and care that mother-father-headed families are, but that is either unlikely or impossible.
While its proponents congratulate themselves:
We — mothers paired with fathers — have the exclusive lock on raising kids to be happy, productive adults.
We — mothers paired with fathers — have the exclusive expertise on exposing kids to what is masculine and feminine.
We — mothers paired with fathers — are the only viable option for boys to become men and girls to become women.
We — mothers married to fathers — can only be successful if we keep the privilege of marriage to ourselves and teach our kids that families with moms married to moms and dads married to dads aren’t real families.
Ridiculous.
It must stop.
Photo from normalityrelief licensed under Creative Commons
29 Comments
Thank you. Recommended!
Thanks from a single dad. Recc’d.
It goes beyond that hateful rhetoric. They’re talking about children having a right to their “biological” parents. So in the process of demonizing gay people, they’ve also denigrated any heterosexually-headed family that doesn’t have a biological mother and father. That would include families that have adopted children. Families that have a step-parent. Families that are headed by grandparents or other parental guardian; and families that are headed by single-parents. So basically they’ve spat on the vast majority of families in order to foster discrimination against gay parenting.
And…. would these jackals have the gall to walk up to a mother who lost her husband to one of Bush’s WARS or walk up to a man who lost his wife in one of those ill-conceived wars….. or walk up to the children of Laurie Piestewa …. and say, ‘your family is not right or worthy’???
Why don’t look around you: do you believe you are surrounded by normal people? Chances are half of them came out single parent households. People without social skills, only able to relate to a computer? Or play computer games? With tatoos and piercings? There is problem with with the current American psyche. Do you think it may have something to do with single households? It is your theory that growing up in a single parent household produces normal people. It is my experience that it does not. Now who is right? And my experience spans 60 plus years. How about yours? I certainly remember people as being more social, as opposed to self absorbed. You are surrounded by narcissistic people. One of the reasons might be that they grew up in a single parent households. Most people I see around me seem to be having problems knowing whether they are a man or woman. How do you explain it? Just because you like things in a certain way, and come up with theories to justify your beliefs, anyone can come up with an opposite theory, and be just as right as you. And just because you don’t like their opinion, that is your problem.
Thanks… my kids are adults now.
I know what you mean about being sick and tired of this hate-driven bullshit in the name of a god-of-love. I try to remind myself of how the most effective spokespersons of the other side, so far, have been the children of those “wrong” parent singles and combos.
It will take more time unfortunatly, but those kids are so fabulous in their bearing witness. (On most subjects, I am a real pessimist. But not as much on this one. Single and LGBT parents are that great.)
Growing up in a two-parent household where the parents are constantly fighting isn’t healthy for kids either. Growing up in a two-parent household that is just for show – where the parents are staying together “just for the kids” but are completely absent emotionally from each other and from those kids too is not healthy for the kids either. Growing up in a two-parent household where the parents – one or both of them – are physically or psychologically or even sexually abusive to each other, let alone to the kids – is not healthy for the kids.
Sometimes the kids are much better off in a single parent family.
And the problems you cite aren’t just the fault of single-parent families. In case you haven’t noticed – our entire society and the world around us has changed with all the technology, the pressures from the media and their peers, the availability of drugs and alcohol, and the fact that society in general used to support parents in raising children ‘back then’ whereas nowdays it actively fights against in so many ways. This is not just a problem for single parents but for ALL parents.
Interesting observations. My own observation, after 60+ years, is that most of the narcissists I’ve encountered in my life are old white males of about your age. The young people I know who are 20 to 40+ are much more aware of climate concerns, family abuse problems, inequality in meeting the needs of the populace and such. I’m quite hopeful that when the Old White Dudes who think they are special (not, by the way, most of the men who comment here at FDL) finally die out, I wonder if America will get its act together.
Hey CV… with all due respect, I’m not hearing a desire to engage thoughtfully in your generalizations and questions. Here are a couple quick notes, though.
Effective parenting, in any family configuration, is no easy thing to accomplish, day in, day out. But a lot of parents, again from any family configuration, do figure it out. My point was just that some parents and hope-to-be parents are told that they are defective or incomplete as people, because of their “wrong” family configuration, and thus incapable of ever being effective parents.
And, not that it’s terribly relevant, but our ages aren’t far apart and my kids are adults now.
Be well…
Families come in all shapes and sizes. Having worked in juvenile justice programs, as a guardian ad litem, and with the foster care system, I can say that some of the happiest kids I’ve seen were in the most odd family configurations after having ‘survived’ the mom/dad so-called ideal family these delusional folks would have us believe is the model for how things are supposed to be forever and ever.
What works is when the adults – whoever they are – love the children and do the best they can to look out for the children’s best interests, no matter what. That’s all that counts in the end. Period.
And other than that – the make-up of the gender-identities of those adults, or how many of them there are is totally not relevant.
True! It’s nice to see truth spoken.
Great post. As to narcissistic kids, while I don’t subscribe to my wife’s view that they are born that way, I don’t think the correlation between single parenys and narcissism is all rhat strong, speaking from a small sample of friends and nieces. I’ve been trying to figure out what buggered up these poor souls for a long time, and haven’t come up with a good answe. The best I have is that they were too smart for their own good. This is also my viewcof fucked-up fundies.
Children need both parents, to develop their character. We have incredible divorce rate, 50% or something like this of marriages end up in divorce. Where the problem lies is with our way of selecting our mates. I am not saying I did not make the same mistakes. Ages ago we had societies, and we still do, where there were (are) arranged marriages. And they had a much higher success rate than we have with stable families. I was listening the other day to “Eugene Onegin” opera the other day, and there is an absolutely wonderful Russian proverb: “Heaven sends us habit instead of happiness”, which is to say, when we get used to something, we become happy, whether a chair, a car or a wife. Also, if you marry young, you can get used to the other person. She then becomes like a sofa.
These societies realized long ago that they needed stable social order for the society to be orderly. Plus they needed to control illegitimacy. Today, not only we have illegitimacy, we encourage it. That does not produce a stable society.
We believe we know everything, that the what worked long ago no longer works today. We feel that we are entitled to infinite amounts of sensual pleasure without cost. Unfortunately, life does not work like this. There is always a price to be paid by lack of self control.
If you want to control divorce rate the following has to be done:
1. Make it extremely difficult to marry.
2. Make everyone spend a week in family court.
That should really cure most people. Only the most dedicated would marry. That would really reduce divorce rate.
How old did you say you were?
Hey All… feedback is much appreciated… Thanks!
Linking anything I said to the purported narcissism of youth strikes me a wild detour. For what it’s worth, I witnessed beautiful flashes of empathy, generosity and selflessness in my kids at young ages.
My personal background that helped to form the original post is that I grew up with one healthy, ever-available parent and one absent parent. The absent parent was disabled by mental health issues which never subsided before dying at 62. But, the healthy parent was a fighter for everything that was possible for me and my siblings.
From that, I learned that effective parenting requires a crazy, ever-evolving set of skills, many of which have to be learned by trial and error. I loved watching out for my infant brother when I was 10. My first babysitting job, at 12, was for a 6-week-old (by then, I had changed a lot of diapers!). By age 15, it was embedded in my psyche that I not only wanted to be a parent some day, but I could build on everything I had learned, and honor my family by being an even better parent.
The challenge to that youthful optimism came, as a young adult, from taking the Full Insult to heart. I made decisions which ultimately hurt my loved ones grievously, based in part on believing that my parenting skills would only be valid as a hetero-married person. When I finally came to terms with being not-so-hetero (in my 30s), the impacts were stark and ugly, rippling out over too many people.
That’s why I say the Full Insult of “Children Need a Mother AND a Father” must stop. Kids and young adults who have grown up with, or grown into, a selfless desire to give back to their own next generation must not be told their hopes and desires are counterfeit because they are LGBT.
Children need love, nurturing, self-esteem and encouragement. It would also be nice if they could grow up without bigotry.
I’ve known a man who was a husband and father to two amazing daughters. When he recognized his true nature, his wife and he continued to be good parents to those great kids even as he moved on into his own other life. I coached T-ball with him, and he was a great teacher and a great parent. And I do not think that his former wife or his daughter had any ill will toward him. Life is full of adventures. Sometimes things just change.
Thanks for the post but I am sorry to disagree, at least up unto a point: my father died in 1964 and frankly my mother lost it, I grew up as a “latchkey child”. When she got her shit together ~ 1971 her kids were independent and at the the time she could no longer handle that so she cracked down on her eldest, me, at the time while letting my younger brother still run free. I still bear scars from those years, while they are psychological they are nonetheless real and haunt me to this day. I have no children and don’t wish my life on anyone, smoke & drink as I hope to be gone soon (56)….
Hey Dearie… that was the sort of outcome I pressed for, negotiated carefully in hopes of, worked for day by day and step by step as gently and carefully as possible. I’m so glad that people often see the results I experienced as an outlier and an oddity because so many other parents have learned to (re-)discover the adventure of co-parenting.
In my family, it just turned out that some of my closest loved ones couldn’t or wouldn’t find their own path to personal healing and rebuilding of functional relationships. Now approaching the 20-year mark since I came out, not much has changed, leaving me careful not to give up hope, while accepting the reality of today.
My experience spans over 40 years. I grew up in my biological household containing a mother and a father. I grew up knowing that my mother married my father because she became pregnant with me. I (and my brother)got to watch for 13 years while he drank and was abusive. By the time I was 18 years old I had no desire to EVER marry. At 22 I got pregnant with my first child. Yes, I could have forced the person who I became pregnant by to also parent our child. I chose not to. One of the reasons I made that choice was I remember what a nightmare my childhood was. When my son was 8 months old I met a wonderful man. We feel in love(an ACTUAL reason to marry.) We ended up marrying and having 4 children together. We’ve been married 2 decades. He’s a great dad to my first child. He was there for my son for shots and peewee soccer. He bailed him out when as a teen my son started to act out. They aren’t biologically related but they have a special connection.
Biology is less important than a child having loving and caring adults willing to guide a young person. Yes there is more stability if there are more adults but limiting it to “mom and dad” is a surefire way to ensure that children that aren’t fortunate enough to have functional biological parents and a functional household are set up for failure instead of success.
darms… my heart breaks at the raw deal you were served as a kid.
Not knowing all of the details, it occurs to me that you got the same sort of raw deal that all kids are dealt when no functional parent is available. Regardless whether your mom was single, partnered or married, the fact that your basic needs were not being for years was cruel and unfair.
Bringing things forward to today’s world, it also strikes me that the Full Insult of “Children Need a Mother and a Father” impacts hetero-married parents who find themselves unexpectedly single. “Wait a minute,” a young widow or widower with kids might think, “I did everything ‘right,’ knowing that kids need a mother AND father, believing that anything else would tarnish them.” With the spouse and co-parent ripped tragically from the family, why wouldn’t the commitment to the Full Insult leave the grieving parent impaired or crippled in rising to the challenge of single parenting?
Take care, darms…
Beautiful, cwaltz…
It strikes me that you had learned from experience what you didn’t want or need as a 22-y/o mom-to-be. And yet, you had flipped the negative experiences growing up into believing you could do better for your own kids, believing in your own competence as a parent for as long as you remained single.
Exactly.
This is a great article. Well written. Excellent topic. The issue of LGBT was never on my radar until an article was written about the dad dressing up his kid as a girl and parading him around town. I wrote about it on my blog. I truly see both sides of the argument but in the end, I think if a child has 2 LOVING parents, then who cares? Our society accepts divorced and step parents right? http://www.sippycupcocktails.com/2012/09/attention-seeking-dad-gays-up-his-son.html
Thanks. Maybe my take-away from all of this is that children need a parent who is dedicated & committed and frankly, that is easier in a multiple-parent situation…
Your comments about how society has degenerated don’t hold water. A close examination of the sexual mores of the Puritans reveals that at least 42% of the children born in that so-called pure religious society were conceived out of wedlock. Women and children were chattel – that is they were considered no more than a piece of furniture owned by the man of the house, or a dog or livestock. And they could be treated as such. Sure, no divorces. But women could and were frequently tossed out into the street with only the clothes on their backs. That was what constituted divorce. The women had no appeal from that and they lost their children and had no right of appeal. They were then doomed to a life of prostitution or worse.
So that’s what the good old days were like. People keep dreaming of a time that never existed. No thanks.
It may be easier in a ‘multiple-parent situation’, provided both parents are equally committed. But all the research has shown that it is the presence of just one caring adult that makes all the difference in a child’s life. And ultimately, it winds up not being important who that caring adult is – just that it is a caring adult.
Kids are by nature and by the state of their brain development, naturally selfish. This is not a bad thing, it is a developmental process. Their world consists of them. So it is not important to them whether the adults in their lives are men, women, single, married, old, young, gay, trans, living together, happy or sad, or whatever. Kids only care that their own needs are met. And they don’t care who does that for them – only that it happens. All of this argument about who does the parenting is completely and totally beside the point. It just needs to get done, by someone who cares about the child.
I agree that a single caring parent might make all the difference but I don’t know what that looks like especially in this day & age. I was 7 when my father died and as I stated earlier, my mother flipped out & withdrew into her ‘adult world’. She said she still cared and I had no reason to doubt that at the time and I managed to become an independent free-thinking child capable of making my own decisions, the problems came later when she decided she had to ‘take control’ of me.Maybe I’m getting too personal or off topic but had she remarried back then even a shitty step-parent for me would likely have been better than none, if for nothing else than an adult she could share her burdens with instead of laying it all on me. Maybe some of us can be good single parents but I think children need at least two parents (note I’m not addressing gender issues, as you eloquently stated above when discussing the welfare or well-being of a child, gender issues are irrelevant as caring parents can be of any gender).