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.Of course, what they don't say in this article is that in every lesbian couple there's a masculine partner and a feminine partner, which would suggest to me that the masculine influence is still very important in the upbringing of a balanced child.
According to Stacey and Biblarz, “Two women who chose to become parents together seemed to provide a double dose of a middle-class ‘feminine’ approach to parenting.” And, they conclude, “based strictly on the published science, one could argue that two women parent better on average than a woman and a man, or at least than a woman and man with a traditional division of family labor.”
Ah, there’s the rub. All howling to the contrary, most heterosexual men and women like that traditional division. Sticking to “gendered” parenting roles offers a seductive affirmation. Fathers, roughhouse all you want. But we, gatekeeper moms, are in charge of the rest. We could give you detailed instruction, and you still couldn’t possibly do it as well. “Even women who want their husbands to help more with the kids don’t want to give up their traditional authority,” says Stephanie Coontz, director of research at the Council on Contemporary Families. In addition to our pragmatic embrace of these roles, we still live in a culture with a deeply embedded notion of what a father is, beyond just another set of hands, and men, women, and children cling to it.
The bad news for Dad is that despite common perception, there’s nothing objectively essential about his contribution. The good news is, we’ve gotten used to him.
The notion that fathers are no longer essential to good child development is simply silly. All you have to do is look at the groups within our society have have a large percentage of single-mom families and what do you usually see? Gangs, which replace the missing father figures in the kid's life. Kids are looking for that masculine influence and if they can't get it from home they'll find it somewhere else.
Posts
1 comment:
I'd much rather see a child raised by a Lesbian couple than aborted, but I think this is another case where somebody came to a conclusion and then crafted a study to prove it.
Do kids of Lesbian parents study harder and relate with their parents better because their parents are both women, or because they're social pariah's and have few other people to relate to? Out-of-the closet gay people live in very close and restrictive communities, which also means they are raised in a culture with little outside influences.
But the problem with so many "modern" hetero families where parents follow traditional roles is they only follow the ones they like. i.e. the woman doesn't work, or considers her career secondary, but also considers herself in charge of the house and the Man just a working fool to keep them properly financed, rather than anything approaching the head of the household.
In a family with traditional roles, you've got to have a strong father who's head of the household or he's just a meaningless drone with little influence on anyone.
Post a Comment