Cathy Young of Reason writes:
…married fathers, especially in households where both parents work, have become involved in hands-on child-rearing to an extent that would have seemed unthinkable 50 years ago. It is no longer unusual to see fathers changing diapers, bottle-feeding infants, or shopping with toddlers. Stay-at-home dads are a small but growing population.
Yet the trend toward more engaged fatherhood is being canceled out by the growing number of children with no father in the home. This redefinition of families as women and their children is a modern-day version of the old-fashioned, very non-feminist notion of family and child-rearing as a female domain in which men are only visitors. Sending men the signal that they are disposable is hardly a way to encourage them to be better fathers.
Concerns about the drop in two-parent families are often couched in sexist nostalgia for the days when men were the breadwinners and women stayed home. The 1950s-style family is certainly not the only environment in which children can thrive. But glorifying single motherhood is no better and, in the end, no less sexist.
Categories: Fatherhood, Motherhood
Children don’t have a right to expect their parents be married to each other. The existence of a person’s offspring proves that they are a parent, not a spouse. The support obligation is parent to child not parent to parent.
Where ever there is an unmarried mother you can be sure that somewhere there is an unmarried father who is every bit as important to the child as she is. Children need both parents to exist, they don’t necessarily need both in order to survive. A child can survive if cared for by any number of people in concert with or separate from their parents – but the child still has an inherent right to expect to have been supported by the people who reproduced to create them.
I don’t think women raising their children with no help from their fathers prove that father’s are unnecessary. The child still has a right to be supported by his or her father; his total absence proves only that he is failing to meet his obligation, not that he is unnecessary.
What does this woman want unmarried parents to do in order not to broadcast this message that fathers are not necessary? Should they abandon their children as well? Should they turn their children over to nice married couples to prove that fathers are necessary? Wait that would not work. giving a child up for adoption does not prove that father’s are necessary it proves that adopted father’s are necessary?
I guess the author thinks married adoptive parents are better for children than their unmarried parents.
It use to be very difficult for an unmarried woman to raise her child on her own so difficult in fact that they’d often had no choice but giving their child up for adoption if they wanted their child to survive. Today its much better we have a system that encourages people to raise their own children both parents obligations are clear. Fathers are more important now than ever before.