Paraphrasing The Band is what comes to mind as I scan the headlines:
The best advice anyone could give a dad preparing for a custody battle is to become as active as possible in the lives of your children and to document everything.
or
And it’s just another day.
Posted in Children of Divorce | Comments (0)
Samhita Mukhopadhyay at the American Prospect on “Marrying Yourself.”
Posted in Marriage | Comments (2)
The Australian Study of Child Health in Same-Sex Families aims to investigate the physical, mental and social wellbeing of 750 children belonging to about 500 parents. It will involve surveys and interviews to score the children on a large range of measures.
Lead researcher from Melbourne University, Dr Simon Crouch, said although there were likely to be thousands of children with same-sex attracted parents in Australia, very few local studies had ever looked at whether their family circumstances affected their wellbeing and when they had, they were small. Furthermore, he said most studies of such children had been done in northern European countries and the US and they tended to focus on children of lesbian mothers at the expense of those belonging to gay men, bisexuals and transgender people.
They’re asking people to volunteer for the study.
Posted in Childhood, Reproductive Technologies, The Future of Parenthood | 26 Comments (Comments are Closed)
In New York Times today:
Sperm donors are no more likely to carry genetic diseases than anybody else, but they can father a far greater number of children: 50, 100 or even 150, each a potential inheritor of flawed genes, and each a vector for making those genes more pervasive in the general population.
Posted in Fatherhood, Reproductive Technologies | Comment (1)
HuffPost blogger Anne Vitiello talks to “kids of boomer divorces [who] have become 21st century parents.”
Posted in Children of Divorce, Motherhood | Comments (0)
Susan Gregory Thomas at the Wall Street Journal:
Even as men have made great strides as fathers, however, they can find themselves rudderless as spouses. “We’re getting a new cultural script for a ‘new dad’ but not for a ‘new husband,’ ” says W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the University of Virginia’s National Marriage Project. “That married people with children now often refer to themselves as a ‘stay-at-home mom’ or ‘stay-at-home dad’ instead of as ‘wife’ or ‘husband’ signals that we now prioritize parenthood over marriage itself.”
For more, see State of Our Unions 2011, When Baby Makes Three: How Parenthood Makes Life Meaningful and Marriage Makes Parenthood Bearable.
Posted in Fatherhood, Marriage, Motherhood, The Future of Parenthood | Comment (1)
by reporter Phil Izzo:
…In 2010 for the first time, married mothers were more likely to be employed than single mothers. That trend became more pronounced in 2011. Last year, 63.4% of mothers living alone had a job, compared to 64.6% of married mothers. That was largely because single moms are having a much harder time finding employment. Their unemployment rate was 15% in 2011, compared to 6% for their married counterparts living with a spouse.
…Part of that reason for the disparity is demographic differences. Single mothers are more likely to be minorities or have lower levels of education than their married counterparts. Women with just a high school diploma had an 8.7% unemployment rate in 2011, compared to 4.3% for college graduates. Meanwhile, black women had an 11.9% jobless rate, while white women’s rate was 6.5%.
Posted in General, Marriage and Money, Motherhood | Comments (2)
by Kay Hymowitz in the New York Daily News:
Today’s “stay at home mom” becomes next year’s “working mother” and vice versa. To put it a little differently, the mommy wars are over, but not because one side won. It’s because women keep moving between the mythical enemy camps.
Posted in Marriage and Money, Motherhood | Comments (2)
Good piece by Jessica Gavora in WaPo:
…Although polls show that married women favor Romney over Obama, unmarried women are the most reliably Democratic voting group outside African Americans. They constituted a whopping 71-to-29 percent majority for Obama in 2008, earning them a place in what Democrats call their “rising American electorate” — the people of color, the young and the unmarried women who helped deliver the presidency for Obama in 2008, and who Democrats desperately want back in 2012.
The problem is, the rising American electorate is a reliable Democratic vote only when it bothers to register and show up. And even though they show a current 44-point preference for Obama, unmarried women — especially those with children — register and vote at lower rates than married women.
The turnout of unmarried women is so unreliable that, until the 2000 presidential election, Democrats generally wrote off the single female vote as not worth the effort. But in that razor-thin contest, strategists noticed for the first time that 22 million members of their most reliable cohort of voters did not go to the polls. If single women had cast ballots in the same proportions as married women, Al Gore probably would have received the punched chads of an additional 6 million voters, more than enough to have won him the White House…
Posted in Marriage, Motherhood | Comments (2)
Writes Professor Carlos A. Ball:
As we prepare to honor mothers on Sunday, we should keep in mind that the practice of mothering is not limited to women. There are many men in America today, married and single, gay and straight, who mother their children every day. I am one of them. My male partner and I nurture and care for our two sons in ways that are indistinguishable from what society has traditionally expected of mothers.
Sorry guys. This holiday is mine.
Posted in Motherhood, The Future of Parenthood | Comments (16)
HuffPo blogger Dara Pettinelli:
Any early aspirations I had about getting married and having babies were systematically diluted by listening to my mom’s conversations with her two best friends, Terri and Linda, for years, upon years, upon years. The three of them met in their early 20s and are inseparable to this day. The same cannot be said for the men in their lives. Though my parents are still married, my mom was married twice before she met my father (and even came close to divorcing him, but that’s another story). When I was little and could have been off playing during their get-togethers, I preferred to pull up a chair and sit with them at the table as they drank coffee (sometimes wine) and had “girl talk.” During those conversations, I absorbed their stories of first loves and wrong loves, separations and divorces, of failed attempts to change partners and tinges of regret for some of the things they sacrificed for the happiness of their families. It was 20 solid years of straight-up relationship repellant.
Posted in Children of Divorce, Marriage | Comments (2)
The program Divorce Ministry 4 Kids* has a new blog post up which includes helpful questions to pastors, to help them think through the current status of their ministry to children from divorced or unmarried families and how they can improve. Questions include this excellent one:
When you picture the kids in your ministry at home, what do you see? Do you imagine kids in homes similar to yours? Do you see them in traditional two-parent homes? Or, are you tuned in to the reality of today’s kids?
UPDATE: In my first version of this post I mistakenly referred to this group as Divorce Care 4 Kids, whose program I have encountered (and recommended) before. I have now learned and corrected on this post that Divorce Ministry 4 Kids is a separate, distinct organization. The more the merrier!
Posted in Children of Divorce, Faith and Families | Comments (3)
In HuffPo, Roland Warren of the National Fatherhood Initiative has an interesting piece suggesting that what we find repellant about “Octomom” is what she reflects back to us about our own cultural choices.
Posted in Fatherhood, Motherhood, Reproductive Technologies, The Future of Parenthood | Comment (1)
Next week in New York the major networks will announce a slate of new shows, including a sitcom on NBC that features a gay couple and their surrogate. The title: “The New Normal.”
The new normal: when we’re supposed to agree it’s ok to say a mother is not a mother but rather a “surrogate,” and that it’s ok for (wealthy) men to hire women (with little money or social power) for the use of their bodies to gestate babies.
Posted in General, Motherhood, Reproductive Technologies, The Future of Parenthood | 28 Comments (Comments are Closed)
A new Australian study just published in the New England Journal of Medicine:
Overall, with assisted reproduction methods, the risk of any birth defect was 8.3 percent compared with 5.8 percent for unassisted pregnancies. These included cleft palate, and heart, gastrointestinal and esophageal defects.
For in vitro fertilization (IVF), the risk for birth defects was 7.2 percent. For intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), it was 9.9 percent.
And a Daily Mail (UK) article:
The designer baby factory: Eggs from beautiful Eastern Europeans, sperm from wealthy Westerners and embryos implanted in desperate women
Posted in Reproductive Technologies, The Future of Parenthood | 3 Comments (Comments are Closed)
From Hennepin County, Minnesota:
…Unlike divorce cases, where the couple may have known each other a long time and have a shared history, never-married parents who show up in Peterson’s courtroom may not know each other well. And they now have an 18-year shared endeavor: raising a child…
In 2010, Judge [Bruce] Peterson and a team of partners created the Co-Parent Court using federal, county and foundation money. Similar to drug courts and DWI courts created in the 1990s to address recurring problems in the criminal justice system, Co-Parent Court is the county’s first problem-solving court in the family court arena. more
Posted in Childbearing, Dating, Mating, Hooking Up, Marriage | Comments are Closed
And in a new piece at BioNews, Wendy Kramer persuasively argues that what we don’t know should be the big story.
In 1988 the Office of Technology Assessment estimated that 30,000 children were born via donor insemination during the year 1986/87 in the US (1).
A quarter of a century – and no further research – later, ’30,000 annual births’ is still trotted out in academia, lectures and the media (2). Sometimes the number is doubled, probably to allow for the passage of time, and occasionally a range of 30,000 – 60,000 is deployed.
Yet so much about donor insemination has changed during this time. Using either of the whole figures is scientifically unjustifiable, and the range is just as flawed.
Hence, experts should not be using such patently erroneous figures. Rather, they should be noting that there is no reliable method of assessing how many children are conceived via donor insemination each year. They should be pointing out that the USA has no accurate tracking or record keeping from which it is possible to make an educated assessment.
Instead of complacently relying on outdated best guesstimate figures from more than a generation ago, they should be demanding reliable, recent figures. They should be voicing outrage that neither the fertility industry nor any other entity is required to collect data or report statistics on the numbers of human beings conceived using donor sperm. This is in stark contrast with cattle insemination, which is much more tightly regulated and surveyed. more
In our report, My Daddy’s Name is Donor, we also cited the 30-60,000 number as the experts’ best guesstimate. And believe me, if you try to tell a reporter that there really are no numbers the first reaction you get is that you must not know what you’re talking about. You can sense their fingers creeping along the figurative Rolodex to call their next source.
But Kramer is right. The big story should be that we don’t know the story.
Posted in Fatherhood, Reproductive Technologies, The Future of Parenthood | 31 Comments (Comments are Closed)
This episode sounds fascinating. Though, sadly, it’s reminiscent of a true situation that happened recently in which some jerk contacted donor conceived persons telling them he was their father.
Detectives Benson (Mariska Hargitay) and Amaro (Danny Pino) investigate the disappearance of a teenaged girl after her young brother calls 9-1-1. While Fin (Ice-T) and Rollins (Kelli Giddish) look into a possible abduction, they discover the girl had been searching for her biological father, an anonymous sperm donor. The investigation takes a startling turn when a suspect is found to be targeting several young, vulnerable women, all with the same personal connection. But the suspect isn’t what he seems, and Dr. Huang (Wong) must delve into his past to save the women. Guest Starring Eric Close and James Van Der Beek. Also starring Richard Belzer (Sergeant John Munch.)
Posted in Fatherhood, Reproductive Technologies, The Future of Parenthood | Comments are Closed
