I’ll just publish this NYT Letter to the Editor in its entirety (h/t Julian Sanchez via Twitter). It’s from a Princeton professor who takes Katie Roiphe and the guy who wrote the “Who Needs Men” article to task for misrepresenting her work. Think of it, two op-eds within a week of each other that rely on this same researcher’s work in the same prominent publication. What the hell is going on here? The letter below.
***
Two recent opinion articles cite my research to support their claims that fathers aren’t necessary for a thriving household (“In Defense of Single Motherhood,” by Katie Roiphe, Aug. 12, and “Men, Who Needs Them?,” by Greg Hampikian, Aug. 25). That does not fairly describe my work.
Income security is very important. But fathers in most cases are critical contributors to family income. And income security is only half the story.
Emotional security — which children develop from living in stable families where they can form lasting relationships with adults who stick around for the long run — is also important. Stable homes with one parent are rare. More often in single-mother households, children meet, attach and then say goodbye to men who are only temporarily connected to the family.
Two parents committed to each other and to raising a child together are more likely to provide the economic and emotional security children need. That large numbers of fathers cannot provide economic and emotional security constitutes a serious social problem.
SARA McLANAHAN
Princeton, N.J., Aug. 28, 2012
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I fisked Hampikian yesterday. This letter is a fantastic development.
Notice how at the end she still blames men for the problem.
She’s not blaming men for the problem. She’s saying that whatever it is that causes men to not be there, it’s a problem. Is that the economy or no-fault divorce or what? She’s observing the reality. But just to address what you are saying – do you actually think that there aren’t a lot of so-called deadbeat dads out there who make crappy excuses to justify their not being in their kids’ lives? It’s not all feminism’s fault.
I thought it would be corrections on Y-chromosome degradation and the mention of a mouse from two fathers.
“She’s saying that whatever it is that causes men to not be there, it’s a problem. ”
doesn’t seem like that.
I didn’t know there was a new study in circulation giving anti-father ammo to freak feminists. Most social science studies, including recent ones, agree that fathers are vital to a healthy nuclear family and, by extension, to a healthy society. For instance, here’s a study showing that fathers are more important than mothers for kids’ psychological development along 6 out of 7 measures:
http://psr.sagepub.com/content/16/2/103.full.pdf+html
re: deadbeat dads vs victim dads. who knows what the exact ratio is, but i’d bet, taking into account social and economic forces of the past fifty years, that for every honest to god deadbeat dad there are two honest to god selfish single moms leveraging the system for all it’s worth. partition blame where its due, but keep in mind that blame extends just as readily to eatpraylove bored housewives and manipulative, slutty single moms as it does to caddish, feckless deadbeat dads. since no one in the MSM, or anywhere really, is willing to engage the sins of womanhood, it’s up to sadistic, shibboleth shredding pricks like myself to bring balance to the force.
“there aren’t a lot of so-called deadbeat dads out there who make crappy excuses to justify their not being in their kids’ lives? It’s not all feminism’s fault.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tender_years_doctrine
reading about Daniel Amneus’s work, “The Case for Father Custody” I thought that default father custody was kinda male-dominated thing. Then in Steve Moxon’s The Woman Racket, I found out that it only meant that fathers could be hooked into paying for their kids rather than society.
CR:
“there aren’t a lot of so-called deadbeat dads out there who make crappy excuses to justify their not being in their kids’ lives? It’s not all feminism’s fault.”
some of that is sour grapes. i.e., “i’m being humiliated by the divorce industrial complex and my bitch ex by getting de facto cut out of my kids’ lives, so i will assuage my ego and stabilize my precarious emotional state by acting as if my kids are no longer very important to me.”
or, if you’re gonna treat me like a deadbeat, i’m gonna enjoy the advantages of being a deadbeat.
of course, there are plenty of men who don’t have strong paternal instincts (ahem, ghetto, ahem) and high testosterone does tend to make men less interested in the day to day grind of raising children, and less likely than women to receive an emotional dopaminergic reward from the raising of kids. (my eyes glaze over with boredom whenever a woman proudly presents her sprog for the other women to coo over.) this is a sex difference that is innate, and many such men are willing to pay off the ex for the prize of more free time away from humdrum family obligations.
that said, there are also a lot of fathers who got tossed out of their families through little fault of their own, and are for all practical purposes, barred from seeing their kids in any qualitatively enriching way. that is truly an injustice in every sense of the word.
NN:
the professor wrote: “That large numbers of fathers cannot provide economic and emotional security constitutes a serious social problem.”
I read this as the type of critique leveled against Charles Murray’s book. That economic realities diminish the ability, and therefore the desire, of men to provide for children.
“Is that the economy or no-fault divorce or what? ”
it goes farther back than that.
http://no-maam.blogspot.in/2012/07/the-marxist-dialectic-of-family-part-ii.html
(add to that the married women’s property act)
http://wombatty.blogtownhall.com/2012/05/14/early_feminists_moderate_or_radical.thtml
Sure there are deadbeat dads, feminism helped creating in them, and encourages weakness in men that would further it(feminism helps too by not putting on them the exacting standards of patriarchy), the only problem for feminists would be that they are not coughing up money and feminists themselves don’t make much. This is feminism, and not the funny, cute thing that Christina Hoff Sommers imagines it to be.
People of Color have many children
whites do not have children
once whites are gone then all the problems wil end
watch the Baltimore documentry by aljazeera
what is now called a deadbeat dad has existed throughout human history. now when we are having a discussion of what is the best situation in which a child can be raised, deadbeat dads become a bigger issue. especially since people don’t rely on extended family networks because they are usually spread out all over the country. criticizing feminism is fine – it’s part of the problem. but there are plenty of fathers who would avoid their fatherhood role with or without the impact of feminism.
anti-racist,
so by your logic the only deadbeat dads are black dads? i thought you were *anti* racist, not racist? white man.
I know a man who had a one night stand in his early 20′s with a woman he went to high school with. She ended up pregnant and had a daughter. She is significantly lower class than him and a long term relationship was not possible. This man has stayed in his small town, worked a low level job, gone to school and took his daughter on weekends and one weeknight.
This woman has since had another baby, with another man, who is not in the picture. She is using some of the child support money from the first father to support the second child. It has been suggested that this man try to get custody from her, but apparently his chances are very slim, it’s not even worth trying.
Anti-Racist, truth Brother. mabe we can bring the glorious day closer. please pass your contact information to white boy Chuck so we can discuss certain things. Respect Soldier.
Anti-Racist is a strong man of intelligence
He had integrity and we follow his Words with due attention.
It’s a multifaceted problem. One could blame feminism for displacing men from the work force, education fetish and resulting debt, housing bubble, living beyond our means. The end result is that men cannot afford to be purposeful fathers or to fight for meaningful roles in the lives of the accidental ones.
We’re in a dark place as a society. Identifying a root cause that can possibly be stanched, a requirement that means we have to avoid the simple ‘people are selfish and stupid’, is comforting. Alas, the truth isn’t that simple.
what is now called a deadbeat dad has existed throughout human history.
Really?
Outside of the modern Western world I can’t think of too many societies that would have the tolerance or excess resources to allow for such a thing as a single baby momma.
found something on her(the singer of a similar name keeps popping up)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MensIssuesOnline/message/33430
just another feminist who seeks to enforce more stringent child-support.(“and maybe that’d make men more emotionally supportive” or maybe the infant-father bonding from scandinavian paternal leave)
and more monies for poorer women with children(more deadbeats), abstract here:
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1515222?uid=3738256&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&sid=21101012469543
“it’s part of the problem. ”
Yes(though the whole discussion is moot now that she is just another one), deadbeats have been with us for long and there will be plenty without feminism, and in real world it’s hard to show mono-causality.
In working-class families where men now can’t find work, one could say that off-shoring of industries was the main problem, but how much less popular that would’ve been if female emancipation held less of a sway and the fate of families and hence women were called into question?
Or men losing motivation due to removal from their children’s lives and their homes compared to say an alternative divorce arrangement where father keeps the children and mothers do nanny-duty for pay.
And of course the pill and the consequent decision of child-birth that is women’s only and removes men from the process, the economic “success” of women which makes men less likely to work for a provider role, etc..
Anti-Racist is a strong man of intelligence
Put down the crackpipe, man. First you’re trying to masquerade as white and now we see that you’re fantasizing about being two downlow negroes flirting with each other.
CR:
“That economic realities diminish the ability, and therefore the desire, of men to provide for children.”
poor economic prospects also diminish the attractiveness of those men to women. so what we’re looking at here is a giant feedback loop that implicates both men and women in its sticky web. public policy, btw, can’t do much to significantly dampen the amplitude of this feedback loop, outside of revolutionary change. female hypergamy will always be with us, as will male paternity guarding.
oh, and one more thing that seriously gets short shrift in these discussion of “men dropping out”: it’s a lot easier to say “fuck it all” to the mother of your children when she’s bloated up into a disgusting fat sow. men quickly lose their desire to support women (and their kids) who are physically repellent to behold.
“feminism helps too by not putting on them the exacting standards of patriarchy”
“feminism helps men too by not putting on them the exacting standards of patriarchy” and is a good way to increase grrrrl power, (one can fall farther from one’s potential than be raised higher than it)
“it’s a lot easier to say “fuck it all” to the mother of your children when she’s bloated up into a disgusting fat sow”
LOL, feminists should do a study on this for fat-challenged study departments and how standards of beauty discriminate against child-support gathering mothers. More fat activism!
There’s also the fact that men are incentivized to GTFO of their kids’ lives by family court. This is something that I didn’t understand at all until I went through it myself.
The way it’s set up, if you are a father and your ex-wife/babymomma wants to have complete control of the kids, all sorts of pressure will be put on you from different angles to let her have her way. Most of what we focus on are the penalties for trying to be there for your kids (like false accusations, court costs, etc.), but what most people don’t realize is that the court will actually cut you a break if you roll over and give the mother everything she wants as far as custody is concerned.
Although, as you suggest, there are precious few studies regarding this, anecdotal evidence and my own personal experience suggest that men who give up on their kids and get out of their lives are not ordered to pay as much child support. The court literally forces men to pay for the privilege of being a father, and that’s a tall order for a lot of divorced men. Given that the penalties for falling behind are quite severe, this constitutes a very powerful incentive to get out of their lives.
This is why I don’t condemn men who have allowed their relationship with their children to lapse. On the one hand I recognize that it’s best for the kids and for society to have present fathers, but on the other it simply isn’t humane to expect men to ruin their lives in a futile quest.
Only a radical reappraisal of our values will change the status quo, and that’s why I fully support the efforts of those who are cutting down the shibboleths of this weird, chthonic cult that’s come to wield such disproportionate influence in the Anglo world.
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It’s real simple, a child needs a mother and a father. Everything else is a lie.
Let me amend that, every child needs a mother and father who are married and committed to each other.
Two parents committed to each other and to raising a child together are more likely to provide the economic and emotional security children need. That large numbers of fathers cannot provide economic and emotional security constitutes a serious social problem.
It seems very likely that the propensity to stick around with the mother of your children is under genetic control. After all, many more African Americans seem reluctant to do so than white Americans and even less Asian Americans are reluctant to stick around.
In any group there will be a distribution of willingness to stick around and ensure that the children are taken care of.
A civilization with customs based around a high percentage of males providing for their children is not going to survive an influx of bad genes.
It is not that large numbers of fathers cannot provide the security she is refering to. If they are African American, they don’t want to do so, largely for genetic reasons.
Notice the professor states that “two parents” and “stable families . . . with adults” are what she wants to see. I’ll speculate that it doesn’t matter to the professor if the families consist of two mommies, or two daddies, or one daddy and five mommies, or one mommy and three daddies, or any other conceivable combination. Everything is OK as long as everyone sticks around.
Comrade,
That may be true, but it’s more likely that she simply doesn’t know the answer to that and would be irresponsible (and a risk to her credibility) to imply otherwise.
Nothing is more enjoyable than watching a woman attempt to comprehend reality. Or a feminist “intellectual” attempt to fathom the causal underpinnings of a social problem.
It’s like watching a puppy chase its tail. Hours of laughter…
@Fourth Doorman:
It may be true that blacks have a lower inherited propensity to stick around. It might explain part of the disparity between black and $OTHER_RACE illegitimacy rates. However, there is no way that this explains the _increase_ in illegitimacy over the past sixty years. It happened too fast.
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