Kicking. Squealing.
A Slate article by a woman Pamela Gwyn Kripke is headlined “It’s better to be raised by a single mom.“ Why? She writes:
Ten years ago, I was not as ebullient, fearing the logistics, mainly, of my new arrangement—making house payments, changing filters in the attic, getting to soccer practices and ballet without splitting my body in half surgically. The apprehension was warranted; the details have been hard. I worried less, though, that my two daughters, now teenagers, would grow up as well as they would have had a proper father lived in their house. Now, I see that they have grown up with so much more. More than, I daresay, their peers from two-parent families have. Hence, the ruby in the cake.
…
But beyond that there is also the beauty that emerges from the strain, the impediments, even the sometimes terrifying knowledge that their parents might fail them. No single mom wants to fail them—provide less, teach less, support less, be less—but it is in our minds that we might. So we struggle, and over the long term, we impart to our children that struggle can be good. This is something they know intimately.
The progeny of single mothers have grit, according to Kripke. But what she paints as character-building struggle seems more like a privileged upbringing compared to most two-parent households. It’s also certainly different than most single-parent households. The entire issue cannot be discussed unless you consider the real-world impact of limited incomes. Kripke seems to be doing pretty well – she freelances for Slate and the New York Times and other outlets. Her father was also a surgeon. so we can assume that she comes from good stock and perhaps has been able to establish herself in many small yet important ways, financially. Another:
Before the divorce, we lived just six blocks away in a large house, a fancy French-style manse that made me feel as if I were living in someone else’s house. After, to avoid a change in schools, we moved into one of the neighborhood’s original stone cottages, which is about one-fifth the size of our former home. It is charming and solid, though it needs a new roof and front path and bathroom vanity, testaments to the pressure of income, the continual weighing of worth. What’s a tight corner, anyway, when there is hardwood under the kitchen linoleum and college tuitions ahead. The girls would learn about value, and craft, and history, yes, they would. I, having already learned about value, and craft, and history, would find meaning in how the freezer door handle hit the wall.
We are surrounded by huge homes and the other accouterments of wealth. Kids here, and in similar bubbles of affluence, find gift-wrapped cars in the driveway when they turn 16, as well as one of the greatest predictors of success: support.
Kripke also mentions that the father of her daughters lives a couple of blocks away. She doesn’t mention if he contributes financially to their upbringing or if he has visitation rights. We should assume that he does both, but to the liberal elite, just being divorced with majority custody is slumming it.
What Kripke also doesn’t acknowledge is that she and her daughters are free-riding off of the intact families in her neighborhood. They are basking in the safety and positive externalities of the families in their vicinity. The strong intellectual environments and riskless streets which separate grit from ghetto. Of course it is easier for kids to develop this magical quality called grit when they are still relatively safe and well-fed because the mom is smart enough to either have married (and divorced) wisely or to bring in a nice income and have a freelance gig which allows for a steady physical presence in their lives. That is not the norm of these family arrangements.
If her kids got knocked up, they wouldn’t be despondent like ghetto kids or those from some rural dead-end. Casual drug use would be fodder for an introspective entrance essay to a nice college.
This isn’t true grit, as John Wayne would have it.
Nonsense on stilts. I take this more personally as I am a father, but our daily influence is far greater than our financial contributions. It is our presence, our masculinity, our disciplinary actions, our support. It is the fact that we’re in the house.
Fuck any dumb bitch who claims otherwise.
This single Mom is doing very well, and it seems you can’t stand that
No, it isn’t better to be raised by a single mom. End of discussion.
Tan,
yep, this single mom did it *all* by herself and i feel completely inferior to her and her amazing ability to persevere.
Every situation is different.
I grew up in a stable affluent two parent household and I am a complete failure.
I played basketball with several guys that were raised by their grandmother in the bad parts of town and they now are married, gainfully employed, well educated, and rasing children.
There is no such thing as a “single mother.” There are mothers who are married to the fathers of their children and there are mothers who are using the power of the state to leech resources and security off unrelated men in their community.
Denying the child a father is a form of child abuse.
Children are as likely to end up living with neither parent (4%) as they are with just their father (4%) according to a certain census. Very few single mothers today are widowed (about 1% of all mothers). A large minority is divorced (concentrated among the latter generations such as Generation X and the Baby Boomers) but the majority will never be married in the first place (Generation Y and younger generations).
Basically this whole divorce/domestic violence/sexual harassment industry is a form of class struggle to snotty SWPL White Liberals and most Asians. It completly destroys family formation in the lower classes because, and excuse me, lower class people (e.g. Black, Hispanic, certain Asians etc) in general are just more violent and this is part of their nature.
Upper class latte drinking feminists like Hilary Clinton are smart enough to not walk out of a cheating bastard like Bill Clinton. Or DSK’s liberal wife divorcing him after that whole rape scandal. And so forth.
Lower class women (particularly NAM types) are stupid and should NOT follow anything that flows out of a woman that makes anywhere between six figures to seven figures per year. Or who lives in any of the major big cities. Or who is super-rich and liberal.
Your husband/boyfriend/friend/etc is not abusive. Is not the enemy. It’s just that lower class men disgust/repulse/scare upper class feminazis and their white knighting husbands. He’s the evil to them. Not to you.
Chalk another example of the liberal pathology of ‘the exception proves the rule’. This feels like a parody of those awful divorce propaganda articles that Dalrock skewers. As noted, this woman didn’t do it alone anyway.
anti-racist – The exception to the rule does not disprove the rule. It proves it.
And yes she IS free-riding the influence of her mostly good family intact neighborhood, were most have both a father and a mother.
Give a woman a typewriter…
She isn’t a single mom. She’s a divorced woman with a kid. There is a difference. I keep saying this, but the use of “single mom” to cover every woman from welfare recipients to war widows is politically motivated. Another feminist abuse of the language to make them all seem “heroic” and to equate the noble w/ the irresponsible.
@Days of Broken Arrows – Are most divorces done with good cause/reason? No.
Anything that does not smell of a widowed woman, whether it be a divorced woman (most likely no-fault or HIS fault as with most divorces) or an unmarried who is irresponsible, is a red light.
Red lights I’m telling you.
“It’s also certainly different than most single-parent households”
That was precisely Dan Quayle’s point during that whole Murphy Brown brouhaha: that it’s one thing to glorify single motherhood when you are rich and can afford sitters, maids, chefs, tutors and nannys. It’s a whole other thing when you are living off your EBT card and dream of someday becoming night shift assistant manager at the local McDonald’s.
It’s shameful not to be able to keep a man around, not something to brag about.
I wonder how her daughters feel about not having Dad around. Maybe that doesn’t fit too well into this narcissistic narrative.
Her body language in the photos is so sad and needy…notice how she clutches her kids and leans toward them like she is desperate to be their buddy…no wonder she feels the need to pat herself on the back in front of thousands of readers. These kids will never get away from the Mom Needs Affirmation show unless they set some clear boundaries.
“Free lancing” for Slate and NYT to write a few paragraphs about herself and her friends? I bet she barely makes minimum wage. Who pays her health insurance? I don’t think Slate and NYT will keep the checks going to these troupes of batty female writers much longer.
I could be wrong, but I’m betting daddy and ex-hubby carry an awful lot of freight. This woman’s gravy train runs out when the daughters hit age 18. Then she starts the descent into crazy catlady-hood.
Here is her bio:
http://www.99-series.com/author14.html
Educated at Brown and Northwestern. Contracted as freelancer by NYT to cover Texas. Lives in Dallas where the cost of living is very low as far as cities go. Either way, I don’t see how she doesn’t get financial support from her ex husband. If they lived in a mansion at one point, they were rich, and she’s certainly not leaving money on the table. Her story is completely disingenuous.
And that writing! She’s already half-batshit crazy:
The girls would learn about value, and craft, and history, yes, they would. I, having already learned about value, and craft, and history, would find meaning in how the freezer door handle hit the wall.
As if her kids have anything in common with NAM kids and their 72% illegitimacy.
She also wrote a piece in which she said she shares a zip code with Laura Bush. This is the Preston Hollow area of Dallas. Goes without saying that it is upper crust. Grit there is not the same as grit in other areas of Dallas or even more rural parts of Texas. All grit does not interact the same in all environments.
http://pamelagwynkripke.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/lunchwithlaura005.pdf
My guess is she had to pare down her lifestyle because her ex husband is now maintaining two households rather than one.
Ever notice most of these articles feature women who have all daughters, not sons? Your average single-woman-raising-kids-from-abusive-husband movie also seems to feature daughters only. Manipulating the background scenery like that is a classic way for the fempire to hide the worst problems. The higher price boys pay gets swept under the rug.
Disingenuous is the word. You see it in liberals discussing multiculturalism as well. They live far from the new immigrants and decide themselves how much contact they want with them, but since they know some UMC integrated immigrants, they are sure that immigration is nothing to be afraid of.
Georgia Boy: The risk of divorce is significantly lower with all boys. When boys reach puberty they often want to live with their dad and their mothers are often happy to get rid of them, if it does not cost them money.
Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.
She’s like a stage mom, trying to bask in the glow of her FABULOUS DAUGHTERS! They still seem kind of young though, just barely teens. Well, the ex may live a few blocks away, but if he’s not a presence in these gritty girls’ lives, how mucha wanna bet they will soon be riding the cock carousel and lashing out at their sainted mother. I bet the husband was thrilled to be rid of her.
“Grit” is one of those SWPL words like “artisan,” which they use to identify with a vitality and primitivism that they in reality don’t have much of a connection to; which they severed when they uprooted themselves from their ancestors.
Imagine you had two bell-shaped distributions. The rightmost one is situated a standard deviation or two from the leftmost one. What do you call the portion of the lower curve that is above the mean of the upper curve? I’m sure there is a technical term for that, but here’s the functional defintion:
Hamster Fuel
Seeing a few functional examples from the lower distribution should not blind us to the fact that increasing the size of that distribution is a BAD THING. Yeah, it might be true that the delta within each curve (in practical terms, 6-8 sigmas) is greater than the delta between curves (1 to 2 sigma), but don’t let that confuse you. 1-2 sigmas in anything meaningful is a huge difference, and it creates overrepresentation ratios at the tails that are truly egregious. Lewontin should be consigned with Gould to the 9th circle of the Inferno, per Gould’s oath in his despicable book the Mismeasure of Man.
Dads who vamoose make girls who are loose.
If anyone is registered over there, feel free to leave that comment, which is intellectually more honest than anything else on that site.
hmm, “hamster fuel”. i like the term but think it could be used in another capacity.
as to what you’re discussing, you’re talking about the scalability of utopia. swpls in their bubbles think that their lifestyle choices are scalable downwards to the masses.
It worked for the Gilmore Girls, right? TV shows like that probably do more harm than conservatives can even imagine.
“The girls would learn about value, and craft, and history, yes, they would. I, having already learned about value, and craft, and history, would find meaning in how the freezer door handle hit the wall.”
And, the overuse of commas, and, grammar, yes, and grammar especially, and freezer door handles, and walls…
WTF?
Crazy as a shit house rat, as my Grandfather would say.
The girls would learn about multi-culti obsessiveness, and deracination, and Liberal self-annihilation, yes, they would. I, having already learned about multi-culti obsessiveness, and deracination, and Liberal self-annihilation, would find meaning in how the Section 8 housing brought vibrancy to my once boring neighborhood and how little Jessica got gang raped by Jamal and his friends. We held hands, and forgave them.
PA:
Damn, that song was amazing. Kinda hits on why I stayed after everyone else in my peer group in high school and college left for the mainland.
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That is a great song. It comes across as very genuine as well as opposed to just a polemic rant set to music.
Here is an abstract from a real study published recently in the American Economic Review the top Economics Journal
(3) The Trouble with Boys: Social Influences and the Gender Gap in Disruptive Behavior
Marianne Bertrand and Jessica Pan
This paper explores the importance of the home and school environments in explaining the gender gap in disruptive behavior. We document large differences in the gender gap across key features of the home environment — boys do especially poorly in broken families. In contrast, we find little impact of the early school environment on noncognitive gaps. Differences in endowments explain a small part of boys’ noncognitive deficit in single-mother families. More importantly, noncognitive returns to parental inputs differ markedly by gender. Broken families are associated with worse parental inputs, and boys’ noncognitive development, unlike that of girls’, appears extremely responsive to such inputs. (JEL I21, J12, J13, J16, Z13)
On average not having a dad is bad, especially for boys.
Thanks Larry. Interesting. I’ll probably put that on a front page post.
Tan:
‘That mom seems to be doing alright.’
That’s what they said about Adam Lanza’s mom too. Just wait: the kids haven’t grown up yet.
I read that Slate piece earlier today while at work. Man, I wish all you guys would leave these comments there. If nothing else, the kneejerk-lefty contingent needs to know you exist.
Don’t misunderstand — there are plenty of responses there contesting the article. They’re just not as incisive and smart as the stuff here.
Tan is a fucking moron.
Tan:
‘That mom seems to be doing alright.’
That’s what they said about Adam Lanza’s mom too. Just wait: the kids haven’t grown up yet.
yep, forty YEARS of leaving little guys with psycho-mom, and no adult male restraint on her multiple nutteries, while Tan and Company ruled their matri-culture and put Dad in his place (of subjugation)
Ms. Lanza shouldnt have been allowed alone with the goldfish, much less a human male
now the only “solution” that Femerica has left is to take everbody’s (men’s) guns away, and put the national guard in the classrooms
well done ladies! (and enablers): your Gulag is complete!
really, well done
Felix Homogratus, Dimitri Chavkerov Rules! You pay us we post good about us!!
Anecdotal stories that seek to critique actual trends are enraging. Single moms tend raise worse kids. It is a fact.
She paints the entire story in terms of material wealth. It seems to be the only resource worth noting, nowadays. Nothing to speak of time and energy she had to spend working/looking for a new beta provider/dating/ that should have been spent with her children. Children of single parents are attention whores for good reason.