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Mothers and Fathers
My number four son is now a police officer, a few months into his first year on the job. He spends his evenings and nights driving his patrol car around a New England city, staying awake, keeping the peace.
He tells me that about once a week he responds to a domestic call involving a minor. With few exceptions, they’re variations on the same theme: a single mother with one child, a son, who is unruly and defiant and whom she can’t control. My son tells me that his department responds to at least one of these every day — this in a relatively small city.
He had one case where the boy was ten years old. The lad refused to put on his seat belt, so his mother called 911.
I think it’s hard for most women to discipline children, particularly sons. I think some women fear that they’ll lose the love of their sons if they say “no.” Beyond that, I think many, perhaps most, women simply don’t want to be the heavy, the no-nonsense voice of authority. It’s a role many men don’t mind playing (and one I always enjoyed), but one mothers would rather delegate to fathers.
Boys and girls need fathers. But we can’t talk about that, about the roles fathers play, if we have to pretend that men and women are the same, or that their differences are trivial and mutable.
And that is perhaps the most important reason why we should reject calls for respectful compliance with the trans nonsense, and encourage a clearer understanding of sexual reality — of men and women and how we differ.
Published in Culture
Mitigated.
It’s been some years, but I do remember seeing some data from researchers who tried to parse out the data on a number of father-related bases, and used completing high school, grades, and convictions for criminal activity as measures of outcome. Obviously, research data is going to be statistical, and any individual case may differ radically from the statistical average or median. My recollection is that:
That was my initial thought on reading the post. I know that courts recognize that a mother cannot physically make her child visit a father if they don’t want to. I learned that from my sister’s divorce.
States may differ, but in general, if the visit is ordered then the parent must make every reasonable effort to enable the visit. For instance, one case I researched involved a child exchange in a parking lot. Mom brought children to the rendevous point, put their properly packed luggage on the sidewalk, and had the children exit the car. Father appeared and children refused to get in his car. After some efforts to convince them, kids got back in mom’s car and were brought home. Appeals court ruled that mother complied with the order, it was up to dad to convince the children to get in his car.
I would caution any parent that unless there is a real danger involved with a visit, that arbitrarily refusing a visit can get them into real trouble if brought to court for enforcement.