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Yes, this thread has a provocative title, but I gotta draw y'all in here somehow and my winning smile is not text.
It seems like the biggest group of douche bags/a holes out there are men who grew up without fathers. Obviously not every guy who grew up without a father is bad, I would bet most are very good in fact. It's whole all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares thing.
Anyway, it seems like the biggest pricks out there have a correlation to growing up without a dad.
I don't know if it just gives them a bad disposition or what.
Thoughts?
Thoughts?
I dealt with a number of douchebag kids growing up and currently deal with two huge douchebag administrators...all of whom came from ideal nuclear families with strong father figures.
or if their father didn't raise them the right way, it seems that it is more important for a guy to be raised by his parents the correct way than it is for girls to be raised by parents the correct way
The research is clear, whether it's men or women, that people who grow up in single parent homes don't do as well in life on a variety of social and economic metrics.
Even politically liberal researchers are admitting it:
....a wealth of research strongly suggests that marriage is good for children. Those who live with their biological parents do better in school and are less likely to get pregnant or arrested. They have lower rates of suicide, achieve higher levels of education and earn more as adults. Meanwhile, children who spend time in single-parent families are more likely to misbehave, get sick, drop out of high school and be unemployed.
I grew up without a father. Poverty. Being left out. It was all part of my life in the 1950s. But I've done well. I'm married (25 years) and have step daughters and grandchildren. But it is not often that way. Here's the truth:
The single parent family is largely the result of public policy gone terribly wrong.
When FDR signed the law (ADC - 1935) that became welfare, it did not apply to black women. Just white.
It also had a "man in the house" clause, so if a woman was living with a man, she probably didn't qualify for aid.
The Civil Rights Act (1964) corrected the White Only policy, and admitted Black women, who, because of their disadvantaged status, qualified much more often that White women.
In '68 the Man In The House rule was overturned. Now, women could live any way they chose, and still qualify for benefits because the man didn't count unless they were married.
So it became advantageous to have children, but not be married.
And that's what women do to this very day.
It is a terrible, terrible turn of events. No one saw what was going to happen, and no one could stop the judicial wheel from turning. The current - and future - crop of SPUDs (Single Parent UnDiscplined) kids serves the NFL's needs, but that's about all.
It has become a world wide phenomenon - more so in some countries than in others - and it will impact world history.
It would be a different and better world if the 2 parent family was still intact.
Close but not quite.
I assume you have no experience with public assistance. I have, though it's been quite a while. They consider HOUSEHOLD income and HOUSEHOLD numbers of humans. Able bodied adults must be working, or enrolled in aggressive "get a job" programs.
The only thing is, if a woman is unmarried, it's not that hard to lie about the presence of a man in her house. If she gets married, though...
But the woman in that scenario is actually committing a crime, and if they find out she's got a person with income under her roof and isn't reporting them, she can get in trouble over it, at the very minimum get kicked off assistance and prohibited from applying for years. At worse, I've actually known someone who went to jail for welfare fraud.
Quote:
Originally Posted by sade693
Sorry, but this looks like a false causal conclusion. This is very reminiscent of the way intellectuals thought in the 18th/19th centuries, though. Look up Malthus when you have time. If he were alive, he'd agree with you.
Anyway, the main assumption that this post makes (and scholars like Malthus made) is that poor people have more babies when they have more money. I don't think that the connection between those two variables is as strong as people think it is. It certainly looks that way, but I think there are other variables that have to be considered. You tend to see that birth rates are highest in developing nations. Yes, a large number of those having the most babies are poor, but I think the bigger variable is the lack of education that's common among that demographic. It has been correlated that the more educated people, women especially, in a society are, the "better" they are at family planning. In fact, birth rates and death rates follow a pretty predictable pattern in countries across the world:
1)They start about equal
2)Death rates decline with technological/medical advancements
3)Death rates stay lower, and birth rates begin to decline as the nation becomes more productive (wealthier) and the people more educated
4)Birth rates stay lower, and so death and birth rates are about equal again
Western Europe and the US went through the exact same phases, with 2 and 3 occurring sometime around the industrial revolution. The point being that women don't have babies because there's a welfare handout for which single mothers are qualified. They have babies they may not be able to afford because, ultimately, they don't have the resources to make a "better" decision.
Think about it: even if the government hands out assistance to single women with children, that doesn't change the fact that those women would have been better off remaining childless. That's because even with the assistance, children are still very costly. So, it's not like a woman increases her net worth by having a baby and getting government assistance. Single and childless she has her income minus the cost of subsistence for herself. With a baby she has her income + a supplement handout minus the cost of subsistence for herself AND the child. Not to mention all the time and attention she has give to the child, those are costs, too. That's actually the opportunity cost.
Women, even the poorer ones, know that. It seems like the poorer single women who end up mothers get that way because they couldn't/didn't know how to find a convenient way to protect themselves from pregnancy.
I think that people make a mistake of just looking at zoomed out statistics without imagining what this kind of life looks like. It's ASSUMED that the woman who cannot afford a child but who got pregnant, was just being a ho, or she's irresponsible, whatever. Have any of you ever been in a really vulnerable place? I mean, like, somebody close to you died and you are not functioning right. Trauma has taken over. You're starving, you're poor, you're an abuse victim, you live in a hostile hood and fear for your life every day... Anybody? Because it is scientific fact that first of all, people whose survival is at risk, do not make good decisions, compared to those who are comfortable at the most basic food-and-shelter, safety levels. Then there's the fact that if you are female, one way you might lean towards in terms of "how do I survive" coupled with the natural human urge to be loved, which is compounded if your parents didn't love you in a healthy way, all of that points to seeking a mate. You think that some guy is gonna move in with a poor young woman who is struggling, and NOT demand sex? Whether she wants it or not, whether she's on birth control or not? What does he care if she gets knocked up, he can always run. Maybe his daddy did. Or maybe he'll stay and try to help, who knows.
And even as a reasonably intelligent girl from a middle class background, when my family put me out at 18 into the world, I did not know how health insurance worked, I didn't know how to find a doctor, make an appointment, and keep my birth control prescription up. Everybody acts like these things that seem so common sense to full fledged adults are "duh" to teens, and they are not. And we still have parents who are either uncomfortable talking about reproduction to their kids, or who think that if you educate your daughter you're giving her permission to get it on...and schools teaching "abstinence only" which is ridiculous... But hey, why did I not remain alone? I did for sure know where babies came from after all... Because I was vulnerable. You know who predators target? Vulnerable people. That's what happens. A vulnerable person who gets mixed up with an abuser, a manipulator, she isn't a number, a statistic, not in real life.
But when we talk about fatherless kids and all this... I think that even more significant (way more significant) than how welfare works, are factors like no-fault divorce (so dysfunctional, abusive couples break up, rather than silently coping and staying together because they have to) and social changes following birth control and "free love" and various cultural things, the slow decline of religion and traditionalism...people believe that they can make it all up as they go. To some extent, they're right, but too much freedom can leave those who are not ready to make good independent choices, flailing without guidance if the guidance does not come from another source.
People act, though, like abusive relationships are this really rare minority and they aren't. Generations of my family had abusive alcoholics, and prior to my parents, they stayed together and just suffered and passed on their problems. Which is worse? No father, or an abusive father? In the Relationships board, we say that being single is better than being in a bad relationship, but a good relationship is best of all. Maybe that applies to parents, too.
Well the PC police are going to come out in droves and accuse you of stereotyping, but I think you've hit on to something. Mod cut.
I've noticed that men who grew up with out fathers tended to be more passive, lack assertiveness skills, but that is just an observation (and NO I am not trying to claim ALL men who grew up without dads are like this).
Last edited by PJSaturn; 03-10-2020 at 02:16 PM..
Reason: Off-topic; discussing forum moderation.
This whole topic reminds me of how people were in denial about the negative effects of smoking. They'd say stuff like "Well my Aunt Bertha smoked a pack a day and was as healthy as a horse and lived until she was 90!"
People love to cherry pick and look to the outliers when they don't want to look at the ugly truth.
The ugly truth is kids who grow up in single parent homes have a lot working against them. And when you look at a large sample of people, you see that the population of people who grow up in single parent homes don't do as well in life on a variety of metrics (income, employment, mental/emotional health, maintaining stable relationships, etc.) when compared to kids who grew up in 2 parent homes (even when other factors are controlled for, such as race, education of parents, etc.).
Like I've been saying for a while, when 40% of children are born outside marriage (as is the case in the U.S.), no wonder the middle class is shrinking. I'm surprised it hasn't shrunk even more.
Yes, of course, there will always be exceptions, but they are just that...exceptions.
Yeah, I know. People don't wanna hear that and will deny it.
I am interested to know why so many people assume that single mothers are single by choice.
Lots of single moms are single because their BF or husband walked out.
I'm not singling out the women in this scenario.
But if they weren't married to the guy when they had the kid, then that IS a choice. And, statistically speaking, live-in relationships with kids are much more likely to break up before the kid is age 5 than for those who do things in the right order (Marriage, THEN kids). The order DOES matter. So having a kid when you're not married is almost, by definition, an indicator of a relationship at high risk of breaking up.
But no, it's the 21st century, and there's absolutely no reason there are so many unplanned pregnancies. Guys really need to wise up as much as women do. I'm the first one to say that.
I agree people walk away. I'm all in favor of making it more difficult for people to do so when kids are involved.
But we, as a society, also need to learn that most people in their 20s are going to absolutely s*ck at picking long term partners for themselves. I'm not exactly in favor of arranged marriage, but let's call it quasi-arranged. Or maybe we just call it having parents who insist on more input over their children's dating lives. Letting the kids do their own thing has a very high failure rate, which leads to social instability, a high degree of wealth and income inequality, etc.
This is because the people who grew up in more nurturing households tend to repeat the positive cycle and wait to have kids, have fewer of them, and they tend to bring them into more stable household arrangements. People who grew up in unstable homes are likely to repeat the cycle of have kids too young, have too many, and bring them into unstable relationships, which exacerbates wealth and income inequality, as well as makes life difficult for the kids emotionally and otherwise.
Over the past few generations, the less able have been outbreeding the more able, and well....the results are staring us in the face.
One factor could be that these boys/young men did not have someone to hold them accountable. My dad is still alive and I'm 46, just that fact alone may still play a small role in how I behave. When I was younger it played a much bigger role...just knowing that I would be forced to answer for something I may have done. A kid without a dad, and nobody filling that role, can act out and not feel like he has anybody that will hold him to account.
I have 2 male friends, one 79, the other 56, who were raised by single mothers, and both say that their Mom was as tough on them as any father would have been. My older friend says his Mom was "my mother AND my father."
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