Psychology Today To Child Custody Divorce Courts, Father's Rights Groups: Dads Are Equal

Israel News Agency / Google News ^ | June 3, 2007 | Joel Leyden

[SeaHawkFan]

But when "Psychology Today", one of the most respected lay journals on clinical psychology...

Can't get past the second sentence without telling a big lie.

[Marie]

I cannot speak for men, but I have read about men who claim that when they first laid eyes upon their first child, a surge of emotion flooded them such as they had never known before. This was true regardless of the gender of the child. Usually they described it as a feeling of such love, tenderless and a feeling of responsibility to defend the child. So, it is highly likely that this type of bonding has a hormonal aspect to it. The question is which come first? The emotion or the hormones? It must be partly instinct.

My husband and I were separated (by the Army) during the last part of my first pregnancy and for three months after. The first time my husband held our daughter, the look of tenderness and love that crossed his face stunned me.

[gogeo]

It is entirely possible that many of the mothers were not narcissistic, but rather had been abused, neglected or morally affronted by their husbands and wished to preserve a family atmosphere for the children without having to "normalize" socialist relations between the father and and share the children with their father's mistress who participated in breaking up the marriage. But such conservative thinking falls outside the scope of Marxist abstractions...

Yes, let's not move beyond that bedrock principle that has served so long for so well...when in doubt, it's the man's fault. Conservative thinking not long ago called for fathers to have custody of children...when viewed in that light, it's the current system that's influenced by what you call "Marxist" thinking.

Assuming that men are never at fault is as insane as assuming that women are never at fault...or even that any one gender is predominantly at fault. The truth is that there's plenty of blame to go around.

This article addresses the role of courts in the current model of divorced families and the consequences that follow. It addresses the empowerment of women to exclude fathers from their children's lives. Perhaps you can move past your own palpable bitterness(whether sympathetic or personally derived) and address that issue.

[gogeo]

My sons father doesn’t want joint physical custody and to make it law that he has to have my son 50% of the time would rip my child to shreds...

Shared parenting is perscriptive, not mandatory. It isn't forcing those who don't want to assume 50% parenting to do it.

[gogeo]

Man. so far it sounds like every woman on this thread conceived children with complete Neanderthal jerks. A real shame...

Interesting point.

[gogeo]

Happy now?

No, no, NO!!! That's discrimination!!!

(according to Gogeo's 'Fractured Webster's', discrimination is that which does not accrue to my benefit.)

[Tribune7]

Who's the father?

Note that estimates range from 1 percent (for high status men) to 30 percent.

[Leftism is Mentally Deranged]

Good that that publication recognizes the truth. That popular psychology mag has a lot of light-headed articles based on fluff, and so I haven’t read it years and don’t expect to.

[ModelBreaker]

Who's the father? Note that estimates range from 1 percent (for high status men) to 30 percent.

Thank's for the link. I was planning on digging one of them out for Albion today but you saved me the trouble. If Albion is interested, she can find more references in Wade, N., Before the Dawn (2007).

One additional factoid. The earliest study I know on this subject was accidental. It was conducted by a hospital in Chicago in the 50's. They were studying something about heritability of blood type. In the course of that study, it became apparent that about 15% of the babies could not possibly have been sired by the supposed father because of differences of blood-type. That means the number was almost certainly greater than 15% as some of the women had probably philandered with men who had the same bloodtype as the supposed dad. (They terminated the study as soon as they discovered this because, in the 50's, this was an unacceptable fact. N.B., it's sad that it is no longer unacceptable--it's just another marker on the long, moral decline of America.) I don't have the time to look this study up. But I'm sure a google search project would provide it.

One could easily look at this fact as an easy explainer of why otherwise conservative women are so adamant about legal abortion. For every women who philanders and gets pregnant, there are certainly more who manage to avoid pregnancy and more who would like to have the option of philandering without having a baby. Altogether, if you start at 15% and add on, this amounts to a fairly substantial portion of married women. That makes abortion the ultimate, fix-it-up-after-you-break-it solution for a substantial group in the population. It would explain the odd voting pattern of married women on this issue.

[Philistone]

Yup! (My daughter is 11 and says similar things).

My ex-wife has my extraordinary self-control to thank for the fact that she is still alive...

[ModelBreaker]

Child, I am not angry, I am reflecting the sad state of American society and jurisprudence, having done my graduate work in family law. Your claim that up to 15% of children born to married couples are not the spawn of the husbands is wildly off the mark. Please cite your reference for that very dubious statistic.

Another poster kindly provided them. I also added some in my last post to you.

I have a little family law background also (nothing like your graduate degree). I handled some dissolution cases when I practiced law. Sometimes I represented the boy and sometimes the girl. (I avoided cases where custody was involved--there's nasty and then there's nasty. Custody cases are at the extreme end of nasty.)

Even where no custody was involved, both spouses were usually complete jerks and were using the system to exact revenge on the other in whatever way they could (these were disputed dissolutions, not ones the parties agreed on.) Both spouses were usually willing to perjure themselves to exact revenge.

It was much worse than ordinary civil litigation. However, usually the man got reasonable long before the woman. Not out of moral purity, but because the rules are so heavily skewed in favor of the woman. The cost to the man of being a jerk is, in divorce court, much higher than the cost to a woman. So the women had a lot more leeway to continue being jerks. And, I should add, they took full advantage of that leeway most of the time.

It seems to me that skewing the rules in favor of the woman in custody cases (even more than the financial rules) is really a bad idea. It lets one side be super-jerks and leads to the very high prevalence of false claims of child-abuse where custody is involved. Where both parties pay a cost for being jerks, both tend to be more reasonable. And that's better for the kids.

[Albion Wilde]

In post 27, you said, "Did you know that in America, between 10 and 15% of children born to married couples are NOT the child of the husband? " (Emphasis mine.)

I objected to that figure, because you attributed this behavior to married couples. I read your link and none of the studies gave that high a figure for married couples, only for all pregnancies. Also, the studies were conducted in ultra-liberal European countries as well as the U.S.

Given today's promiscuity among young people and Europe's wholesale rejection of religion except among its Muslim immigrants, I do believe this figure is possible when applied to all pregnancies in Europe and the U.S., certainly including poverty communities such as "trailer trash" or "urban youth", as well as those marriages that took place when, or because, the bride was pregnant.

But I do not believe it could be accurate for couples who marry and wait to have children after marriage. One of your sources also cited the lower incidence of "cuckolding" among the more educated couples.

[ModelBreaker]

Actually, they were another poster's cites. You should check out Before the Dawn, which I provided. It is a wide ranging study of human genetics and the history thereof. One of the key factors in doing genetic history is the amount of cuckolding because y chromosomes come only from dad. That book states that most geneticists accept the 10-15% figure for married couples.

I doesn't surprise me that high-status men are cuckolded less. It's a good female reproductive strategy. Get the best schlup you can to support you and your kids and then populate the nest with better genes than the schlup can provide. But if your man is at the top of the totem pole, that strategy doesn't help. QED.

That's life in a fallen world.

[rockrr]

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