Happy Father’s Day New York Times Style: “Will Dad Ever Do His Share?”

Well Happy Father’s Day to all. Unfortunately the left, led by the New York Times thinks that fathers are not only useless lugs, but expendable too.

“When Mom and Dad Share It All” — The article’s author Lisa Belkin attempts to make it a study of how well Mothers and Fathers share the parenting duties. She gives examples of couples who have elaborate charts of parenting duties and how Fathers try to share the load.

But according to her the couples who do the best job of co-parenting are Lesbians.

“Heterosexual couples can learn from gay couples about sharing housework and child care,” says Esther D. Rothblum, a professor in the women’s studies department of San Diego State University whose comparative study of the relationships of 342 couples — lesbian, gay, heterosexual — was published in the journal Developmental Psychology in January. “They are good role models.”

Like I said, Fathers are just not needed in 2008. Just look at the number of women who are deciding to have children and raise them on their own. The CDC reports that 40% percent of births were to unwed mothers. …And Baby Makes Two

The media has glamorized the lives of Hollywood actresses with unwed pregnancies like Jamie-Lynn Spears, Jamie Pressly, Angelina Jolie, Selma Hayek and Halle Berry.

Television has it’s share of “Idiot Fathers”; Al Bundy of “Married With Children”, Homer Simpson of “The Simpsons”, Archie Bunker of “All In The Family”.

You can also blame the Women’s Liberation movement of the late 60’s.

Lisa Belkin throws another dart at Dads by saying,

“Where the housework ratio is two to one, the wife-to-husband ratio for child care in the United States is close to five to one.
“The most striking part,” Blair says, “is that none of this is all that different, in terms of ratio, from 90 years ago.”
Back when women had to tend fires to cook and put clothes through the wringer and then onto the clothesline, they spent 50 hours a week on housework and men spent 20. (A ratio of 2.5 to 1.) And back in the 1950s, when no one was even bothering to measure how many hours men spent on child care because it was thought to be negligible, the average mother spent 12 to 15 hours caring for her children — the same as they spend today.”

Okay, points for trying to share the load of household chores and the duties of caring for the child. Mothers need a break — but let’s not minimize what Fathers represent to a child’s development.

Michael Lamb is one of the world’s foremost researchers on fatherhood. His book, “The Role of the Father in Child Development” brings together the world’s best investigators in the field.

In a nutshell he says the effects of father absence are:
psychological maladjustment
academic / school under-performance
antisocial behaviour
difficulty establishing and continuing intimate relationships

“On average, children raised without fathers are more likely to show signs of psychological maladjustment, they are more likely to have difficulties at school, difficulty in getting even to underperform, or to drop out of school early, to have less school completed. They are more likely to be represented in the statistics on delinquency and unconventional social behaviour, and they seem to have difficulty establishing and maintaining intimate relationships, particularly heterosexual relationships once they move into adulthood.”

I am a Father and anyone who tries to minimize my importance in my children’s lives better take a big step back!

I have two male friends that have bucked the trend and raised their daughters solely on their own while juggling careers. They’ve done amazing jobs in a world that really doesn’t value men raising children single handed. I applaud them, I respect them and I’m a little jealous.

Those two Dads have raised great kids who will reflect their Father’s values all their lives.

So hats off to all the Fathers in the world and Happy Father’s Day!

Posted: 06/14/08 2210PT

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