The End of Men recently published in the Atlantic, can’t decide whether the marginalization of men from the family, the economy and the academy, is a nightmare or a dream come true. Steve Baskerville takes on the questions no one else will and says what no one else will say. The End of Men is not a naturally occuring result of natural forces, but something aggressively constructed by committed ideologues:
While elite feminists did assume previously male occupations, many more women have entered the workforce in professionalized versions of traditional homemaker roles. This has transformed childrearing and other domestic tasks from private family matters into public, communal, and taxable activities, necessarily expanding the size and power of the state and leading to the creation of vast bureaucracies to oversee public education and social services. Read more…
MSNBC had this article on the lowering age of sexual maturity among girls. This article tracks an overall decline in the age of breast development. It reminded me of a series of papers I’ve read about the declining age of first menstruation. This MSNBC article doesn’t report on this, and the factors may be somewhat different. However, I have been following the decline in age at first menses because one of its strong correlates is the presence of an unrelated male in the household. By contrast, girls living with their biological fathers tend to have their first periods at a later age. There is a lively debate over the reasons for this correlation. But the correlation seems to be well-documented. Read more…
Monday (July 5th) I listened to a broadcast on the Diane Rehm Show of an interview with James T. Patterson, author of Freedom Is Not Enough: The Moynihan Report and America’s Struggle over Black Family Life from LBJ to Obama. That title was already on my long (long…) wish-list of books I’d like to buy if I had a few thousand bucks to spare (and a few years of leisure time I could spend to read them) so of course I listened with interest. But if what I heard was any indication of the kind of self contradictory ‘logic’ to be found in his book, then it’s probably no longer one of the must-have titles on my list. (So don’t take this as a review of Professor Patterson’s book, which I haven’t read. This is just my reactions to some of the assertions he made in his interview.) Read more…
Fred Reed writes some provocative stuff. I often disagree with him, but he’s smart as a whip and always interesting. In this article, he takes on hooking up.
I see where women, or college girls anyway, are honking and blowing most fierce about how they don’t like the way sex works nowadays. Yeah. It seems that the hook-up is in flower. Read more…
Yesterday my husband and I took our three children, ages 5, 2.5, and 3 months, with us to Macy’s to find a wedding gift for my husband’s sister. A helpful clerk, an older woman named Marjorie, spotted me looking around for a place to print a registry and immediately jumped to my aid. She walked me to the computer, gave me a helpful tip for pulling out the pages correctly, and took the time to explain a few things on the printed sheets before setting me loose to first relocate my family. I had walked off leaving my husband holding the bag–the diaper bag that is, as well as keeping tabs on our two free birds and the baby safely trapped in her car seat he had set on the floor. Not surprisingly, he had everything under control, so I simply stood near him as I perused his sister’s registry. Read more…
Family law Judges are famous for their truly disgusting rulings. But no matter how low they sink into the muck, they continuously find a way to achieve new lows of tyranny and immorality.
Witness this case: Read more…
Part 1. in a series of responses to a question posed by a student.
No one contract can treat same sex couples and opposite sex couples identically.
(Warning: this post is long! But Worth the effort if I do say so myself!)
1. If you believed that it is not possible for the government to be neutral in the definition of marriage, would that change your view of the desirability of your proposal? Read more…
Just this past weekend, I told the National Association of Catholic Family Life Ministers that the use of Artificial Reproductive Technology is the newest threat to marriage as the lifelong fruitful union of a man and a woman. I argued that the very existence of the ART option is distorting women’s marriage decisions. They believe that they can postpone marriage indefinitely, and if Mr. Right never shows up, they can still become a mother on their own, artificially.
As if on cue, Time magazine steps up to the plate with corroborating evidence:
New research from Belgium and the U.K. suggests that women may increasingly be considering freezing their eggs as a way to prolong fertility as they pursue a career — or find the right romantic partner. A survey of nearly 200 female students found Read more…
is the name of the Knights of Columbus pro-fatherhood initiative. I met their editor, Brian Caulfield, last week at the National Association of Catholic Family Life Ministers in Cincinnati. He says nice things about me in this post!
They may be a small and non-representative minority of Catholics, but they are people in possession of an idea, and know they have the truth to share. Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, who runs the cutting-edge Ruth Institute in defense of marriage, insisted repeatedly in her talk that Catholics have the benefit of knowing the truth, and they should be anxious to share it out of love and compassion for their neighbors.
This whole Fathers for Good site is a pretty cool source of encouragement for fathers.
There is a lot to be said for cultivating stoic virtues. The best people in the world, as far as I’m concerned are those that are determined to bestow upon others what they need. And they will make their own wants secondary.
The pursuit of happiness is fine. But assigning too high a priority to happiness and pleasure makes a person into a narcissistic jerk.
This article discusses how getting married and having children can make somebody into that kind of person.
And here’s where I wonder if we ought to re-examine our commitment to happiness. It seems to me that there’s possibly some merit — if we persevere and have the sense to learn from it — in the other-orientation that is (good) parenting. It’s fine to go through life happy, in other words, but I suspect we also want to go through life without becoming big fat self-absorbed jackasses. Children really help in that regard. Read more…
I just discovered Dr. Gordon Finley over at Men’s News Daily. Here he is on the challenges to fatherhood:
fatherhood itself is under fire on multiple fronts and with multiple losses, not only for children and fathers, but also for society. Consider three: male unemployment, divorce, and non-marital childbearing.
Male unemployment today is higher than female unemployment while not coincidentally female educational attainment is higher Read more…
We here at the Ruth Institute have been saying for quite some time that Artificial Insemination technology can and will be used to push men out of families, and in so doing increase fatherlessness.
It almost boggles the mind that there is any dispute about this proposition. Witness the strange and unexpected changes in the law that Kay Hymowitz documents in this article:
Unfortunately, in the absence of any other authority, answering these questions has fallen to family court judges, who are—and I mean no disrespect—not always the sort you’d expect to be on the short list for the Louis Brandeis Award for Cautious Jurisprudence. Read more…
Thumbs up from me for this article.
Social science may suggest that kids drain their parents’ happiness, but there’s evidence that good parenting is less work and more fun than people think. Bryan Caplan makes the case for having more children.
By BRYAN CAPLAN
Amid the Father’s Day festivities, many of us are privately asking a Scroogely question: “Having kids—what’s in it for me?” An economic perspective on happiness, nature and nurture provides an answer: Parents’ sacrifice is much smaller than it looks, and much larger than it has to be. Read more…
My last post dealt with the sampling and reporting problems associated with the latest study purporting to show that the children of lesbians are doing just fine. The fact is, that the study claims that the children of lesbians are doing better in every dimension than the children in the general population. The underlying message of this story is not simply, “leave us alone to have kids the way we want.”
Herewith, are the 3 Really Pernicious Messages behind the “Lesbians Make Better Parents” Story line:
1. Women are better parents than men. Therefore, Read more…
The great Theodore Dalrymple takes on the issue of fatherlessness. Contrary to the promises of those who would redefine marriage out of existence, every indication is that mass fatherlessness leads to a world of Hobbesian horror, not of Kumbaya love and happiness. (Emphasis added).
The worst child abusers in the country have been successive British governments. They have done everything in their power, by means of social reform and fiscal policies, to promote the very circumstances in which child abuse and neglect are most likely to take place. Read more…
by Michael Cook
In the US alone an estimated 30,000-60,000 children are born each year through sperm donation, yet no entity is required to report on these vital statistics. Until now, no reliable evidence has been available on the experiences of young adults who were conceived in this way. A report released this week by the Institute for American Values, My Daddy’s Name is Donor, is the first-ever representative, comparative attempt to learn about the identity, kinship, well-being, and social justice experiences of these adults. Read more…
Dr. J. discussed a decline in empathy over time in this post. She discussed several possible causes of this decline.
I propose to add one more possible contributing factor– a decline in the influence of fathers. David Popenoe in has book Life without Father: Compelling New Evidence That Fatherhood and Marriage Are Indispensable for the Good of Children and Society
, discusses the importance of fathers to families and to society.
Reading his description of what fathers do in their families, I began to wonder if Popenoe did field research by observing my own family. His description of the differing parenting styles of mothers and fathers was absolutely uncanny.
After that discussion, Popenoe discusses the importance of active fathers for contributing to the development of a child’s intellectual competence, academic achievement and psychological well-being. All of this should be obvious. What is surprising in the research is this. Citing two studies from learned journals including a twenty six year longitudinal study, Popenoe makes the surprising conclusion that the active presence of fathers in the family is important for the development of empathy.
But rather than acknowledging this, I’m sure the left will find some way to blame the decline of empathy on McDonalds or George Bush. That’s just my guess.
This article states that mothers who stay at home, stay married more often than those who don’t. The stats for divorce and working mothers is highter. Interesting. Couples where the husband helps out, especially with the kids, have an even better chance of staying together.
by Carolyn Moynihan
Four jobs a week. Honestly, guys, that is all it takes after the birth of your first child to reassure your wife that you want to be helpful at home, and prevent your risk of divorce increasing. That is what a new study in the UK has found, and it suggests that those four tasks protect your marriage even more if your wife is not going out to work. Read more…
Judith Stacey and Timothy Biblarz’s new study, “Two Mommies Are as Good as Mom and Dad,” actually goes further than this: midway through the piece, the viewpoint becomes that women (or gay men) are better than heterosexual men. Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse has already responded in print; now she unpacks this study in this podcast.
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