My diary is directed to upstanding straight men who desire marriage, and to raise their children under their own roof until the children are at least 18. It is not directed to abusers, drunks, chronic layabouts or "deadbeat dads," nor to feminists of the variety that consider the two-parent household oppressive, and want to do away with it. My thesis is that men who wish for an enduring marriage, to remain close to their children, and for their children to turn out well should consider marrying foreign women from more traditional cultures, and not American women. I know this is a provocative thesis, but while reality-based arguments will be respectfully received, presumptions about my character and name-calling will not be replied to.
Most women would agree, I hope, that men should not engender children that they are not willing and able to care for. If you knew that you had genetic anomalies making serious, but let's say nonfatal, disorders in your children four, five or ten times more likely than in the general population, would it be responsible to have biological children? If you knew of any set of facts leading to the belief that the odds of a good outcome for children of yours was at best fair, wouldn't it be the better course not to have kids?
In present-day America, a man contemplating fatherhood must, or certainly ought to, consider the consequences both to his future children and to himself of the likelihood that he will be abandoned by his wife, and that she will be awarded custody of the children (if she wants it).
This ought to be a huge concern. 2003 statistics show that only 31.3% of American children live with both parents. About 27.7% live in single-parent households. About 30.0% live with one parent and a step-parent. (The remainder live with grandparents, in foster care, etc.)
The likelihood that an American child will live in a single-parent household before turning 18 is about 50%. The percentages of "single mother" versus "single father" households (23.3.% of children live with Mom only; only 4.4% with Dad) may underestimate the woman's chances of being awarded custody of children in a divorce if she wants it.
So, divorce and the loss of custody is a very real risk to the American male who hopes for a stable home with children. Moreover, studies show that the expectation of which parent will be awarded custody closely tracks who files for the divorce: in households with minor children, at present it's roughly 3 out of 4 divorces that are initiated by the mother.
The feminist retort will be, I expect, some combination of arguments (1) that abolition of the father-under-the-roof family is desirable, and/or (2) that most men, even if not abusive or evil in any flagrant sense, are almost by definition so unenlightened that they deserve to be abandoned, and if they wish to be permitted to live with their children, they should change themselves to conform to feminist ideals.
As for the second argument, by now we have a generation including large numbers of males raised in households strongly influenced by (if less frequently in strict conformity with) feminist doctrine. A significant fraction of American men consider themselves feminists. Is there any evidence that wives discard fewer "feminist" husbands, than more traditional "non-feminist" husbands?
And, assume what you will what it implies about me, but I find generosity and honesty distributed more or less evenly between the sexes. I can't be convinced that whereas men who walk out on more or less dutiful and well-intentioned wives are bad people (and should be made to pay through the nose in divorce court) but women who walk (and take the children) are justified, even in the absence of the traditional fault grounds.
Certainly, some percentage of those divorces initiated by Moms involve Dads who are violent, abusive, drunks, compulsive gamblers, chronic layabouts and so on. Still, feminism supports the decision of any woman to divorce her husband, if only due to emotional dissatisfaction or because one has found a more attractive lover or, indeed, for any reason or none. And I am here looking to advise men who are not violent, abusive, drunks, and so forth as to why marriage and children with an American female might be a bad choice for them.
I will tarry but briefly on the consequences for fathers of the loss of their children via divorce. Men, for the most part, don't need to be told. Women face the situation sufficiently infrequently, that they often lack empathy for what males go through in a situation the women rarely face. It's devastating. You lose day-to-day contact with your kids. Often - usually - your ex-wife will try to alienate the children from you, even if the divorce was an "elective" on her part. You are legally required to support your kids as if the divorce had not occurred; indeed, in some states, whereas parents in an intact family may choose not to pay for college (as in the case where the child is a shitty, unmotivated student) but after divorce, the custodial Mom can choose college, thrusting most or even all of the cost onto Dad. Nearly every state has created in its laws a bizarre expectation that, after divorce, the wife and children will have (generally at the husband's expense) an undiminished standard of living, which is hardly realistic, unless the divorcing husband's name is Donald Trump.
All of the legal decision-making is cloaked in a thick, mendacious goo about "the best interests of the child," which is legalese bullshit for "Mom wins, but since we have a broader agenda here, we must pretend that divorce and custody are gender-neutral." Indeed, I read a legal article by a good feminist who acknowledged that the trend toward allowing custodial mothers to relocate with the children is based on a growing (and no doubt "progressive") understanding that identifies the "best interests of the child" with the mother's well-being (as defined, no doubt, by the mother).
This equation reminds me of the referenced diary concerning the abortion issue, entitled "It's About Women." Um, do I detect a bit of narcissism in this manner of thinking by women, that the well-being of children (and the plenary choice of life or death, even for the far-advanced fetus) is "about women," and everyone else can go to hell? It's all about me, asshat!
With the best of intentions, the quality of the noncustodial father's parenting will be greatly impaired. Without the day-to-day interaction, most noncustodial dads are reduced to "treat providers." They take kids to dinner, buy them stuff, and so on. My elder, sixth-grade daughter has reached the point at which many of her schoolmates' fathers have been removed from the home (more often than not, by decree of their moms) and I see some of this close-up. It's execrable.
Usually, from divorce until their kids are grown, Dads are reduced to virtual nonentities (except, of course, in their sole meaningful and valued role, that of "support obligor"). Whether you will be satisfied to get to know your (grown-up) kids again, years after the divorce, after they have undergone the consequences of fatherlessness, is a different story.
As men should expect limited empathy from feminists, let's focus mostly on the implications of single-parent living - in the huge majority of cases, fatherlessness - on children. This is by way of reply to feminism's argument that abolition of the two-parent family (to be accomplished by expulsion of the father, and the reduction of his role to respite care of children and, of course, check-writing) is an affirmative good, a job we should be striving to complete.
Every study shows that the situation is very, very bad. Kids not living with their fathers are two to three times more likely to have emotional and behavioral problems. They make lower grades, are more frequently absent from school, are twice as likely to drop out of high school, and less likely to attend college. They are more anxious, hostile and withdrawn than children in two-parent families, and single-parent homes produce about three-quarters of the teenagers who commit suicide.
Kids without fathers in the home are more than 4 times as likely to smoke cigarettes. They have sex earlier and with more "partners," and get pregnant more often. Toward the upper end of the income scale, upper-income girls in fatherless households get pregnant five times as often as their two-parent peers. Kids in fatherless homes are more likely to be poor, of course, but lest all of the grave problems affecting these children be laid at the (often exaggerated) failure of fathers to pay child support, at every income level, by all or nearly all criteria, fatherless kids fare worse, and usually dramatically worse, than children who live with both their mother and their father. Indeed, lower-income kids with two parents do significantly better than fatherless kids, including where lack of money is not an issue.
Most liberals and Democrats are concerned, and rightly so, over disparities that show "minority" children, chiefly black and Latino, as being worse-off than white children. I have not looked to compare "misery indices" as between fatherless children and those of any disadvantaged racial or ethnic group, but my guess would be that no racial or ethnic minority group's kids -- compared by the above, or other similar criteria, with the white non-Latino population -- would post numbers as disheartening as those of fatherless versus two-parent household children. Fatherless children may be America's largest and most devastated at-risk group, and I am not aware of any affirmative action programs for their benefit.
The would-be husband and father contemplating this landscape must consider, too, that he may have, for practical purposes, no say in a decision to subject this future children to the above-described scenario. American moms can, and in very significant numbers they do, leave the husbands and fathers of their children over reasons that women in a number of foreign cultures by and large would not.
As the wholesale ejection of fathers from American homes can be described as child neglect practiced on a societal scale, the man who loves children is better off by seeking a wife in a more traditional country outside the United States. If those countries, in many instances, have laws or mores that are unfairly disfavorable to women, the solution naturally is that fair-minded American males, picking a foreign mate, do not need to take advantage of them.
I feel certain, that if American women were subject to the marriage contract that most of them apparently feel entitled to ask men to sign onto -- and their husbands could walk at any time with an 85% or so likelihood of obtaining the custody of any children, not to mention alimony, health insurance, property distribution, and child support -- most women's continuing enthusiasm for getting married (as distinct from staying married) would plummet. But as the present deal is demonstrably bad for men, and bad for children, isn't it the very definition of insanity for men to keep doing that which too often leads to a terrible outcome?