DO CHILDREN NEED A MOTHER AND A FATHER?--PART TWO: Eve

2) The family is the preeminent place where we learn what it means to be a man or a woman. You can see this by looking at the gratitude of people whose parents (like mine) provided excellent models of manhood and womanhood. You can see it in how terribly hard people have to work to get over bad models of manhood and womanhood provided by their parents.

And you can see this by asking people who grew up without a mother or without a father what they missed out on. Take people who were raised by their mother and grandmother. Here are two loving women, trying hard to do their best. And yet the children almost always talk about something missing: daddy.

Notice that although there are obvious other reasons mother/grandmother households aren't optimal, those aren't the only problems the kids notice. In fact, those aren't the main problems the kids notice. People raised in these households will sometimes say, "Yeah, we were poor, it was lousy," or, "Yeah, my mom and my grandma fought a lot, kind of a power struggle within the family." But a lot more often, you'll hear the very simple statement, "I didn't have anyone to teach me how to be a man" or "I didn't have anyone to teach me what men were supposed to do for their families." A lot more often, you'll hear, "I wanted a daddy."

Same-sex couples raising children may not live in poverty. They may not experience the intergenerational power struggles of a mom/grandma/kid household. But they definitely will experience the fatherlessness or motherlessness that children notice and suffer from. We don't snatch kids from their mothers because the mothers aren't married; but neither do we encourage unwed motherhood or mom/grandma households. So too we should not encourage fatherless or motherless same-sex parenting arrangements.
posted by Eve at 12:42 AM | link

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