From: noraa@cbnewsk.cb.att.com (aaron.l.hoffmeyer)
Subject: Re: Impact of the absent father
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1992 02:39:50 GMT

In article <1992Aug26.174339.1@fnalno.fnal.gov> holzman@fnalno.fnal.gov (Daniel B. Holzman) writes:
>Actually, Aaron, the Brown reference indicated to me that he was talking about
>getting single mothers well-paying jobs.
> 
>> You know it.  Mott's simply flouting the standard "Women good, men bad"
>> rhetoric of modern-day - oh, I hate to say it - "feminism" - and writing
>> dad out of the picture as some unneeded sperm donor.
>
>This was not clear from the article.  I think you're reading more into it than
>was there.

Well, Daniel, I don't know if I was reading more into than was there or
not.  But tomorrow I will speak with Mr. Mott and find out exactly what
he was trying to imply with his study.  I will also ask him how the
study was conducted, what his hypotheses were, what his cohorts think of
his work etc.

And I will try to be open-minded when I talk to him.

The point that I felt was implied in the article was that dads really
aren't important when it comes to producing well-adjusted, intelligent
children.  Mott seemed to imply that throwing money at the problem
would be the solution.  This problem has been carefully analyzed and in
numerous other studies the results were that children from
single-parent homes tend to achieve less and tend to get in trouble
more than children from two-parent homes.  I interpretted Mott's
conclusions as stating that the problem is not single-parent homes, but
lack of money in those homes, and low-levels of education for all those
single-parent mothers.

Why did I take exception to such thinking?  Well, because I think
fathers are important - very important - for children of both sexes.  I
think that children who have two good parents, even if they don't have
a great deal of money, tend to be well-adjusted and are more aware of
what it means to be a man or a woman.  I think children of two-parent
homes get the benefit of having parents who can relieve one another,
who are not always rushing from place to place just trying to keep up
with the children.  I think fathers are good at instructing children
how to do many things and on average are much better at that
instruction than are mothers.  Among those things are:  how to row a
boat, how to throw a baseball, how to put a worm on a hook, how to play
poker, how to climb trees, how to change a flat tire, how to wash the
car, how to take failures with dignity, how to get up and go to work
everyday - even when you don't feel like it, how to find the North Star
by first finding Ursa Major, how to balance a checkbook, how to
motivate others, how to make fun of yourself, how it is not unmanly to
cry at movies, how to change a diaper the wrong way - so you get out of
it later - basically, I think men are better at teaching children than
women what it means to be a man.  And I think that is important.

Why do I think it is important?  Well, because when I look around and
see things like the riots in LA and hear that many of the rioters were
products of single-family homes, I just have to wonder how well those
social programs which encouraged poor, uneducated women to become
virtual parasites of society and how it literally forced her to get the
father of her children out of the picture, I have to wonder if all
those programs didn't ameliorate the problems, they exacerbated them.
I see all those young men who grew up hyper-masculine, thinking that
real men beat the crap out of other people to make a point, and the
most glaring omission I see in their lives was not money - there are
lots of poor people who don't turn out bad - but the lack of father
figures in their lives.

By completely discounting the quantity of time that children would be
spending with both parents, and the fact that much of that time would be
good quality time, and that children would gain from exposure to
representatives of both sexes, and simply saying, with a very limited
data set, that fathers are not needed, well, I think Mr. Mott has a
political agenda that he is pushing, and is not interested in truth.
But we can only really fix the problems if we can accurately find the
sources of those problems.  Anything else is spitting into the wind.

Aaron L. Hoffmeyer
TR@CBNEA.ATT.COM 
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