male-exclusive parenting support networks and structures

I am glad to listen to your experiences. In fact I asked about them in my OP. But I'd appreciate it if you not trivialize the issues I raise in the process. Of course the issues that a single father faces are different than those of a married father, although I suspect that we'll find some common threads if we take the effort to listen to each other.

Also, I'd appreciate it if you ask what I'm doing to resolve my problems before assuming that it's nothing. What you're actually boiling down to is an enforcement of the male gender role of stoicism. My problems are "trivial." Talking about them is "complaining."

I think it's interesting that you say you've gotten your support from other single dads. Why is it that you haven't received support from mothers, or from married fathers? Why did you segregate yourselves?

 

Well, you can't say I'm not consistent! Although you are mischaracterizing my point somewhat. I never wanted a segregated male support group. What I want is desegregation.

And what's the point of this 3rd person bullshit anyway? You don't want to argue with me. Fine, agree with me or ignore me, no skin off my teeth. But you obviously do want to argue with me. I mean come on, you claim you don't want to talk to me, but you're taking the time to sift through my old posts looking for ammunition. So what was the point?

 

I see that drumminmama has been part of LLL. Who else has been part of a parenting support group? What was the group? Did you enjoy it?

I never felt the need for a support group so my answer is N/A.

 

I dunno if lazy is the right word here, because you could just replace the word "mother" with the word "parent" and it wouldn't take any more work to say. I think that ignorant or unthinking would be a better description. People just don't think to consider the fact that not all parents are mothers.

So let's take another example from my life, and recognize that for each example that I know of, there must be many more that I'm simply not aware of, due to "lazy marketing."

My wife, being a professional academic, does some academic writing. She has what they call an accountability group that gets together regularly to keep track of each other's progress and prod each other to work more. Her particular group calls itself a "new mothers writing group." Now, this is a small college. I could count the number of faculty with young children on both hands. In fact one day I did, and I noticed that all of the mothers and none of the fathers are in their writing group. I asked my wife about this, and she said that she didn't know why none of the fathers are involved. I asked her if any of them had been invited, and she said no, probably not.

If you think that the parenting forum is gender neutral, you haven't been paying attention. Most everyone who hasn't been specifically prodded to realize that men are parents too are going along at autopilot, implicitly excluding men. I'm sure that it would be called the "mothering forum" if that didn't sound kind of weird.

I admit that I mistitled the thread. I should have said "male exluding." But I wasn't expecting quite the reception that I received, so I wasn't thinking carefully about exactly how I phrased every little thing.

Well thank you for saying that. I wish that it hadn't taken 7 pages of animosity to get there, but what can you do? Water under the bridge one can hope.

I deliberately went from severe and systemic discrimination (divorce courts) to more trivial aspects, to point out that the discrimination is the result of a pervasive social norm that manifests itself at all layers of society, including the self.

My point was simply that lactation is not the defining factor of acceptance into LLL, but gender. The fact that men can lactate, and that non-lactating women are welcome, blows the false equivalence between lactation and gender out of the water and makes your "damn good reason" not so damn good.

While the rank and file may be legitimately ignorant of male lactation, it's not them who make the rules. Male exclusion is a rule that comes down from on high, from people who should be (and probably are) more informed.

While I recognize that not all women are comfortable nursing in front of men, there are better ways to deal with that than by excluding all men. This is indeed a lazy policy born of complete unconcern for men.

LLL is actually a very good example, because they so explicitly place men and women in their traditional gender roles. Women are the primary caretakers, and receive support. Men are relegated to support roles if they participate at all.

 

Single parents, of either sex, are highly stressed.

Its not strange for them to think "It wasn't supposed to be this way. It's not fair."

 

I agree with that statement!

 

I just wanted to add in regards to LLL , I'm breastfeeding right now and I've only had one issue with it. Breastfeeding in public is a very terrifying thing. I've considered going to an la leche meeting to get moral support and tips for this. With my particular breastfeeding issue, I don't really want to attend at all if men are there. It would make me so uncomfortable and I don't think it's fair to run women out of the meetings or make them afraid to go just because a few men feel left out.

I can understand some of your concerns but this one seems like a non issue to me.

Also, I have no clue what you're talking about when you say men can lactate. I've often wished my boyfriend could lactate when I have to get up for the fourth time in one night but alas, he can not.

 

Men have mamary glands that are capable of producing milk. In order to do it, it takes a lot of stimulation, and hormones. Basically he has to make his hormones similar to that of a lactating woman.

I can see why you and others could feel uncomfortable nursing in front of men. But then again, some might also feel uncomfortable nursing in front of lesbians, or in front of transexuals. Should they be excluded also? Where do you draw the line, and why is it at testicles? No, it doesn't make sense. Comfort issues could be addressed as logistical problems as they arise. There's simply no reason to exluce men entirely, especially when you consider that single fathers or fathers with extreamly busy partners are among those who need the most support arranging breast milk.

Perhaps we should stop concentrating on the one area that we don't agree on, and spend some time talking about addressing the concerns that you agree are valid. I think that divorce courts are the most severe area of discrimination in this regard. There's not much that any of us can do as individuals to impact that issue unless we're involved with it directly, but I think it's important to raise awareness of it. Maybe we could discuss the parameters of an ideal situation in which both parents' involvement with their child are valued. If one parent's voice isn't louder than the other, than there are all sorts of questions about what to do if the two disagree. For instance, what if one parent wants to move accross the country for some good reason, but the other doesn't?

 

I have found in places like shopping malls they dont have 'mums' rooms but 'parents' rooms to look after childrens needs. And as a male i certainly received my share of female attention, especially after being involved with and being a parent helper in a primary school! I am now married to one of the teachers LOL

 

I think that this is much more relevant than other issues you've brought up in this thread and elsewhere on the forums.

Unfortunately, there are no easy answers to this. I know because I've thought about this for countless hours since having my child. I am with the father now and I hope we stay together for a really long time but I've imagined every possible scenario in the event that things do not work out.

I think ideally parents should put the child's best interest first and work together outside of the courts if at all possible. I imagine it rarely works out that way and unfortunately once it goes to court the court is going to favor the woman. This makes sense in a world where fathers spend most of their time working and spare very little time for child-raising, but the dynamics of family are changing and fathers are becoming more and more involved in child raising, while women are becoming more and more involved with work and financial support.

From a personal standpoint I wouldn't take my child away from his father. I wouldn't move across country. I wouldn't even move to a different town. I've joked that if we ever split up we need to buy houses next door to each other so we can split custody 50/50.

I don't know what solution to offer to parents who find themselves in that situation. I don't really know how parents work out custody even living in the same town. It must be an extremely difficult situation often made even worse by two people ultimately looking out for their own interests rather than their child's.

 

I'll let this one slide in favor of searching for some sort of consensus, except to point out that of course it's the most relevant issue, that's why I led with it. Read the OP. It just happened to be the issue that no one else wanted to talk about.

Well, there's one thing for sure. This is one hell of a hard issue to address. Thing is, right now we've got a fairly simple set-up. The woman calls the shots unless the man can prove that she shouldn't, in which case he calls the shots, unless someone can prove that neither of them should, and only then do things get complicated.

Now obviously everything's peachy if the parents can agree on what to do. But that rarely happens. Let's assume that both parents want what's best for the kids, but they don't agree on what that is. This seems like a safe assumption to me, because if one parent doesn't care about the kids, it's easy to say hey, you take 'em and Sollomon won't even have to try and make us tear them in half. There's always the question of maybe neither of them want the kids, but that's a clusterfuck that I don't think I can touch right now.

So the question becomes, what happens when two parents who care about their children disagree about custody decisions. With no dominant opinion, how does who decide? I mean obviously we're talking about some sort of divorce court or arbitration, and I supose that you take each dispute on its merits.

One pit fall is that if both people are on even footing, the person who has best prepared their evidence is going to win the day. So you'll end up with some very tricky play in which one unsuspecting parent gets blindsided by the other. And that's just one possible issue right off the top of my head.

Another thing that's often struck me as unfair about the situation is, why don't the kids get a say? And it seems to me that a real solution might be found here. I don't think that children are given enough credit for knowing what's in their own best interest.

This has possible pit falls too, like parents vying to turn their children against each other, or the children might decide to go with the one who gives them the most iced cream. But in my opinion, children have high emotional intelligence. They may not have the vocabulary to describe it, but they intuit social dynamics very well. On the really big choices, I think they'd make the right decision. They're going to want to stay with the parent that isn't abusive or neglectful. If a parent that isn't abusive wants more visitation rights, a child would want that too. They'll want to stay in the same town with the same friends instead of moving across the country.

I think maybe the solution, when the parents don't agree, is to empower the children.

Talking about this, it strikes me how few conversations like this I've had in the past. It's just not part of our cultural discourse. We're so far away from fair treatment of men in divorse courts, we don't ever even have the slightest idea what that might look like. That makes me sad, and scared.