Relationships

Women Can Be Abusers Too

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“Things started out pretty good the first couple of years.  Then, she slowly changed.  She always had a temper, but then we got into some money problems, and it got worse.  She would get mad, and it would escalate all out of proportion.  She’d start hitting.  She’d slap at my face, and then keep slapping and try to scratch me.  I’d put up my arms, or just grab and hold her hands.  I never hit her back.  I was just taught that you never hit a woman.” 

In her regular ‘Can I Just Tell You’ essay, host Michel Martin shares her thoughts on the myths and troubling facts about domestic violence.

If you want more information on domestic violence against men, read more about it:

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/domestic-violence-against-men/MY00557

http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/01/30/a-hidden-crime-domestic-violence-against-men-is-a-growing-probl/

And for more on the quote above, read this: http://home.comcast.net/~philip.cook/essays/the_whole_truth_about_dv.htm

Fatherhood

Seen Also In Men

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A documentary about the paternal instinct three fathers hold that pushes them to fight for meaningful relationships with their children. Under the weight of broken relationships with their own fathers, the negative stereotypes of what a black father does not do, and the injustices in the family court system towards willing fathers; these men rise to the occasion for the love they’ve felt since they knew their children were on the way

 

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/34278066 w=500&h=281] <p><a

Family, Parenting

The Real, Complex Connection Between Single-Parent Families and Crime – The Atlantic

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In a recent post, “Single Moms Can’t be Scapegoated for the Crime Rate Anymore,” Philip Cohen tries to correct what he sees as an injustice in the way the United States’ crime rate is discussed. He writes that many pundits believed the crime wave of the late 1980s and early ’90s was caused by an increasing number of single mother families. However, as he shows in his charts, crime rates began declining in the early 1990s, even while the percentage of single-parent families continued to rise. In his mind, that means that family breakdown cannot explain the crime wave and “single mothers deserve an apology” from said pundits.

But by ignoring a host of policy and cultural shifts during that time, Cohen fails to prove his conclusion….

The bottom line is that there is a large body of literature showing that children of single mothers are more likely to commit crimes than children who grow up with their married parents. This is true not just in the United States, but wherever the issue has been researched. Few experts, including Cohen, dispute this. Studies cannot prove conclusively that fatherlessness—or any other factor—actually causes people to commit crimes. For that, you’d have to do the impossible: take a large group of infants and raise each of them simultaneously in two precisely equivalent households—except one would be headed by a father and mother and the other by a lone mother. But by comparing criminals of the same race, education, income, and mother’s education whose primary observable difference is family structure, social scientists have come as close as they can to making the causal case with the methodological tools available.

To say this is not to “scapegoat” or “blame” women; for one thing, fathers also play a role in the making of single-mother families. For another, blame personalizes what is a huge, global, and multi-causal demographic shift; it’s like saying economists are blaming laid-off employees for noting the decline in manufacturing jobs.

Read more HERE: The Real, Complex Connection Between Single-Parent Families and Crime – The Atlantic.

Reading List

The new ‘new normal’

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Men who are fighting to continue to stay in their children’s lives and winning is going to be the norm. Once fathers see other men fighting a court system that was biased towards mothers for decades and winning, the games couples play while dealing with custody issues will quickly come to an end.

I found this great article in Bloomberg News and thought I’d share:

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Matt Abourezk, 49, a single father in Darien, Connecticut,
said the idea of only occasional contact with his two sons was unthinkable.
He and his ex-wife readily agreed to trade weeks with the children

Joe Cioffi, a physician from Fairfield, Connecticut, settled for visitation rights to his son after he and the boy’s mother split up. Soon, he decided that wasn’t enough, so he spent four years struggling to win primary custody.

“Why should I be the underdog here?” Cioffi, 59, said of his clash with his former girlfriend. “I’m a professional. I pay my bills. I’m not a criminal. I’m home at night. So we played hardball.”

Cioffi’s custody victory and living arrangement encapsulate two distinct changes driving a 27.3 percent jump in U.S. families led by single fathers in the past decade, according to figures released from the 2010 census. While the number of single dads remains small, greater acceptance of shared custody and more unmarried couples have altered traditional ideas of child rearing, demographic experts said.

“It’s time for us to stop assuming that single parents are always women,” said Andrew Cherlin, a professor of sociology and public policy at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. “There is a visible presence now of single men caring for their kids. We didn’t see that a few decades ago.”

Single dads now account for 8 percent of American households with children, up from 6.3 percent in 2000 and 1.1 percent in 1950, census data show. Cioffi’s community has outpaced the national rise in households led by single fathers. (His former girlfriend, through her attorney Janis Laliberte, declined to comment for this story.)

Single-Father Surge

The number in Fairfield County rose 31 percent during the decade, to 5,457 from 4,167, three times the growth in single mothers, who were up 10.1 percent to 21,811, according to the census. Fairfield, which has 335,545 total households, is one of the wealthiest counties in the nation with a median household income of $81,114.

Male same-sex households with related children are a small portion nationwide and in Connecticut, where they made up 828 of the state’s 1,371,087 households in 2010, census data show.

As fathers have gotten more involved in the lives of their children and mothers have increasingly entered the workforce, it has become less unusual for fathers to seek and gain custody.

“If the dad is really interested in getting custody and wants to have a relationship with his kids, he is far more successful than he was 20 years ago,” said Margaret Brinig, a family law professor at the University of Notre Dame.

Read more HERE

Family

Contradictions

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MURPHY: Rojas believes that more than men, women need and want the security of marriage and children; and that by pursuing the same career paths as men, they’re actually hurting their prospects for the future. This is what he says of his brightest female law students.

ROJAS: You can imagine that she’s going to be hired by a wonderful legal staff, and she’s going to travel a lot. Maybe she’s not going to marry, herself, until the late 30s. Oh, what a horrible life she has ahead.

MURPHY: Because?

ROJAS: Because she’s going to be on her own. I mean, the problem is, is she’s going to be on her own.

MURPHY: Contradictions are everywhere. When I asked Rojas about the most important historical event, for Chilean women, in the past 50 years or so, he said it was when poet Gabriela Mistral won the Nobel Prize. Yet Mistral was a woman that never married, and never had children. She actually left Chile because it was easier to have a career abroad; and she spent most of her life on her own.

Does this sound familiar? I see the same thing happening in America.

 

more HERE

 

 

Divorce, Parenting

Kramer.com vs. Kramer.com

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By PAMELA PAUL

Published: November 23, 2012 New York Times

MOST divorced couples would probably prefer not to see each other. Ever again. But when you share custody of your children, you have to assume a certain amount of face-to-face time amid the endless back-and-forthing.

Think of the clashing summer vacation plans, the who-goes-to-Lucy’s-birthday-party, the “Max forgot his homework again” at Dad’s. And those devilish contretemps that can arise if Mom, for example, decides to keep her house kosher while Dad serves the children pork chops. Or if her new boyfriend is suddenly sleeping over on “her” nights to host the children.

Let’s just say that no matter how well ex-spouses and still-parents coordinate, there’s a good chance of teary phone calls, angry exchanges during drop-off, and all-out fights about who’s not saving enough for college, often played out smack in front of the children.

Unless, of course, it’s all done remotely. These days, the cool aloofness of technology is helping temper sticky emotional exchanges between former spouses. And for the most part, according to divorce lawyers and joint-custody bearers, handling the details via high tech is a serious upgrade.

It’s joint custody — at a distance.

read more here: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/25/fashion/joint-custody-from-a-distance.html?pagewanted=all