Parenting is a Team Sport

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An excerpt from: Parenting is a Team Sport, Thy Black Men are Not Storks, and We Need a Fatherhood Bailout –  found on ThyBlackMan.com

When I consider these lessons of manhood that I’ve been able to take for granted, I feel horribly for many of the young boys and girls in our communities. Too many of our boys don’t get the chance to learn the principles of manhood at an early age, and end up feeling lost in a world where manhood requires courage, focus, dedication, commitment, intelligence and vision. It’s a warzone out there, especially for black men, who are fighting for resources in a society that wants to see us dead or in prison.

……I encourage mothers to always appreciate and respect the value of a dad. The “I can do it all by myself” mindset is empowering in some ways, but debilitating in others. The presence of consistent and involved role models of both genders is critical to raising a balanced and intelligent human being. Your kids may seem to be OK without having their father around, but the truth is that you won’t see much of the psychological damage for another 15 years.

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Love

There is nothing better than hearing my kids having fun with each other. It’s great when they can spend time entertaining each other. They were so full of energy today.

This is one of the many reasons why I love being a father:

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The Value Of A Father

It’s crazy that we have to have articles written like this in 2013. It is sad that women don’t understand the value of a father. It’s also apparent that fathers don’t know their worth either.

I have always known the truth since I grew up with both a strong father and a nurturing and supportive mother.

The social experiments over the past 50 years have confused both men and women. The increased reliance of government due to misguided policies of the Great Society of LBJ coupled with radical elements of the second wave of feminism, have transformed our society into two camps that have been working against each other instead of together. This affects us all. It is time we wake up from this battle of the sexes and start realizing what the opposite gender brings to the table.,

Choosing to raise children on your own is not only selfish, but has proven to have long term adverse effects on generations of boys and girls.

I feel it is unwise when women choose single motherhood, really unfortunate when fathers die early, incredibly upsetting when men walk away from their role as fathers and let women raise children on their own and truly horrific when our family court system forces fathers out of the lives of their own children. It happens on a daily basis and needs to stop.

I am going to repeat this until the message gets through old and clear-
children need both the mother AND the father.

Check out this article and you will understand why:

The Distinct, Positive Impact of a Good Dad
By W. BRADFORD WILCOX- The Atlantic Magazine


I understand where Jennifer Aniston is coming from. Like many of her peers in Hollywood, not to mention scholars and writers opining on fatherhood these days, she has come to the conclusion that dads are dispensable: “Women are realizing it more and more knowing that they don’t have to settle with a man just to have that child,” she said at a press conference a few years ago.

Her perspective has a lot of intuitive appeal in an era where millions of women have children outside of marriage, serve as breadwinner moms to their families, or are raising children on their own. Dads certainly seem dispensable in today’s world.

What this view overlooks, however, is a growing body of research suggesting that men bring much more to the parenting enterprise than money, especially today, when many fathers are highly involved in the warp and woof of childrearing. As Yale psychiatrist Kyle Pruett put it in Salon: “fathers don’t mother.”

Pruett’s argument is that fathers often engage their children in ways that differ from the ways in which mothers engage their children. Yes, there are exceptions, and, yes, parents also engage their children in ways that are not specifically gendered. But there are at least four ways, spelled out in my new book, Gender and Parenthood: Biological and Social Scientific Perspectives (co-edited with Kathleen Kovner Kline), that today’s dads tend to make distinctive contributions to their children’s lives.

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