Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
July 16 - November 29, 2018
There is no such thing as “parenting.” There is mothering, and there is fathering, and children do best with both. It does not detract from the many mothers and fathers who have of necessity raised children alone, and done so successfully, to insist that mothers and fathers bring distinct strengths to the task.
“men and women bring different gifts to the parenting enterprise, that children benefit from having parents with distinct parenting styles, and that family breakdown poses a serious threat to children and to the societies in which they live.”
“most fathers and mothers possess sex-specific talents related to parenting, and societies should organize parenting and work roles to take advantage of the way in which these talents tend to be distributed in sex-specific ways.”
These differences are not the result of gender roles or sex stereotypes. They are a matter of what comes naturally to moms and dads, what moms a...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
“The burden of social science evidence supports the idea that gender-differentiated parenting is important for human development and that the contribution of fathers to childrearing is unique and irreplaceable.”
We should disavow the notion that “mommies can make good daddies,” just as we should disavow the popular notion . . . that “daddies can make good mommies.” . . . The two sexes are different to the core, and each is necessary—culturally and biologically—for the optimal development of a human being.13
Fathers tend to be the ones who engage in what sociologists call “rough and tumble play”—teaching their boys that it’s all right to put people in headlocks but not to bite, pull hair, or gouge eyes. Fathers help their boys channel their distinctively masculine tendencies into productive activities. When this doesn’t happen, social costs run high.
For boys, the link between crime and fatherlessness is very clear.
As importantly, boys also learn to control their own aggressive instincts when they see a man they respect and love—their father—handling frustration, conflict, and difficulty without resorting to violence.
By contrast, boys who do not regularly experience the love, discipline, and modeling
of a good father are more likely to engage in what is called “compensatory masculinity,” where they reject and denigrate all that is feminine and instead seek to prove their masculinit...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Studies of crime indicate that one of the strongest predictors of crime is fatherless families.
Another review of the literature on delinquency and crime found that criminals come from broken homes at a disproportionate rate: 70 percent of juveniles in state reform schools, 72 percent of adolescent murderers, and 60 percent of rapists grew up in fatherless homes.
As a result, dads are more likely to police whom their daughter is dating. A married father and mother are models of a good male-female relationship for their daughter.
The affection that fathers bestow on their daughters makes those daughters less likely to seek attention from young men and to get involved sexually with members of the opposite sex. Fathers also protect their daughters from premarital sexual activity by setting clear disciplinary limits for their daughters, monitoring their whereabouts, and by signaling to young men that sexual activity will not be tolerated.
. [F]athers send a biological signal through their pheromones—special aromatic chemical compounds released from men’s and women’s bodies—that slows the sexual development of their daughters; this, in turn, makes daughters less interested in sexual activity and less likely to be seen as sexual objects.
One study found that about 35 percent of girls in the United States whose fathers left before age 6 became pregnant as teenagers, that 10 percent of girls in the United States whose fathers left them between the ages of 6 and 18 became pregnant as teenagers, and that only 5 percent of girls whose fathers stayed with them throughout childhood became pregnant.18
Studies that control for other factors, including poverty and even genetics, suggest that children reared in intact homes do best in measurements of educational achievement, emotional health, familial and sexual development, and delinquency and incarceration.
[I]t is not simply the presence of two parents . . . but the presence of two biological parents that seems to support children’s development [emphasis in original]. . .
. [R]esearch clearly demonstrates that family structure matters for children, and the family structure that helps children the most is a family headed by two biological parents in a low-conflict marriage. Children in single-parent families, children born to unmarried mothers, and children in stepfamilies or cohabiting relationships face higher risks of poor outcomes. . . . There is thus value for children in promoting strong, stable marriages between biological parents.
“The advantage of marriage appears to exist primarily when the child is the biological offspring of both parents.”
We know the statistics—that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and twenty times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from home, or become teenage parents themselves. And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it.
“I was raised by a heroic single mom. . . . But I sure wish I had had a father who was not only present, but involved. Didn’t know my dad. And so my whole life, I’ve tried to be for Michelle and my girls what my father was not for my mother and me. I want to break that cycle.”
Marriage benefits everyone because separating childbearing and childrearing from marriage burdens innocent bystanders—not just children, but the whole community.
When parents are unable to care for their children, someone has to step in, and that “someone” is often the state. By encouraging the marriage norms of monogamy, sexual exclusivity, and permanence, the state strengthens civil society and reduces its own role.
“The core message . . . is that the wealth of nations depends in no small part on the health of the family.”
“play an underappreciated and important role in fostering long-term economic growth, the viability of the welfare state, the size and quality of the workforce, and the health of large sectors of the modern economy.”26
“Being raised in a married family reduce[s] a child’s probability of living in poverty by about 82 percent,”
Marriage protects children from poverty. It increases the likelihood that they will enjoy social mobility. It steers them away from crime and relieves the state of having to pick up the pieces of their families. If you care about social justice or limited government, if you care about the poor or about freedom, you should care about a strong marriage culture. Civil recognition and support of the marriage union of a man and a woman is the most effective and least intrusive way to pursue freedom and prosperity.
First, as a policy matter, the state is in the business of recognizing marriage not because every marriage will produce a child but because every child has a mother and a father.
Public policy must consider the big picture, not individual cases. It is the procreative nature of marriage rather than the actual procreative results of individual marriages that explains government policy in this area.
Second, as a practical matter, many couples who think they are infertile end up conceiving or adopting children. Many who say they never want children change their minds. It’s important to keep these men and women united with each other.
Third, as a philosophical matter, an infertile marriage is fully a marriage. A marriage is a comprehensive union marked by one-flesh union—the coordination of the spouses’ two bodies toward the single biological end of reproduction. That coordination—and thus the one-flesh union—takes place whether or not it achieves its biological end in the fertilization of an egg by a sperm some hours later. The union, like the act that seals it, is still oriented toward family life. This explains why in common, civil, and canon law, infertility has never nullified a marriage.
Impotence, by contrast—which prevents a couple from consummating their union in the one-flesh marital act—has been grounds for declaring that a marriage was never completed.
Interesting thought: requires more research and thought.
Fourth, as a pedagogical matter, recognizing marriages in spite of infertility teaches that marriage is a comprehensive union, not ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
By contrast, redefining marriage to include same-sex relationships will teach that marriage (gay or straight) is an instrument for gratifying the emotions of adults. The stability that guarantees children a mom and a dad is not a component of such a union.
In sum, then, public policy is about the rule not the exception, marital norms benefit society even when lived out by infertile couples, infertile marriages are still marriages, and state recognition of infertile marriages has the benefit of reinforcing the truth about marriage without any disadvantages.
“[T]he marriage laws at issue here involve no government intrusion. They create no crime and impose no punishment. Same-sex couples remain free to
live together, to engage in intimate conduct, and to raise their families as they see fit.”
In the last chapter I argued that marriage is a comprehensive—permanent and exclusive—union of sexually complementary spouses who engage in a comprehensive act that is inherently ordered toward a comprehensive good: the procreation and rearing of new human life.
“Every definition that I looked up, prior to about a dozen years ago, defined marriage as unity between a man and a woman as husband and wife.” So, he continued, “you’re not seeking to join the institution, you’re seeking to change what the institution is. The fundamental core of the institution is the opposite-sex relationship and you want to introduce into it a same-sex relationship.”
It’s a no-brainer that [same-sex couples] should have the right to marry, but I also think equally that it’s a no-brainer that the institution of marriage should not exist.
Fighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we are going to do with marriage when we get there—because we lie that the institution of marriage is not going to change, and that is a lie.
The institution of marriage is going to change, and it should change. And again, I don’t think it should exist. And I don’t like taking part in creating fictions about my life. That’s sort of not what I had in mind when I came out thirty years ago.
The needs and rights of children will be subordinated to the desires of adults. The marital norms of monogamy, exclusivity, and permanence will be weakened. Unborn children will be put at even more risk than they already are. And religious liberty—Americans’ “first freedom”—will be threatened.
You could receive a divorce under certain rather strict conditions—the “three As”: abuse, abandonment, and adultery.
Some scholars refer to it as unilateral no-fault divorce because the consent of both parties is not required. There’s nothing like this for other contracts.
How much domestic stability do we expect when a man is under a more serious legal obligation to his plumber than to his wife?
As it became not only legally much easier to leave one’s spouse but also psychologically and socially easier, the percentage of children growing up with just one parent skyrocketed.
Today, 40 percent of all births in America are out of wedlock; the rate is 50 percent among Hispanics and 70 percent among blacks.
