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I think Laces makes a very good point there. We can apply metrics - say, the average income over a ten-year period, the level of education, the likelihood of being in counselling, for example - but to tie those in to the exact effects of parenting is going to be very tricky. For example, if I have an absent father, then maybe as a child I overachieve, aiming for approval, and this gets me into and through a good college, into a good job, etc. But then at some point my resentment and distrust of authority figures emerges, and affects my life adversely. It's a tricky one....
Also, as SMatthew mentions, I'm not sure it's productive to locate specific acts of parenting with the different genders. Certainly there are traditional roles for parents, but these are sufficiently inadequate to describe the modern family that they might need a bit of work. For example, they are predicated on the assumption that families "normally" have two parents, a father who works and provides and a mother who stays at home and nurtures. That seesm to describe a comparatively small (i.e. comparative to, say, thirty years ago, although probably still statistically the majority(?)). But it clearly *doesn't* describe an awful lot of families. so, to what extent are the roles of father and mother the consequence of the strengths man and woman might be supposed to bring to the table, and how much are they directed by who is around, or by codes of behaviour that said that women could not work or own property once they were married, so had little to do except raise children?
The one-parent family is a pretty good place to start with this question. Is it the case that in a single-parent family, be that parent male or female, the traditional roles of the other parent are simply *missing*, or is there some process where the different areas of parenting are pulled together and mised together? I generally suspect that the problems facing a lot of single-parent families, and the children of many single-parent families, are not a result so much of a missing element but of the greater difficulty of producing both money and attention for the child in the required amounts. There's some interesting stuff in this thread about how single or dual parenthood might affect a child.
Oh, and on the question in the abstract - Why are men not considered to be as capable of bringing up children on their own as women? - this raises an interesting set of questions. Mothers are immediately associated with nurturing, caring, rearing - in the thread linked to above, the thesis was advanced that women rarely reached the top levels in business becasue their time was taken up with pregnancy so much - and so we are "keyed" to see the woman-child pair as natural; it's the "About a Boy" thing where being a single father is a great way to meet chicks, because you live in a culturally female world of childrearing.
However, I seem to recall that the reason most children of divorce end up with their mothers is that their fathers do not want them. In the UK, IIRC, in cases where fathers challenge for custody, they get it more often than not. Does that suggest that fathers are actually better at being both father and mother than mothers, but have more important things to do as a rule? |
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