BBC news using the phrase "broken home"

I'm 55, and I have seen a lot of marriage break ups in my time. I can categorically state that every single time, it was the husband at fault.

Reasons for the marriages failing were predominantly :

Cheating
Gambling
Going AWOL on drink/drug binges
Not pulling their weight at home
Not contributing financially
Violence

ALL perpetrated by the men who just couldn't get their shit together. Meanwhile, the women were single handedly raising the children, earning a wage, keeping the house running, doing all of the mental load, and unsurprisingly, didn't even have the time to think about cheating, gambling etc.

These women are heroes to me.

And yet, we have posters on here, who have never experienced being with a fuck-wit, who like to pontificate from their Ivory tower, about how all of these women must have somehow brought this on themselves, for making poor choices. So, even in the scenarios above, the women are to blame, not the men.

I hope these posters aren't raising sons, and I hope that if their DH does someday fall short, that they reflect on the bullshit they spouted on here at innocent women, who are just trying to do their best by their children, when faced with unthinkable circumstances.

None of us walked down the ailse thinking that our groom was going to monumentally fail us. But many of them did. It's what we do about that that makes us. I am proud that I left my cheating and violent husband. I deserved more. We all do.

A marriage that ended in divorce is a failed marriage. That doesn't mean the decision to end it was a bad decision. In many cases, it's the best decision.

It's simply not comparable to moving to a new job or a new house.

You don't take a vow to stay with your employer or stay in your first home till death parts you. When you get married, it's "finding the one" so for it to come to an end is sad. It wasn't meant to end.

Most people don't go around saying "failed marriage", but we all know what it means. It shouldn't be taken personally.

This doesn't mean one has a negative view of life IMO.

Just yesterday one of my teenager's friends saw fit to take the piss out of him because he's from a single parent family. These attitudes don't happen in a vacuum.

It’s incredibly depressing. I became a single parent 47 years ago when this kind of attitude was prevalent, I did hope we might have moved on by now.

Oh the last one always makes me laugh as if the small amount of benefits and child maintenance he refuses to pay makes up for not being able to work a full-time job because your stuck doing all the childcare after he's fucked off or decided to only have the children when convenient for him (random times) even a minimum wage job would pay infinitely more than most of these dead beats "maintenance" 😂

Men with nothing paranoid about gold diggers. Many such cases haha

I’ve seen some of the most vile vitriol towards us single parents on Mumsnet. The worst ones were:

”Single parents have made their bed, they need to lie in it…” (Said by a poster who just the previous evening had been joining in with the encouragement of a mother to leave her abusive DH, reassuring her she could manage on her own, etc).

”Single parents all have social workers for a reason” Since when do we all have social workers? This is utter, utter BS! I’ve been a widowed mother for years & years. Never had any contact with any social worker in any capacity.

“They’re a drain on society. Most of them have tricked a poor bloke into getting pregnant so they can get benefits”

Utterly deplorable behaviour from grown women.

I find the debate around this interesting I've seen a lot of these "manosphere" influencers talking about single mothers raising criminals etc etc. And they have the statistics. And talk as if a father being there would 100% prevent a child becoming a future criminal. Lol.

Correlation doesn't always mean causation though and one parent is going to have a much harder time financially than two parents and more likely to live in a cheaper neighborhood where there's more bad influences on the kid. Peer pressure has a big effect. That's just one example though I could probably think of others but my point is I don't believe the reason for the statistics is necessarily just because the kid has one parent.
I mean think about when there's a war and the men go away for years at a time, ive never seen anyone claim that that caused all the kids to become criminals

Oh, she did. This poster has a lot of form 🙄.

It sounds like you are being overly sensitive, has it touched a nerve?
Many homes are broken and don't give the children therein the best start in life.

Nice to know that as a widow, people are referring to my child’s circumstances as a “broken home” ffs

Smug superiority tends to end very badly in my experience, battered by their own self imposed judgment these pp usually struggle the most when their ‘perfect’ well chosen dh turns out to be a lazy cheat!!

This isn’t about YOU though. Plenty of us single parents do not behave like your parents!

It refers to the original family unit being broken. That's undeniable.

In some cases, the family unit was never together so that's not a broken home/unit.

It's as negative as saying "failed marriage", but that's unlikely to change.

I don't think it will prevent people leaving a bad relationship. What prevents them leaving can be, lack of self esteem, financial reasons, fear of not seeing their kids everyday, fear of change and other reasons.

People stay in bad relationships, even without kids, so the fear of a broken home isn't what kept them there.

I think "separated family" would be a better term, but I don't see broken home becoming obsolete to describe kids from divorced or separated parents any time soon.

I often think that people who protest stuff like this strongly are the real vulnerable ones. Like, you have your position- everyone whose relationship has broken up is a "ninny" who has made terrible choices. So, if you discovered tomorrow that your DH has been cheating on you for years/ has been abusive to your DC or similar, what would you do? You couldn't leave, because that would mean you were a stupid ninny who couldn't pick a good man. So you stay, plaster on a smile, ignore your and your DC's distress...

It's not a mindset that you see very much any more- most of us have thankfully moved on- but I think we can all point to examples in previous generations where appalling abuse and mistreatment has been endured for decades because of the importance of maintaining the facade of a happy two parent family.

Waiting for the smug "there are always signs", as if women ruin their own lives by having children with men who abuse them for a laugh.

Strangely enough men don’t tend to come with warning stickers on their heads saying serial adulterer or violent when stressed!

I'm sorry, did you just refer to the victims of domestic abuse as "ninnies"?

Come on up and collect your award for choosing a partner who didn't decide to start treating you like shit when you got pregnant. Congratulations. You know nothing.

Do you know what's interesting as well? My parents stayed together, but hated each other. Every weekend was filled with drink, fights and threats of violence. Is that a broken home? Apparently not, but I'm 55 now and have never forgotten it.

(Dad's fault, not my Mum's who in fairness was always trying to calm him down)

I'm surprised by the responses. "Broken home" is a way of referring specially to a family where the parents are divorced, and it's a problematic term because it implies that a two parent household is a whole home, and a single parent household is a broken home. This is a problem because it stigmatises divorce while obscuring problems that happen within a family where parents are married to each other.

Whether the family of the man on question is in other ways "broken" is neither here not there. The term broken home refers to the state of being the child of separated parents.

People kid themselves that kids are resilient and all that bullshit, to justify the parents’ poor choices

So, can I ask you : when I found out that my husband had been sleeping with 10+ other women, had tried to sleep with my Mum and Sister, had in fact slept with my best friend, AND was violent to me when challenged - did I make a poor choice to leave him? I deliberated for 4 years. Told him I'd stay if he stopped doing these things, but he carried on. How is any of that my fault or a poor choice of mine? Serious question.

And in case it's relevant, he wasn't like this before we married (so no warning) and we had sex all the time (so it wasn't a case of him getting none at home).

Feel free to link to these studies.

He does come from a broken home, as his parents got divorced.

Royalty are not excluded.

The better term would be "separated home"

I totally agree with you. My dh is from a home where his parents split up when he was a child & they both went on to have several more relationships & children.

They're CONVINCED that these choices have not negatively impacted their original children. The children would say otherwise & the choices the children have made in relationships also plays this out. All have failed marriages / relationships & children with more than one partner & none of them are in relationships with the other parent of their children.

Apart from dh. We're married a long time & he's worked very hard, including therapy at various times to help him navigate things that got thrown up as our dc grew up. He was worried about being able to maintain a marriage & raise a child in a two parent house - it was his goal & his fear. He's really really tackled it head on & our dc has had a fantastic father as a result.

My mil is willfully oblivious. She 100% pursued her own happiness over that of her children. I don't dislike her. She's a kind hearted person in her own way but in lots of ways she was not a good mother.

All of her 6 children have paid a price for her choices. She cannot/ will not see that.

Agreed. He comes across as a bit of a dick tbh