Absolutely! It’s almost as if they’re forcing the narrative to prove their point that all fathers are useless, deadbeat horrors. Any examples of decent fathers or of couples that manage to make co-parenting work are rubbished and disbelieved.
According to @99bottlesofkombucha there’s a whole continent of mothers who know better than the rest of us. Perhaps we should come up with a collective noun for a group of people who live in a world of absolute certainty; who know that they are better than everyone else and that they also know that the rest of the world is out to get them. Perhaps ‘Americans’ will work as a holding term.
The absolute certainty that because they’ve experienced a bad apple and maybe know of a few others means that this means that half the population are shits is bizarre, sad and a little worrying.
I can’t stand the rubbishing of fathers, it’s a terrible message we’re giving our children. And too the idea that going from parenting as a couple to parenting alone barely impacts most women and yet sends men into free fall, isn’t only attacking fathers, but it’s rubbishing the reality of the extraordinary things ALL single parents do.
I’m the child of divorced parents who both did incredible jobs in difficult circumstances (and, as it happens, who divorced not because my father was a dreadful shit who did nothing around the house and had affairs at every opportunity, but because my mother - who I admit still managed to do an extraordinary job of parenting - was a difficult person with huge issues that eventually broke up three marriages and ended up by pushing away everyone she knew, bar me, though she did her best to). My father was a wonderful Dad. No saint, as flawed as all of us and he didn’t do everything perfectly, but a wonderful Dad. Between him, my mother, my grandparents (yes… even the grandfathers!!!) they created a wonderful thing out of difficult circumstances. For all their issues they shielded me from the worst and gave me a very happy childhood.
I know many, many, single parents (either wholly alone or divorced and now splitting time). Absolutely, there are examples of some terrible or absent parents in there, but mostly they are just people doing their best under difficult circumstances. And some wonderful fathers in there too.
I know, for instance, an extraordinary father who lost his wife, and who’s child lost their mother, two days after birth. Through grief and the shock of loss and of becoming a parent, he has (with some brilliant family support- though both families were based over seas) managed somehow to become a father to a wonderful child. He has navigated his loss and his child’s and learnt to be father (and mother) under tragic circumstances. Yet, according to the certainty of a certain group on here, for all that, because he’s a father, he’s a feckless arsehole.
I also have known two stay at home mothers who became single parents, one through divorce and one through the death of her husband. The window had a wonderful hands on dad as a partner, the one who divorced her husband had married a pratt. Both had done the majority of childcare. Both found the adjustment to single parent life massive. They managed extraordinarily. But to suggest that’s it’s anything other than a huge change belittles what they managed. Going from a two parent household to 100% parenting is a massive thing. No breaks, no one to talk to, childcare 24/7. I think they’re brilliant and I have no idea how they do it.