that 50-50 res is AWFUL for kids & mothers and women should fight back?

[rageagainstthe50res]

OK, hands up, i name-changed, because this is so emotionally charged and I don't want to be alienated from my usual threads.

BUT, AIBU to think that actually 50-50 parenting is fucking awful for kids? I mean, can you imagine living your life between two houses? Just how disorientating and unsettling it would be?

And AIBU to think that women have given away too many of their own rights in the name of 'fathers' rights?' I LOVE my father, and my DS loves hers, even though we're not together but in 99% of all parenting cases I know it is the woman who does the laundry, the packed lunches, the kiss it betters, the costumes for the nativity.

We don't have gender equality in this country - salary discrepancies, violence against women, flagrant misogyny in the media etc. Yet the few rights we do hold - that we should be the primary parent because we grow our children inside us and feed them from our own bodies, we now glibly throw away to 'fathers'. I AM NOT SAYING FATHERS SHOULD BE DENIED ACCESS TO THEIR CHILDREN. But I do think 50-50 is too much. And you're telling me that women don't HATE having their kids only 50% of the time? I'm sure most of them are absolutely miserable. A weekend off, great, but 50-50 just sounds heinous.
REally, I'm not being an arse, I'm just massively curious.

Piscesmoon it sounds unfair but if the child is used to being at home with one parent all day then continuity should prevail.

I had to fight for custody of my dd, once she was past the breastfeeding age. I never once thought that I was entitled to have her living with me because I was a woman but because she was used to living with me and I could provide full time care at home. I would have been happy to split the care if he was interested.

I can tell you one thing that is AWFUL (to use the OP's excited style) for children, and that's what happened to me. It's AWFUL for your father to go to work one morning as normal, sneek back in his lunch hour to empty his wardrobe and leave a note for your mother, and never come back. It's AWFUL when the children don't see him for six months, and by the time they do they're so hurt and upset they don't want to see him anyway. And then for their relationship to break down so completely that said children haven't seen their father for 15 years.

That's what happened when my father left my mother. If me and DH ever get divorced (God forbid) I will insist on 50/50 residency. My son needs his father.

bratnav, i think you were unsisterly towards your dsd's mum.
you really would hand over your precious daughters to be brought up by another woman for HALF of their childhoods? really and truly ?
i think that if your dsd goes onto have children herself, she will probably see what hell her mother had to go through.
just my opinion ((whistles casually, waits for the vitriol))

Amazing. Do you all think men and woman are exactly the same? Have you not noticed all the AIBU threads regarding how one partner (always female) seems to get stuck doing all teh cooking, cleaning, childcare, while the other partner (always male) seems to have a tendency to go to strip clubs, get pissed, take off on skiing trips?

You really think that saying men and women are different is stupid, or insulting?

Or are you just trolling out of boredom?

Women are - as a general rule - more nurtuting than men. And children - as a general rule - tend to turn to their mothers when they are upset.

If you don't understand the phrase 'general rule' perhaps you could look it up.

lindsaygii-'and all young turn to their mother/aunt/grandmother group for care when they are hungry/upset/lonely.

That's the reason. The children prefer it. The children. THE CHILDREN'

Do you have any factual evidence of this?

pmsl at trolling put of boredom.

Of course there are threads moaning about men, this is a site full of women. People also don't post about their men when they are great, although it has happened recently.

My ex husband was for a while a crap father and a prize twat, not because he was a man but because he is a prize twat.

I know lots of nurturing men, I also know lots of nurturing women.

Both my ex husband ( once he stopped being a twat) and my dp are actually far better nurturing parents than me and are better at housework. I find my tits get in the way when I am dusting. Damn biology.

Lindsay just because people disgaree with you it does not mean they are trolling.

This is a really weird thread given how many mothers here post on "Stately Homes" and "Narcissistic" threads about their less than wonderful mums.
Again I say good parenting is not a preserve of either gender.
But hey Im not a sexist.

hmm.. i jsu think there is something really theoretical about 'oh, men are very bit as good carers for children as women' because it is simply not borne out by reality. There are able men, but taken as a whole, the majority of men are not equals in terms of childcare...

I know many women whose husbands don't put their children to bed, will not feed their kids without asking Mummy how to do it, my own husband once woke me to ask me wht to do about our baby crying....it is obvious to me that most of the women i know are very far from equals in provision of childcare...they are definitely the main carers.

I don't mean to say 'useless' but it sems in the majority (though not all) cases women do provid the majority of care, and obviously in a divorce whatever status qo has previously existed should be recognised.

I was pretty shocked when i was pregnant and realised the father would have equal rights to the baby as me (ridiculous! all you have to do is have sex with someone, an they then have the right to visit yor child..unless you can prove them to be unfit. And no, it is not easy to do his - of the 1 in 10 women who try to have visitation withdrawn from a husband, only 14% are successful - scandalously low given the high rate of domestic violence!)

personally i can't imagine trying to do GCSE's/ Alevels whilst moving between houses twice a week (very disorganised me, would have left books everwhere) ..

there were some kids sent to board at my school as a result of a compromise arrangment - to get them continuity instead of 50-50 they lived in schoool rather than shuffling from home to home. another far from ideal arrangement.

so in answer to OP - YANBU. I'm sure it can work in some cases, but it doesn't sound like an easy arrangment even considered purely in terms of the logistics and level of disruption for the child.

hi im a single parent and a man and i agree women in general do nurture more than men and as i remember it my mum did more than i do, and i really have to work at it.

I think that the issue we should be concentrating on is that one third of children lose contact completely with their father after their parents split. And barring domestic violence/abuse I think men should be forced to have contact to prevent that happening. I would happily have shuffled between houses every night if I thought my father had given a shit.

I get so sick of women thinking they are the superior parent, it takes two people to make a baby and each should have equal rights.

Just because the woman gives birth does not mean she is the most important person in that child's life.

I think you're reading too much into bratnav's first post, Dittany. Her DSD appears to have 2 families (her family with her mother and her new DP, and her family with her father, Bratnav and their children) which both function well. Why shouldn't her step mother be involved in her care? I don't see how having a healthy relationship with her father and step mother is "coming between that bond between child and her mother".

I have posted a couple of times on this thread about what this actually feels like for a child, but no one seems very interested. I wonder why.

"There was someone on here recently whose ex was wanting exactly that arrangement even though the childcare would be undertaken by a nanny."

My DS spends at least 60% of his waking hours with a childminder. Perhaps that means he should be compulsorily adopted...

OP - no vitirol from me I can assure you, ask Lindsaygii, she has met me, I am just not that kind of woman.

Unsisterly? I am not sure what you mean by this? I could tell you about many of the 'unsisterly' things she has done to me, but maybe just the one will do. Shoiuting at me in the playground of the school that all our DDs attend that 'my DDs should just fuck off and leave DSD alone as they are both little shits', that sort of unsisterly?

I am always very respectful of her, both as another woman and DSDs Mum, and yes, I trust my exH to pick a suitable partner who will care for the DDs when he has them, he chose well before, why shouldn't he again?

dittany, her Mums works FT so if she was not with me she would be in childcare, not with her Mum

I think you should read bratnav's post above yours, Dittany. Mother doesn't sound much like the Partridge family to me.

Your experience was that you saw your father twice a week. I'm sure that was disruptive and you would have liked, I'm sure, for your parents never to have split in the first place. What would, I can assure you, have been a lot more disruptive, would have been for you to never see your father for six months when you were 12 years old, then see him 5 times in the next three years and then never see him again.

bratnav's dsd's mum doesn't have any other children, georgimama. so she has a whole week of a silent house and an empty child's bedroom.
i think her dad and dsm could have sat down dsd and said: we love it when you come here too, but your mummy loves you very much and she would miss you terribly.

i would never encourage my dp to take his xp to court o increase custody of their daughter, especially when the arrangement in place (every other wed - sun, wasn't it?) seems perfectly fine. I just couldn't do it to another woman. This wasn't the same situation as yours, Georgimama. The father was still in teh child's life. All that has been done now is that the mother is clearly aggrieved.
As I say, this dsd will probably go on to have kids herself adn realise how awful it was for her biological mother.

The child isn't there to stop her feeling lonely. The child has needs and she needs both of her parents. And the mother is at work, from what Bratnav says, not sobbing into her child's pillow.

I hated it as a child. Trying to organize friends, homework, uniform, all seemed horribly complicated. But, my parents lived quite a distance from each other. I ended up living with my father as it was infinitely more stable.

if I had to hand over either of mine for a week to anyone, let alone ex, (whom they do not even KNOW) i truly think I would die of grief.

"bratnav's dsd's mum doesn't have any other children, georgimama. so she has a whole week of a silent house and an empty child's bedroom.
i think her dad and dsm could have sat down dsd and said: we love it when you come here too, but your mummy loves you very much and she would miss you terribly. "

Well then we're getting back to the rights of the parent being more important than the rights of the child - aren't we?

Why is the mother's empty bedroom more important than the child's right to a relationship with her father and step siblings?