Absent fathers to be made into scape goats

[ivykaty44]

absent fathers

as a single mother who has lived without maintenence for periods of time and at times struggled to make ends meet I still think it is awful to suggest making a group of people stigmatised.

there are good NoneResidentParents and there are useless NRP, it isn't just absent fathers but sometimes absent mothers. What sort of country do we live in thuogh where we would want to stigmatise a whole group of people.

Better to keep the CSA free and make it work rather than the clerical mess it is at the moment.

mouseface you talk a lot of sense. But people will ignore your post because they don't want to believe that women like this exist. Sticking with the stereotypes is so much easier apparently

"which is why on a divorce you should be paid the valueo f the services you provide" - and what if the 'services you provide' are crap? Is there a refund? What a load of nonsense

allnew - I know

Maybe I shouldn't have bothered as I seem to have arrived in the middle of a spat!

Daft old Mouse.

'services you provide'????????????

Of course we're not going to deny it exists. There was a similarly themed thread in AIBU about 50/50 childcare post-separation. I brought an example of a man fighting to see his children myself. Taking a dogmatic approach and insisting everything falls into an either/or category helps no one.

However, since it is impossible to cover all variants of all sorts of lifestyles when discussing society, we have to go with statistical trends and patterns. And the pattern is that situation like Mouse's poor step-father are unusual in comparison to situations where absent fathers abscond and pay no money.

If it were the case that most women were denying good men contact with their children, the system would have been changed long before now to ensure that couldn't happen.

Right so just because most women don't do it, let's give those that do a free pass and stigmatise absent fathers instead. Right, very intelligent approach indeed

Personally I think all this time and attention and effort would be better spent educating young people on the risks of procreating with people you simply don't know very well

LOL it is us who have been challenging stereotypes all the way through this thread and pointing at actual figures rather than popular images.

I disagree that the person should only get #45K a year Xenia. It should be a percentage of the other person's income,b ecause the principle that is enshrined in Canadian practice, that the child shouldn't have a massive disparity of opportunities in his or her two homes, is a good and healthy one. It cannot be good for a child to have a wild disparity of income between his or her parents - a little bit is fine, children can deal with a bit of difference between homes - but wildly different - dunno, not sure if that's good for them.

Er, where did I say that exactly?

It's about priorities. If you have a situation where 60% of children from separated families are not receiving maintenance from their other parent it makes sense to tackle that before you tackle the 20% (or whatever it is) of children who are being wrongly deprived of seeing a decent parent. To do the former benefits 60%. To tackle the latter helps only 20%. We want to do both, yes, but what we do first has to have the most benefit to the most people.

allnewtaketwo, sunshine isn't saying that at all.

Where have you read that?

"pointing at actual figures" - but people are not numbers. Let's just treat people as individuals according to their behaviour. I don't see what purpose it services to say "well the statistics show that ...therefore it's ok to say whatever we like about a whole bunch of people"

allnewtaketwo, lots of couples live together for years before they have children.

They still get divorced. It's not just poeple who have jumped into bed and reproduced after two minutes acquaintance. That's just another lazy stereotype.

I'm not really understanding your argument allnew.

Are you saying that people are saying whatever they want about non resident parents in general or non resident parents who don't pay maintenance?

"well the statistics show that ...therefore it's ok to say whatever we like about a whole bunch of people"

Where has anyone said that?

educating people on the risks of procreating with people you simply don't know very well

Yes well. I felt 6 years with my XP was knowing him well enough. Unfortunately, he chose not to display this behaviour until I was already pregnant. It was a bit late by then. But if it makes you feel better to blame me for his becoming abusive and abdicating his responsibilities once we had children you go ahead.

I'm not blaming anyone - but clearly education would serve a better purpose than a PM stigmatising a whole group of people, and then another whole group of people bitching on an internet forum

sunshine said "we have to go with statistical trends and patterns"

Why do we? For what purpose?

Funnily enough my xp started to misbehave only when I became pregnant as well.

It's to do with the fact that we have structured society so that pregnancy and childbirth make women vulnerable instead of powerful (we make it more difficult for them to earn their living, we stigmatise mothers who live without men, etc.); at an instinctive, gut level, men know this and that is why the bad ones will only start misbehaving, when women become pregnant. It is no coincidence that the first instance of physical violence by a man against his female partner, will happen either during pregnancy or within the first year of the birth of a first child in over 3/4 of cases; before then, a woman can chuck him out; after the birth of a child, she feels (and actually is) much more vulnerable so is more likely to put up with bad behaviour from a man. Men know this. That's why they keep the lid on bad behaviour until the balance of power is irrevocably changed.

We have to go with statistics because they give us the best information we have. Much better than anecdote and our own experience.

Obviously they're not perfect. And there's an argument that if you haven't actually collected data on something, then all you've got to go on is personal experience and anecdote. There's nothing wrong with personal experience and anecdote and it is useful, becuase sometimes it highlights the fact that the more rigorous quantitative methods of finding out things, haven't been examined. But on the whole, stats are useful for giving us broadbrush figures about how things are in general even where they don't hold true for individual cases.

allnew I think you're just spoiling for a fight and being deliberately obtuse, but I will give you the benefit of the doubt and explain it to you.

Why do we have to go with statistical trends and patterns? What else can we go with that can hope to create even a remotely accurate picture? Why does the govt do a census to find about about people? So it can base future planning and services on a realistic projection. They know it's not going to be 100% accurate but it's a whole lot better than basing it on incorrect assumptions and figures grabbed out of thin air.

At no point have I said that just because the figures show 60% of NRPs do not pay that we should therefore say all NRPs are lazy feckless twats. That deliberate twisting of words simply sounds aggressive and lazy in a debate.

Just to go off a mild tangent, but a related one nonetheless, maybe the next Gingerbread campaign could be publicity about the difference between absent parent and non-resident parent (NRP). Nearly every lone parent I have come across, both in RL and online, is aware of the difference, probably because we have to apply them to our daily lives. It seems that a lot of other people are not though.

Excellent point sunshine there are a lot of NRPs around but they do get cast in the same light as absent fuckers parents.

allnew - what would you rather we did?

I always feel like I've won an arguement when people start talking baout in the third person.. either I've won it or I'm dealing with immature passive agressives.

Either way my mother always told me not to bother to enter in to a battle of wits with the unarmed, I should have listened as have wasted a rather a lotof time today doing just that.

Reminds me why I left MN a little while ago.

about me

Oh darling, you so haven't won this round.