Cold while that's true where there's clear red flags, how do you explain mine and the other pp who's husband/partner changed for the worse AFTER the child was born?
And as I think I said in previous post I've seen this happen to a few others and read of a few cases on here.
I agree it's more rare and most of the time there are clear red flags that either the mother/prospective mother ignores or they employ wishful thinking that the man will suddenly and miraculously mature into a thoughtful, caring and engaged person as soon as baby born!
It's not only on threads where the children are already here where myself and others query what the poster was thinking in having a child/children with someone who THEY themselves describe as always being lazy, thoughtless, selfish etc where we get flamed for "victim blaming"
Even on threads where posters are bemoaning a lack of proposal, are saying they're wanting to ttc but he's not keen and again they're already indicating that he's lazy/thoughtless etc and myself and others say "you'd be mad to tie yourself to this guy" we get flamed for being too quick to jump in with ltb, too pessimistic and critical.
I can't of course speak for other posters, but certainly for myself my aim in saying to these posters isn't some sadistic delight in splitting a couple up but because I am a single mum with a deadbeat ex I don't want others having to go through that unnecessarily.
Also as a generality (and there's other posters who seem to have similar views to me on this) I have also very much observed that men below a certain age (I'd say 50) are pretty poorly behaved in terms of being partners/husbands these days.
Another frequent post - which is kind of the precursor of the "deadbeat dad" posts - is the "lazy husband/partner who expects me to do all the housework and childcare and mental load AND work full time" ones where a common response is something like "send him back to the 1950's"
What seems not to be understood/has been forgotten is that back when households/marriages were run on old fashioned, sexist models of division of labour the point was it WAS divided.
My father, uncles and grandfathers were/are "traditional" types BUT while that did/does mean their families/marriages tend/tended to run with Labour divided along sex based lines they didn't do NOTHING!!
Men now seem to want (and too often get!) the best of both worlds, a wife/partner that works full time and contributes financially but who still does everything that would have traditionally fallen under a wife's purview if they were sahm. But also even when the sahm was a more common occurrence they didn't come home from work and do absolutely nothing at all!
In older generations the wives still didn't do EVERYTHING, generally the men did much if not all of the household admin particularly legal and financial admin, excepting matters particularly relating to school/children.
They did the "heavy" household jobs, car, house and garden maintenance, decorating and so on (And these were more often needing done then, modern homes often don't require much)
There's also an incorrect perception that men of older generations had no input in child rearing at all, whereas certainly my experience - and from talking to friends it's the same in their families too - is that wasn't the case.
They perhaps didn't do so much night wakings and baby care but they certainly were involved with older children, teaching them swimming, cycling, practical household skills, about nature, helping with homework...
Why are we (as a society) letting men be so bloody lazy?!
And it starts with how they're raised
I wonder if partly it's to do with the first "wave" of single mums sons grew up obviously seeing their mums do everything (because they had to there wasn't anyone else) and thinking they don't need to women are capable of doing it all.
But yes I've also observed far too many parents/mums who unfortunately spoil sons but expect daughters to be trained to be independent and capable.
I've seen it with family and friends and I've queried it where possible/very obviously odd expectations were applied in households where there were both female and male children being raised and the girls expected to "help" whereas the boys weren't expected to - I've heard excuses like
"oh no he's rubbish at X it's easier if I/daughter does it" - well he's not going to improve without practice is he?!
"He needs to focus on schoolwork" - and the dd doesn't?!
"He'll only moan" - then discipline him and don't stand for it!
"By the time I've nagged him into doing it I could have done it" - again discipline!
"He's too busy with his hobby" - a hobby is what you do when you have spare time not instead of your responsibilities (how many posts are there about husbands spending too much time on hobbies?!) he needs to learn responsibilities first then hobby, plus why shouldn't dd have same amount of free time?
It HAS to be that boys are raised to be decent MEN as an active decision. Seems to me too many parents think this will happen without them doing anything. And it applies to much worse behaviour than laziness too!