Men who are unaware their child isn’t biologically theirs

[K8ate]

Hearing stories and seeing various online statistics, the average percentage of men who are unaware that their child isn’t biologically theirs ranges from 10% upwards.
Surely these figures can’t be accurate?

its possible, ill admit im not even sure if my biological farther knows about me or is aware im his ?

I know that no contraceptive is 100% effective.
I was expressing my surprise that any unplanned pregnancy on MN is nearly always due to the pill not working or a condom breaking.

Have you not reached adulthood without understanding written English?

Assuming that women avoiding pregnancy aren't sabotaging their own contraceptives, which they wouldn't do because that's counterproductive, and given the high cumulative failure rates over a woman's reproductive life, why are you surprised?

Condoms, with typical use failure rate of 20% per year, have a 67% failure rate over five years, meaning that two-thirds of women using only condoms for five years will have become pregnant at least once when the five years is up.

You might think that I don't understand written English, but I did make it to adulthood with a basic understanding of probability theory.

This is why you are only truly jewish if your mother is Jewish. It’s hard to fake a mother much easier to lie about who a child’s father is

Thank you for the link. What an interesting programme.

This was very common years ago. I also know of someone now aged late 60s who grew up believing her actual biological mother was her sister and the woman she grew up calling mum was actually her grandmother. Also to hide a secret teenage pregnancy.

Yes and apparently a women is much more likely to get pregnant by her new lover than by her husband. I remember a programme on TV talking about this years ago.

I had the exact experience over 35 years ago, "they only have my word he's the father."

Male infertility is very rarely talked about. So even if they ended up having other children who were biologically his, they both decided that child is theirs because legally they made sure the child is theirs.

My mum wasn’t her ‘dads’ daughter. My daughter did one of them dna things, and it turns out she’s a bit over 12% Latvian. My nanna married this Latvian fella when I was about 5, long after my ‘grandad’ had died. I don’t know where she’d been hiding him until then though 🤔

If it’s not biologically his thought that’s massively unhelpful to tell a child he’s their bio Dad especially as in this case it denies and erases the child’s heritage. The kid used to light up when around my friend (that lived next door to the family) who was also mixed race. She was so excited to see someone else with her hair. And coming to think of it they also didn’t take care of her hair, probably in denial her hair was Afro 😏

Not sure if the poster answered themselves but i was just throwing my two cents in as to what they may have meant. But IMO I don’t think anyone is saying a condom is ever an airtight solution for anything tbh, there’s always exceptions but it would help a lot, if it’s used where possible. Have to say all the men I’ve been involved with have been very responsible about protection. If a man that wasn’t my DH told me it’s either
condom-less sex or he’ll leave I’d tell him to jog on! 😮‍💨😆

More generally way too many men and women are getting caught out with unplanned pregnancies and STDs from having unprotected sex in casual relationships & one night stands and it’s ridiculous on both parts.

yes the father was much more decent in that situation. The mum didn’t seem to care about all the chaos she had caused - she was very self absorbed. The kids ended up with a lovely family in care though.

Experts estimate it at around 4% ish. So 1 in 25.

https://isogg.org/wiki/Non-paternity_event

From the perspective of genealogy, you cannot work out what people knew and did not know from the records. DH's grandfather has a father named on his birth certificate who is not biologically his father. His ggrandmother married when she was 7 months pregnant. Her new husband may well have been aware he was not the father of the baby, we just don't know. Some of the older studies have listed illegitimate births where no father is listed at all as NPEs - not the parent expected, which is also flawed.

I think it very much more common than people really have any real notion of.

My exh found out as an adult that his dad was not in fact his biological father. Bio dad had loosely been a part of his for the entirety. Legal and bio dad’s both dead at the point he found out so no closure to be had. It had a very profound impact on him, finding out he had been lied to his entire life.

His legal dad was also not the son of the man who raised him. His mother confessed on her death bed. He never knew, having predeceased her.

That’s just one family. But 2 generations of children being passed off as the children of men who were not in fact their fathers.

We might just be animals, but people are different in that we are thinking animals and we ought to know better.

The good thing about monogamy is that it ensures an equal society- 1 man pairs up with 1 woman, which works out because the gender ratio is roughly 50:50.

If people behave like animals, we don't know what the consequences will be. Clearly, some of these men fathering dozens of children have poor values and are not very intelligent. So will their children also have poor values and low intelligence?

Let's be more than animals and be sensible. I think society and families will work best if people stick to monogamy and fathers are not unknowingly raising other men's children.

I think you misunderstood the post. It isn’t about who is responsible for pregnancy but rather who the father is. That is 100% on the woman to know! If a woman has sex with only one man and falls pregnant then he is 100% the father. If she is sleeping with two men at once then there is a 50/50 chance. 10 men then a 10% chance. The man is in no way in control of how many sexual partners a woman has - irrespective of birth control! Each and every woman should know who she has had sex with!

I had a half brother who turned out to not actually be my brother at all. I think my Dad knew all along and he was against any kind of DNA testing. The marriage with his 1st wife was over but he continued contact with the son who wasn't quite his. The DNA test took place after my Dad had died and confirmed everyone's suspicions. I didn't it change anything though. I still think of him as my brother.

A couple of posters seem to think that we are putting women on non-cheater pedestals by doubting it’s 10%.

Well, no. Because (a) women are not fertile every time they have sex, it changes throughout the month (b) birth control efficacy, especially LARC, prevents a lot of pregnancies (c) whilst not all pregnancies are planned, a woman who is planning a pregnancy is likely to either stop shagging others once she comes off the pill/removes coil or to make an effort to use condoms with lovers.

And the study showing it’s more like 3.7% on average chimes with this instinct that 10% is too high.

Those busting out anecdotes of how their cousin’s cleaner’s son has it happen so it’s not that rare… if you are aware of 1 such situation and say, 19 straightforward situations, then you are also saying 10% is high. You just aren’t focussing on the straightforward ones.

Me too
You just have to watch The Maury show to realise that men are taking care of children who are not their biological children and are unaware of the fact.
I once read the case of a man who found out his three kids weren’t biologically his when he won the American visa lottery.
A requirement of the lottery is that all children of the applicant have to have dna tests in order to ensure that they are biologically related to the applicant.
Poor man found out that his wife had been having an affair for many years and the other man was the father of the children.

I am not convinced by the 10% because the studies showing 10%+ are often based on DNA tests, but don’t exclude groups of people who already know they may not are not the father. So in cases where the woman has been honest and said she doesn’t know and the test is to find out. Not every woman who gets pregnant is in a monogamous relationship. Or they may have split with one person and got in an another relationship quickly but has been honest.

People going for DNA tests often have a reason to have one. So the percentage of people who aren’t the father is going to be higher, before you exclude men who already know they may not be.

Others are based on collecting information on blood groups. Again, they don’t identify and exclude groups who already know they aren’t the biological father. Situations like Babies born to people in relationships via sperm donation, people who have adopted a child but never told them, people who had an affair but told their husband/ partner and the partner decide to stay and raise the child and not tell anyone the child wasn’t his, people who have got in relationships while the woman is least pregnant and decided to name the new man as the father.

The study (linked above), that looks at all the other studies also says they don’t exclude situations where, for example, a couples young teen daughter has a child and they raise it as their own.

I still think the children in these situations should know, but it doesn’t mean the fathers were in the dark.

It doesn’t really bother me if it’s more than 10% or not, but I am always interested in the data behind these sorts of claims and often the data doesn’t support the claim.

I know an elderly lady, whose middle child was not her dh child. She got pregnant from rape. It was a known secret. The more years that pass, less the people discuss it.

They never tested the baby dna, her dh picked her up from the hospital after the attack. I'm not sure the child knows. The dh did end up treating that child different.

I know in countries in war, have a higher number of children born out of wedlock. Women either get raped regularly or sell their bodies out of desperation.

Just because it is safer here, the risk is never 0.

I hate guilty until proven innocent nonsense. I hate the idea of forced dna testing. I used to tell my ex, if you ever asked me for a dna test, you might as well be asking for a divorce. You don't need my permission to do a dna test. If you feel like you need to do it. Hide it from me. It is worse than an affair in my eye. Such a horrible insult.

I once represented a woman whose two children weren't her husbands.
Dad had suspicions so took them off for dna testing and found out they weren't his.
Mum had met someone at uni who was the wrong religion/ race and they couldn't be together.
She left uni and was married to someone of the correct race. But she kept going back to the uni guy because she loved him
But she was pretty vile and blasé about it. Poor kids.

I think the 10% number - which is something we hear a lot in genealogy - is a number pulled out of thin air by someone and which has passed into myth as "truth". As @ShouldhavebeencalledAppollo people doing DNA tests are self-selecting. You do a test with Ancestry or similar because you are curious about your family history or think there's something wrong with parentage somewhere. Similarly the "medical" DNA tests done on babies to prove who the father is - those are not performed on babies where there is no doubt. People don't go on downmarket chat shows for a DNA test if they are certain a child is theirs.

Also as I said upthread when the people are dead and gone you don't know their motivations and what they knew. DH's gg grandfather (on paper) clearly knew the woman he married was 7 months pregnant. Whether he knew the baby was not his is what we don't know.

People who think that 10% is too LOW an estimate - do you really think that 4 or more children in a standard class of 30 are growing up with a man who thinks they are the father when they aren't?

So it's OK then?

Most children look like their parents baby photos or have inherited features, height, build, gait, hair/skin colour etc.