NYT Op-Ed: Why Fathers Leave Their Children

[WontStepUp]

David Brooks pens a thoughtful piece on the prevalence of inner-city fathers leaving their children:

https://nyti.ms/2swnRgx

He makes some great points. Of course, many of the female commenters bristle at his suggestion that the mothers often play a role in it.

I'm interested to read your thoughts.

[Manalysis]

David Brooks pens a thoughtful piece on the prevalence of inner-city fathers leaving their children:

https://nyti.ms/2swnRgx

He makes some great points. Of course, many of the female commenters bristle at his suggestion that the mothers often play a role in it.

I'm interested to read your thoughts.

How underplayed ... who'se decision is it to stop using contraception, and what is the reason?

But what I wanted to say, was, wasn't there a report going around about social workers helping moms to calculate
how they would come out financially if they threw out their insignificant other?
I.e., they are not prepared to support a man, so if he cuts into their welfare, it's boots made for walking time.
So that is one mom-side pressure right there.

M

[voidspawn]

For a start I think we should attempt to disentangle things. Because the one stark truth is that no matter what, the father gets the shitty end of the narrative if he dares leave.

A father leaving his family is very different from a husband leaving his wife (or common law equivalent).

A man who leaves his wife, is punished by being thrown out of the family. We focus on the kids side of it, but that is just the dagger to the heart, thrown out of family also means in laws, family friends, home, resources, finances, support, state benefits and entitlements.

I'm not aiming at all to distract from the children, nor imply a man has material motivations for being with family, fact is most of the resource of the family his work would have paid for, even when the work is done together with his former partner.

But what does it means when a man leaves his children?

This is something we don't talk about much here, because there is a natural focus in MHRM on protecting children's right to have a father and a man's right to be a father.

To look at this, I think we need to accept something that isn't often admitted, even though we all know it to be bloody true. Family can be fucked up, it can be the most wholly head messing, screwed up, unhealthy shit hole a person can exist in.

99.99% of the time that is blamed on the father.

But sometimes, a man is the one who is the stranger in the house, and not the one making others feel out of place. You don't often get a woman being the alienated one in a family. Two main reasons, the children's bond with their mother is near unbreakable (only really bad situations like drugs and cult/gang indoctrination or herself can fuck it up); men aren't motivated to do this - they are motivated to seek the woman's approval and attention. Men don't have families for resource motivations, they are motivated to acquire resources for family reasons. That generalisation does break, but I do think even some of the most selfish a-holes out there, who do give family a go, at least initially sought the happiness that the blue pill illusion enslaves with.

But other situations, let's talk a bit about how a man, who is a husband and a father end up a stranger is his own home.

Let's face it we all know this happens, we've all seen it. We talk about it sometimes from the perspective of it being the woman's power to alienate. But you do get kids who go along with that. You get the characterised 'just a stepfather' but you get this with biological fathers too. The ever growing materialistic and shallow society, devalues the role of the resource provider, and exaggerates the value of the emotional provider. Yes a contradiction, it's shallow and materialistic, it aims to compensate not by shifting materialistic values away from disposability and waste but by devaluing material and by extension the person who is mainly responsible for provision of them. The emotional provider on the other hand gets put on a greater and greater pedestal.

This can feel to a man in this situation as a desperately loveless situation, he can slave at doing more or he can give up and become more self centred. Either way it won't make any difference. His children don't want his company, merely his stuff, they don't enjoy his presence, they don't see him as a provider, but as the person who rations and controls resources. The work done to acquire it, is sold to them by their own shallowness and confirmed by the mother, as the father indulging in his career because he likes that better than them. His work is like, his media centre or his corvette, bike, surfboard, computer, porn collection... or whatever.

A man's presence, fades like an echo when removed from it's worth. The role of emotional support and love provider could well have simply never been allowed to him, instead he was just granted and lured in by the early appreciation his woman showed for his sexual attention. But that soon disappeared when she obtained the closer relationship with the children, and the man was just the means to that end.

Sometimes this doesn't even need to be an outcome of any intentional act. The assignment of roles has continued despite 170 years of fake equality, as in the assignment of roles to the male. Where he can accept and do his role, or run away. MGTOW as in brazenly not accepting it in the first place, is a newer third option evolved from bachelorhood (which is actually being on the shelf, rather than not in the supply).

A woman's emotional behaviour will be the model most likely to imprint on the children, if she's warm to the father, the children will be, if she treats her husband as a source of love and emotional support, the children will see their father as a source of love. If she takes this role all to herself, the father will lose out, and be left with little recourse. He can make extravagant displays of generosity, since he's not allowed to compete directly with the mother, he can't push himself forward as a better emotional care source. Though men can do that role well, sometimes very well, in general men are given the least experience of it, and from boyhood the connection with their mother will be the high point of emotional engagement, and it will all be downhill from there.

So when a man can't make resource displays, and he knows his financial situation is peaked or even about to tank, his gut can tell him, he's got no leverage. He can't make the displays that will get him a thank you hug and acknowledgement of his presence. When a thing is impossible a person begins to emotional disinvest, even if they want the opposite outcome, reality will grind away, it will force itself into a man's perception, men are limited in their ability to fool themselves.

He'll see himself fading away. Reaching a point where coming home doesn't even yield a 'hello' and a 'how was your day?' hasn't happened in years. He'll be a stranger in the house, it won't be his home regardless of what he has provisioned it with. This isn't spoken about but it's the reality of family court's view on men. The legal system doesn't consider stripping a man from his home because society has already taken a view that it is not his, in any sense other than material property. Stripping of home, isn't seen as cruel, merely a matter of pragma.

I don't like the thought of father's leaving their children, but we have to talk about the other situations too. Sometimes, and perhaps quite often, a man's physical exit from a house, is merely the last step of ejection from a home that was completed long ago. He was just stubbornly hanging on to some blue pill dream and a quarterly opportunity for charity sex from a woman, whose love for him rapidly and long ago went from passion to appreciation to having some use in having him around.