The absolute necessity of fathers: Warren Farrell/JB Peterso

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I'm not sure if this is quite PPR but it seems relevant just in terms of how well-tuned children tend to be come well-tuned adults, and they're exploring the sort of polite/tempered yang role that the father has in both raising sons and daughters and what tends to happen to children if they don't have that formative influence. If the statistics Dr. Warren is bringing up are accurate I'd think the sociological importance of what's said here is worth a lot.

My dad is a good man. Not perfect. Sort of like that guy in "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," though my father is not an alcoholic.

I sometimes wish I would have become a father.

My dad was a dirty kiddie beater and wife beater.

Every time I hear statistics like that I can't help looking for biases. Like - children with more father involvement have better social skills - maybe because the more involved fathers are the ones with better social skills to inherit both genetically and environmentally? Involved fathers are pretty self-selected group, we don't really know if other aspects of their personalities contribute to both decision to care for the children and the measured benefits.


(source: xkcd.com)

Yeah that's what the evidence suggests. As far as I'm aware, these effects aren't seen in adopted children or step-children. We also know that children raised by two women tend to turn out just as well as those raised by mixed couples. So it doesn't seem like fathers are "absolutely necessary" beyond their biological function.

On the other hand, I can't help but feel that children who are artificially deprived of a parent (through death or imprisonment rather than separation) are likely to be worse off. But I don't know if that holds up once you examine it and control for other factors.

Magz made a good point. But what's your evidence for the children being raised by 2 moms?

I can't seem to find any statistics on this.

https://thembeforeus.com/study-studies-same-sex-parenting/

This includes the largest study done on children raised by same sex parents, and it clearly show that these children do way worse than those raised in a traditional family structure.

It's a politicized issue so I have my doubts that clarity would be easy to achieve on this one. I got the sense that Warren might have gone down a bit of a tunnel to where it was sounding a bit salesy, I don't necessarily count that as evidence of being wrong but I do consider it unfortunate if it weights against the validity of a message that's even half as solid as how it's being pitched.

On a side note with respect to Jordan I caught something odd from Matt Dillahunty, ie. sort of a blanket claim in his synopsis of his chat with Jordan, that the idea of Bill C-16 forcing speech as Jordan suggested under threat of fine or imprisonment was a sham and debunked. That would be fascinating because it would hit Gad Saad just as hard.

The best I suppose I can do is practice central tendency when the politics gets hot around an issue, because it seems like at that point there's almost no one's scholarship you can trust. Not sure if that's a side effect of our culture's current complexity or a sign that competence, regardless the number of degrees, is taking a nose-dive.

The source of that study looks to be a christian anti-LGBTQ group, so you might question the legitimacy of their results due to their obvious bias. If that sort of obvious bias matters to you in regards to where you get your information, that is.

Hmm, you're right. It's says it was conducted by "the catholic university of america", probably not the best source.

In regards to the topic though, whether it's correlation or causation, every guy I've known growing up who became a criminal, school dropout or drug user, was raised by a single mom.

I think that's what they call "anecdotal" evidence. I have a feeling the answer is complex and that's (at least one reason) why it's difficult to find research studies with clear results one way or the other as to whether there really needs to be one parent of each sex in the household for a child to grow up "successfully", however you want to define that.

My own personal anecdotal evidence tells me that the quality of life one might expect is directly related to one's level of family support growing up--and when I say family support I mean not that there were two parents around (of whatever gender) but rather that the child had access to adult family members that were attentive and loving and provided good guidance as well as discipline. I saw this kind of support provided by parents as well as grandparents, aunts and uncles, older siblings, cousins, etc. So I personally think the presence of fathers specifically in a child's life are less important than that the child has some kind of adult family support that are always there for them. I don't think the gender or the relation to the child matters as much as the quality and consistent presence of the support they provide to the child.

For example, I think I personally benefited from the fact that my grandparents lived nearby when I was growing up, so they babysat for my parents a lot when they were both working and I spend a lot of time at their house. They didn't raise me themselves but they participated in raising me, they supported my parents in raising me, and I got consistent attention, affection, and guidance from them. Those are the factors I think that matter the most, not how they were related to me or what gender they were.

I agree to an extent, but two parents would have a much easier time providing this, compared to one parent.
I'm not sure either if the gender matter as much(as children of single moms, and single dads both do poorly), as the presence of two adults/rolemodels.

Well, while I can't help seeing flaws in his arguments, I do value Warren Farrel's input to the public debate. His view on feminism (that feminism was right to empower women but wrong to see men as the sole or even main enemy) and his ideas of need for some equivalent of feminism, this time for men, are quite close to my personal views.
Still, the data he provided is seriously flawed.

That's my common problem with political discussions, every time I point out flaws in someone's logic, people believe I support the opposite option

I also very much like warren pharrel, but you are right that we should be able to be skeptical and criticize statistics, even if they happen to align with our beliefs.

It would also not help the MRA groups one bit, to fall down on the same level of misusing statistics in the same way feminists organizations have been doing for decades.
Although none of their statistics are remotely as outlandish or flawed, as the pay gap and college rape stats feminists use.

Turns out I was giving you outdated information and we're now pretty confident that being raised by two men is just as good as being raised by two women or a mixed-gender couple.

Good summary here, including links to all the cited articles, including at least one with a very large sample size. It would seem to me that Cornell is as close to an objective source as you can find.