But no matter how many parents children have and their particular sex and gender configuration, a parent is somebody who rears a child, not someone who biologically creates a child. A Mommy or a Daddy is someone who nurtures a child, someone who financially supports a child, someone who emotionally cares for a child, not someone who births a child they are unable to rear, or deposits sperm in a sperm bank for financial gain or social altruism.
The words Mommy and Daddy identify a social role, a relational role, not a genetic marker of biological inheritance. Your title, Figure in the Father Factor , plays into right-wing propaganda that every child needs a father. I know that you know better than this, Ellen. Every child needs a loving home, and enough food, a good education and access to health care, not parents in the right number and gender categories. I think that is a perilous road, impacting many families, including many two-parent, opposite-sex homes, where infertile couples used donor sperm to make their family.
Biological heritage is important — for some children it appears to be very important — but a donor is not a Daddy. My own unscientific - but hand-counted - poll of parents on the subject of whether Bush was right as a dad divided almost as closely and far more passionately than the election itself. Some said that what was bad for the candidate was good for the kids. Others said that disclosure is better than secrecy.
But it raised the old question: What do we and should we tell our growing, growing, grown kids about our own lives? What do we tell them about our indiscretions - youthful and otherwise? What is the impact of our lives on theirs?
Are we really worried about them or about us? These are questions that sneak up on all parents, not the least of them the baby boomers. The s counterculture has become the counter-counterculture. The vice president who smoked dope and the governor who drove drunk are no exceptions. I still remember the Rolling Stone survey of a decade ago showing that baby boomers did everything, regret nothing and want their kids to do none of it.
Baby boomers belong to a generation that believed famously in telling it like it is. Now the whole culture encourages far more openness in families. Adoption is discussed among parents, children and even birth mothers. Divorce, which was once hidden out of shame, is now acknowledged. So, increasingly, is homosexuality.
And a whole lot of adults who were born 8 pounds and 6 months after their parents' marriage now know they weren't premature. But into every parent's life comes that magical moment when their or year-old asks: Did you and dad have sex before you were married? Did you do drugs? Did you drink and drive? The very same folks who once worried about getting caught by their parents may find that was a whole lot easier than explaining themselves to their kids.
On the one hand, grandfather Antonin Scalia insisted that "the child does not belong to the court; the child belongs to the parents. Last week, the Supreme Court waded dramatically into the heart of family life and law. The justices - six grandparents out of nine -heard a case to determine whether and when courts can grant grandparents and others the right to visit children over the objection of their parents.
They listened for the constitutional principles underlying cases that vary as much as the family stories they tell. The case before the court, Troxel vs. Granville, carried all the tire marks of family sorrow. When the couple, who never married, split up, the children visited their father at his parents' home.
The elder Troxels were involved; they were family. But after their son's suicide, after Tommie's marriage, the mother and the Troxels began to disagree about how much time the girls could spend with their grandparents. In retrospect, it's not that hard to understand. The grandparents, suffering the loss of their son, afraid of losing his children, wanted more visits.
The mother, trying to start a new life, working to establish a blended family, wanted fewer visits. The case ended up in court because Washington, like all 50 states, has something called "grandparents' rights laws. In most states, they can only win if they prove it would be "in the best interests of the child" The Washington law was the broadest in the country. It went beyond grandparents.
0コメント