Do Women Need to Accept That They Need Men to Raise a Child Properly?
If you believe the Internet, the answer would be a resounding yes, but is it true, or can women truly do it alone?
I saw a TikTok video from a single mother who had had a son on her own through a sperm clinic, but her son had turned out very troubled.
As a result, she asked the question of whether women need to accept that they need a man to raise a child properly, the idea was that a man can somehow give children something that no matter what, a woman just cannot, and that her son had sorely missed that something.
Many seemed to agree, the woman who created the video included, others did not. The question is, is it true?
Do women need men to raise children?
There is a popular trend to promote single motherhood as the solution to the birth rate problem, and inevitably this has created a large rebellion, with many highlighting how data shows that single parenthood is a disaster, and as such promoting it as the solution is stupid.
The TikTok mom used such data to highlight that the main reason for troubled kids, which she claimed the data proves, is lack of male influence i.e. so missing fathers.
However, as I have discussed before, single mother data is distorted due to inequality in the courts i.e. terrible mothers frequently get custody when the father, who is the good parent, should, which heavily distorts the data for how successful single motherhood is.
This is why the data for single fathers is so good in comparison, fathers only ever get custody when they are the absolute best and only option.
But the fact the single father data is so good proves single parents can consistently on their own do just as good a job as two parents, and if it was not for the distortion of the data, we would likely find that both men and women are equally as capable.
This begs the question if single parents can do great, do children even need two parents and is in fact single parenthood the way forwards? So, is the TikTok mom way wide of the mark, and not only do women not need a man to raise a child, do men not even need a woman?
Do children even need two parents, let alone one of each sex?
If you look at the research, the majority of successful people who come from single-mother households had a father figure of some kind in their lives. The same is true for single-father households, the children in most cases had a mother figure of some kind in their lives — often many, it is amazing how many mothers are willing to help a single father.
To go with this, after speaking to a friend of mine who works with a lot of troubled children, she highlighted to me how one of the most common factors she sees in the kids she works with is they lack a father figure.
I asked specifically if she noticed a trend between children who had two parental figures versus just one, and she told me that typically children do better if they have two parental figures — at minimum.
However, she added that they didn’t specifically need to be the biological parents, and one of the figures could even be a teacher, or someone similar. But she was adamant from everything that she had seen, that children typically need and greatly benefit from having at least two parental figures, one to act as mother, the other as father.
I agree with this, it’s been my experience as well that children do typically need at least two parental figures along with several other solid relationships — research generally shows that children need at least three powerful relationships in their lives, and that is the minimum.
Like said, they don’t typically need to live with both of their parental figures — as said a teacher could be one — but they do tend to need them to at least exist, and be easily accessible.
However, does one have to be male and the other female?
Do we need both a male and female parental figure, or do we just need two parental figures?
There has been a lot of talk of late about the impact of children raised by same-sex parents, with much of the research thus far finding that children raised by same-sex parents have similar life outcomes as those raised by heterosexual couples.
This is promising towards the idea that the gender of our parental figures don’t matter, so women can raise children without male parental style influence, and vice versa men can without female style parental influence.
However, it is not as simple as that, because there has also been research that has found that the opposite is true. As such, there is much debate and both sides seem to frequently discredit the other side’s argument with evidence showing one way or the other.
The reason this happens is that there simply isn’t enough data to come to any proper conclusion about the outcomes of children raised by same-sex couples, despite claims otherwise.
For example, a friend of mine who is part of a same-sex couple and has children herself highlighted that the majority of the same-sex couples that the studies look at come from wealth — which is how they were able to have children in the first place.
This is because to have a child in the past through AI (artificial insemination) you had little choice but to go the clinical route, it’s only through the rise of the Internet that this reality has changed — creating a ticking timebomb in the making I should add, which I’ve talked about before.
A study from 2016 backs this up further, concluding that “given the time-consuming and costly procedures for same-sex couples to obtain children, same-sex parents typically have higher socioeconomic status resulting in better school outcomes.”
Also, the majority of the children from LGBTQ-raised households are at the oldest young adults, most far younger, meaning they haven’t grown up enough for us to even know whether they are more troubled or not, further nullifying the data.
Further elements which nullify the data are that many women from same-sex couples bring with them children from a previous heterosexual relationship, and much of the data does not take into account whether the biological father remained involved — even when it does, it doesn’t go in-depth enough to truly bring about any conclusions.
Another factor the data does not take into account is whether the same-sex couple has a member of the opposite sex to work as a parental figure, perhaps a grandfather for same-sex female couples, a grandmother for same-sex males.
That means it doesn’t tell us whether same-sex females need to find a father figure for their child, or whether same-sex males need to find a mother figure, it does not even tell us whether same-sex couples try to do this, let alone whether they succeed and the effects not succeeding may have on children.
So, it doesn’t really tell us anything, at least not in regards to answering the question we are trying to answer.
However, I did ask my friend whether she and her partner ensured that her child had a father parental figure, and she told me that they had, and it was her father. I also posted in a group of same-sex female parents, and the majority said they ensured that their children had a strong male influence in their life — this counted especially for couples with sons.
Though it should be noted many said they ensured the opposite, and this seemed to come especially from single women from the lesbian community, who wanted nothing to do with men. Perhaps this is telling considering the rather damning data from single mothers, but it is hard to say.
So, we are kind of stuck on the TikTok mom’s question of whether women need men to raise a child, and surely anything a man can give to a child a woman can, and vice versa?
Well, science says perhaps not — at least when it comes to children.
It’s popular to say anything a man can do, a woman can, but when it comes to children, science says perhaps otherwise
I want to share something that my grandmother would always say:
“Women teach children unconditional love, and if they don’t, leave children longing for unconditional love, and hating the world for not loving them unconditionally; whereas men teach children how to be brave enough to face down conflict, and if they don’t, leave children unable to face conflict and forever searching for a father to protect them from it, all the while hating the world for not wanting to protect them.”
I’ve never really bought into this, but I’m going to for a moment because if it was true, it would imply children raised by a male influence only are likely to be disciplined and able to handle and manage conflict, but also likely to be more prone to struggling in relationships due to not having had a mother to teach them how to be close to somebody.
On the flipside, it would imply that children raised by a female influence only are likely to end up great at forming connections, but terrible at maintaining them because they can’t cope with the conflict in them.
So, what my grandmother in her wisdom was saying was that to grow up to be good at relationships and to be rounded, a child needs both a male and female parental influence.
The question is, is my grandmother right?
Well, science says the answer is complex. For example, a recent study found that fathers who read, play, sing and draw with their children for just 10 minutes a day, see their children receive a “small but significant” increase in their educational attainment at primary school. The effect is only found when it is the father doing this.
That means no father, no boost, regardless of who else is doing the reading, playing singing and drawing with the child.
To further backup this idea that only a father can give some things and a mother others, a study back in 2010 found that women get the highest amount of oxytocin and dopamine when they are nurturing a child. However, for men it’s different, they get the highest amount released when they partake in rough-and-tumble type play.
To go with this, children ape this response, so children get the highest release of oxytocin and dopamine when their mother is nurturing them, and get the highest release from their father when they are undertaking in rough-and-tumble type play.
It’s believed that this is why children instinctually tend to seek out their mother when they are hurt and scared, but instinctually tend to seek out their father when they have done something brave or want to do something they perceive as brave — or that the mother won’t let them do.
It’s also believed that this is why it’s very difficult for a person who is seen as a nurturer to be the one who also teaches a person how to face conflict, because the very nature of nurturing is being the person to help someone avoid having to do that.
So, you can’t be the one that says be brave, and the one who says you don’t have to be, you need a parent for each.
This matters because if on a biological level, we want nurture and unconditional love from our mothers, and mothers on a biological level want to give us that, then women would by nature find it harder to teach us to be brave i.e. to face conflict.
On the flipside, if on a biological level, we want our fathers to teach us how to face conflict i.e. how not to be afraid of danger, and how to face it down, and our fathers on a biological level want to give us that, then men would struggle to teach children the power of nurture.
So, if children need a male influence to teach one side of the coin, and a female influence to teach the other side, and biology is the driving force of this need, we would absolutely need both a male and female parental influence in our lives as children to grow up balanced, and inevitably not having one or the other would create problems — at least more often than not.
But does biology really say that this is this way?
Well, brain scans that look into the way our brains change when we become parents perhaps further backs up that it might be.
For example, the female brain literally becomes completely nurturing-focused, whereas men see their brain become more focused on problem-solving, and providing i.e. not nurturing.
As these changes happen on a biological level, it’s probable that children will have evolved instincts that know this happens, and so instinctually seek out a mother for nurture and to learn how to avoid danger, and a father for the skills of conflict management and how to face danger and solve problems.
If this is true, it would mean even if a mother tries to give her children what a father might if he was around, she may find the children are not receptive to it because they want something else from their mother, something that contrasts what the father would give them, and vice versa if the father tries to give something kids want instinctually from their mother.
Don’t take this as gospel, as I remain borderline sceptical, but we already know inherently people tend to want to feel mentally nurtured by a women, and to feel like they are physically protected by a man, so it would not be a far stretch to imagine that we also, at least as children, tend to want men and women to teach us different things, and to reject such teachings — or at least the person giving them — if they come from the wrong sex.
So, our biology may just mean that children — who are very much biology driven, especially in the prepubescent stage— truly do need both a positive male and female influence to grow up rounded, not because men and women cannot teach children the same thing, but because children may only be receptive to learning certain things from each, which would mean perhaps my grandmother was onto something.
Final words
The reality is when it comes to children at present all the evidence says that it is imperative, and I mean imperative, that children have an equal measure of positive male and female influences in their lives, otherwise the odds of them being troubled in some way substantially increases.
That means the TikTok mother is likely right, not because women per se need men to raise children, but because perhaps children truly on a deep biological and instinctual level need a father, just like they do a mother.
To put things more bluntly, when it comes to children, men and women likely need to accept far more readily that they need each other because their children need them both, which means we as a society need to do a lot better at ensuring all children have an equal male and female influence in their lives.
For single parents and same-sex parents, that may be through schools or some other system, but we need to make sure the options exist and are accessible.
If we start doing that, the prospects of children will start rising again, if we don’t, the trend where each generation is more troubled than the last will likely continue — we can’t allow that.
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