Venture into many yards this weekend and you will hear many children, especially boys, following their dads asking the "why this", "why that" questions. But if one of the chidren falls and cuts themselves they will most likely run into their mother who will get out the band aids and give them a cuddle.

Is this because the mother knows nothing about the world, or because the father doesn't care that their child has hurt themselves. No, it is because the father and mother are different, men and women are different. They are better at different things and at meeting different needs in their children. And the children don't need someone to tell them this, or to tell them otherwise.

Men and women being different isn't a bad thing. Marriage is about the partners, husband and wife, complementing each other, about the whole being more than the two individuals. This is just as God intended.

You left out Penny Wrong, Howard.I had a very good example of some womens attitude to domestic violence a year or so ago. I work as a carer for disabled people. As part of my training i was required to attend a medication/first aid course. One of the instructors was a former paramedic. There were 7 women in the class plus little old me. At one stage he related a story about a call he attended where the husband had been bashed unconcious by his wife. Immediately 3 of the women weighed in with comments like "good on her ", "it served him right" and "he probably deserved it". I wonder what the reaction would have been if it had been the wife who had been bashed unconcious by the husband and I had made similar comments.

eye on the future
The social science research on the importance of children having a mother and a father is now extremely well-established, and quite convincing: when one parent is absent – and it is usually the father – then kids are greatly disadvantaged in every social indicator

Professor David Popenoe of Rutgers University puts it: “In three decades of work as a social scientist, I know of few other bodies of data in which the weight of evidence is so decisively on one side of the issue: on the whole, for children, two-parent families are preferable to single-parent families and step-families. If our prevailing views on family structure hinged solely on scholarly evidence, the current debate would never have arisen in the first place.”

Sydney law Professor Patrick Parkinson confirms the international findings in his important study, “For Kids’ Sake,” 2011. He documents how both children’s wellbeing and the state of heterosexual marriage have deteriorated in recent decades to a 52% divorce rate

-A tripling in the number of children notified for abuse or neglect since 1998.
-A doubling in the number of children in out-of-home care in 12 years.
-A 66 per cent increase in the rate of hospitalisation for self-harm for 12-14-year-olds between 1996-97 and 2005-06.
-An increase from 28 per cent to 38 per cent in female school students experiencing unwanted sex between 2002 and 2008.
-A doubling in the rate of hospitalisation for alcohol intoxication for women aged 15-24 between 1998-99 and 2005-06.”

Spiralling rates of child abuse and neglect, foster care, teenage mental health problems, self harm are rooted in the rise of one-parent families and de facto couples, violent or unstable relationships and divorce…

The ‘fatherless family’ has meant poverty, emotional heartache, ill health, lost opportunities, and a lack of stability. The social fabric – once considered flexible enough to incorporate all types of lifestyles – has been stretched and strained. Although a good society should tolerate people's rights to live as they wish, it must also hold adults responsible for the consequences of their actions.

Governments in Australia cannot ignore this reality.

There are massive hidden economic, social and political costs in pursuing this ideological feminist dream to re-engineer family & criminalise fathers.

A recent study found divorce and single parent childrearing now costs taxpayers at least $11.2 billion each year. This scaled estimate includes the costs to federal, state, and local government of the justice (1.93) & health (2.79) systems, unemployment benefits & welfare programs (1.63), housing assistance (0.73), child welfare (1.20), education assist (0.69) and foregone tax revenues (2.23) at all level of government.

Family breakdown and single parent homes is more closely linked to all our major social ills - poverty, violent crime, substance abuse, child abuse, suicide, depression, underachievement and more - than to any other factor. From this inevitably follows generational family dysfunction and abuse with all the concomitant cost increases in welfare, law enforcement, healthcare and education in a self-perpetuating, ever-expanding cycle.

The insidious nature of the Family Violence (sole custody) amendments & the National DV Plan - which remove fathers from families - is that all these costs will increase while at same time destroying the basic economic unit of modern society, the working family, which generates the wealth to meet those costs and not just today but in future generations. Welfare is now the 3rd largest item in the Australian GDP.

Child support/enforcement is presented as a way to recover welfare costs by forcing deadbeat dads to support children they abandon. In reality, it has become a lucrative incentive for divorce, effectively bribing mothers to separate with the promise of a tax-free windfall and ongoing benefits subsidized by taxpayers. Far from saving money, child support enforcement loses money and far more serious subsidizes divorces and fatherless children that generate additional welfare costs.

Further, mothers are not only enticed into divorce with promises of lucrative support payments; they are also coerced into it through threats of losing their children themselves. Mothers are now ordered to divorce their husbands on pain of losing their children through spurious child abuse accusations. Intact middle-class families now live in fear of a visit from the dreaded child protective services

We can't afford the cost of fatherless families

Professor Patrick Parkinson, chairman of the Family Law Council and the Child Support Scheme, and architect of the Children and Young Persons (Care and Protection) Act 1998 confirms this in his new paper, “Another Inconvenient Truth: Fragile Families and the Looming Financial Crisis for the Welfare State”
Ref: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1992740##

Governments around the western world are facing financial crisis from the growing fragility of family life and the increase in births to mothers without a partner living in the home. The costs of family dissolution are to a very significant extent borne by taxpayers, who provide income support for many parents and their children, pay substantial administrative costs in the legal, welfare, education, law enforcement systems and bear more of the costs of caring for the elderly than would be necessary if a greater number of marital and quasi-marital relationships remained intact.

The growing costs to the public purse of mass fatherlessness are simply unsustainable when taken together with the existing governmental debt burden, growing environmental problems, ageing populations, and the problem of decreased fertility in developed countries.

Action therefore needs to be taken by governments to support programs and services that have the goal of promoting & maintaining safe, stable, and nurturing relationships between parents and their children and to eliminate perverse incentives to choose family forms that may not be optimal as a context for raising children.

The Coalitions “weak” shared parenting reform reduced litigated divorce by 22%. In countries implementing equal shared care of children after separation divorce dropped 50%.

The fact that the lawyers union & Emily List feminists underhandedly & unilaterally rolled back this reform makes it clear that Mr Abbott must commit to implementing a rebuttable presumption of equal shared care of children after separation - halve divorce, protect family, save taxpayers $6BN/yr.

There is no other way to separate fiscal and social issues. Break the power of a corrupt divorce-DV multibillion dollar industry and stop enormous sums of money being diverted into funding the political arm of the radical feminist's movement.

Do it right this time.

Howard if they are going to keep CSA or something similar their should be an independent review of the hugely exaggerated figures they use for costs of raising a child and some kind of independent review process so that need, impact and circumstance are taken into account.

The current system makes some extreme assumptions which when applied do real harm.

R0bert