I think this is just another one of those make it up as you go things.

Like..we need RESEARCH to tell us that Mums are important to children.? Do we need some social scientist to tell us Dads are important?

Next (or is it already) we have wanna be shapers of society telling us the nuclear family or that its traditional form of mum, dad and kids is no longer relevant. Now... 2 mums... or 2 dads.. or a Dad and a cat...or Mum and a budgy.... it seems to me like a ball of wool unravelling. Some bright spark holds the end and then suddenly it falls and its all over the place.

Nope.. methinks the 'user manual' for life is the best approach.
Husbands love your wives.
Wives respect your husbands.
Treat young women as sisters in all purity.
Don't provoke your children.

Yes of course all this is from that dusty book the Bible.

But we now have not one but MANY 'Steel Axes' coming in and disrupting our traditional relationships, and we are seeing before our very eyes, the unravelling of our society, where everything is invalid unless some Social Researcher has verified "Yep.. we can do this safely" until of course the next social researcher who wants to promote a book goes in the opposite direction.

Mum,.... what is she without a Dad to support, strengthen, nourish and protect her ? I suggest she is a lonely outpost in a frozen wilderness. (same goes for Dads)
Of course some will point to the exception, or the 'brave woman who coped on her own' to disagree, but think... really think...is it good for man or woman to be alon

I would partly agree there Sharkfin and Boaz-David. The women’s liberation system wanted to devalue the father, because they believed that fathers were oppressors of women, but basically the father in the family was very important to keep the family structure operating and enable children to be born.

The Women’s liberation system has been very successful, and fathers are now termed “partner”, or “non-residential parent”, or “absent parent”, or “dead-beat dads” etc. These terms were not in use 30 years ago, but these terms have been introduced into our language to denigrate and devalue fathers.

But with the devaluing of fatherhood, motherhood eventually declines also. You simply can’t have mothers without fathers, and if you try and have nothers without fathers then the system becomes non-sustainable. So to reinstate motherhood, fatherhood also has to be reinstated also.

This article does very little to re-instate fatherhood. Instead it tries to suggest that mothers are more important than fathers, (and this is also based on a survey with miniscule and non-scientific sampling).

So articles such as this one eventually do nothing to increase the value of fathers or of mothers. The article is a continuation of archaic and non-sustainable feminist doctrine

HRS

The issue you are so morbidly obsessed with is a separate issue to the issue of Motherhood discussed in the article.

HRS, I'm surprised you missed what might be a significant finding of the results given you want to turn this thread into a custody statement. You might note the imbalance between the proportions who favored mothers and fathers and the proportion who normally end up residing with mothers and fathers post divorce. Perhaps you could take that and start a thread in the general threads area, it could lead to some interesting debate. 40/25 vs around 80/20 from memory - have fun with that.

I doubt the validity of the results with such a select and small sample and the reporting of the ranking does not tell us much about how strong the attitudes were. Obviously difficult in a short article. Did the parent who was not the most significant generally come a close second or were they out behind the Pizza delivery person somewhere?

In regard to the idea of excluding kids of seperated families from such studies, I'd rather see some reseach into the impact of the seperation on kids attitudes. I've seen some anecdotal indications that a significant percentage of kids taken away from the other parent eventually wake up to who was playing the nasty games. Keep such kids in the study but ask some questions about care arrangements as they grew up.

I'm surprised by the comments by some posters about mothers being disrespected in society - I get the point about single mums but would have thought that overall mums were at the top of the pecking order in the parenting game.

I think that there has been a shift in the last couple of years but it used to be very hard to get taken seriously as a parent if you were male. The thing that female friends complain about with tradies, car salesmen and the like where they want to speak to hubbie used to be part of the landscape for dads dealing with parenting issues. People seem to be getting more used to dads having active roles now.

R0bert

Liz,
When 1 in 4 children now only see their father every second weekend, then I would think that this factor would strongly influence any statistics on mothers and fathers.

However it is not mentioned in this article, and I am left to wonder why. Perhaps social scientists don’t want to acknowledge it.

Robert,
About the only study that I am aware of that has been conducted on separated children in Australia (or those abducted from their fathers) was a study conducted some years ago by a Professor Parkinson. I believe it was conducted on about 50 children, which is also a ridiculously minimal number of children to conduct such research on.

From memory, the attitudes of the children towards their fathers in that study were quite different to the results of the study of 103 University students.

HRS

If that is the case of 1 in 4 Dads seeing their child every second weekend, then it's a poor reflection on the Dad's that at the end of the relationship they chose that lack of involvement with their children lives.

Dads that shared parenting during marriage DO continue shared care after marriage.