[quote=scaredycat]re; emotional damage; I wasn’t advocating one side or the other. I was just observing that women sometimes withhold child visitation or extract a price for compliance with visitation from men. Men value that visitation at some particular dollar price. I was just thinking out loud that if the shoe were on the other foot, and men had the power to manipulate the system by withholding visitation, that the price men could extract from women in general would be higher, since I think women in general stereotypically would be more “pained” by even one missed weekend. I don’t know what any of this means, and I’m not saying that people or the system shouldn’t be fair, but whenever you set up a system, people and their lawyers look to game it for maximum advantage. and men and women aren’t on an even keel in terms of the price they would pay for very regular visitation. Look, I love my kids, I raised them solo for several years when it became necessary. i see them every day, have diner every night, and on avg spend more time than the avg dad, i think. But i still don’t feel the physical pain, the yearning, when we are apart for a few days. I just think guys are built that way. Women in general seem to get a little batty on even short separations.[/quote]
Very true, scaredy.
It’s a fact that children are biologically more valuable to women than they are to men for the following reasons:
1. Women bear the children, and often risk their looks, health, and even their lives to do so. Men don’t have to do a single thing in order to have kids (except have sex, but that’s not sacrificing anything in order to have kids). A woman knows about every single child she has, while men can have thousands of children and never even know about a single one.
Like it or not, the act of bearing a child creates a very different relationship between a child and a mother. You are forever changed physically, mentally, and emotionally after having biological children. While many good fathers also bond with their children, and love them unconditionally, **in general** women have much stronger bonds (sometimes good, sometimes bad) with their children.
2. A woman has a very limited window during which she can have children, which means that as she grows older (as in mid-life divorce), she can’t have any more. This makes her existing children even more valuable to her.
3. Barring multiples, a woman can generally have approximately one child per 10-12 months. This limits the number of children she can have and this scarcity makes them more valuable as well. We’ve all seen/read about the men who got multiple partners pregnant at one time. Children are more like commodities to many of these men, while women (in general) highly value each child she bears.
There is no question that women and men form different bonds with their children. Women often have to take leave from work because of pregnancy-related complications, and then afterward, if she’s nursing and raising her own babies. IMHO, the mother-child/father-child bonds are complementary, especially when the parents get to raise the children together.
When divorce happens, the complementary nature of the mother/father child-rearing styles is diminished because there is less balance. Also, divorced parents tend to become more focused on their new relationships, jobs (out of necessity), depression, etc., and the children can really suffer because they lose their place in the center of the family. Add to this new marriages and children born to these new unions, and the first children tend to feel like remnants from some failed relationship.
I’ll say it again: divorce sucks **for everybody.**
