One of the most commonly used arguments to support the destruction of fathers’ lives is that it is in their children’s best interests. For those of us who are familiar with the personal implications, it conjures up images of a black widow spider consuming her mate to nourish her eggs. It is, in effect, a justification for doing one person harm for the benefit of the other. However, it really isn’t the children who benefit from the arrangement. It isn’t even necessarily the mother, as women who follow the largely sexual impulse to separate from their mates don’t generally fare any better than those with superior self-control. But because it’s about money – taking money, to be precise – someone is getting something out of the bargain.
The logic of the argument goes something like this:
Children are our future, so there is a common interest in their well-being. However, children are not self-sufficient and need provision and care. Therefore, it is in our interest to make certain sacrifices to ensure their well-being. Men, typically fathers, have traditionally provided for children, so it is most rational to assign this duty to them. Women, who care for children, are holding up their part of the bargain.
It is a simple argument, and one that women almost universally adhere to. A great number of men ascribe to it as well. So what’s the problem?
The problem, when you get down to it, is that it ignores the concept of marriage and the family and treats children as little more than manufactured goods. If men are simply provider machines and women baby rearing machines, each man and each woman is essentially just a worker in a giant, nation-wide baby factory. One worker shovels coal into the furnace while another works the assembly line. Both are simply “doing their job” and have no further obligations.
What this does is encourage mothers to see themselves as discrete individuals performing a job, for which they are owed monthly pay. This is why feminists in the US, despite all the hot air about equality, treat parenting as a union-guaranteed position — their job is their birthright and no man will take it from them. Instead of a private partnership, marriage and childrearing become a public occupation, sort of like working for a state-owned factory in the USSR. The implication, of course, is that the workers are interchangeable, and the guy loading the furnace doesn’t really matter to the female’s personal interests.
To be fair to women, they really don’t care where the money comes from, as long as they are getting paid for their “job.” If the checks come from the state, that’s fine. But if not, they damn well want it from someone, hence the father as convenient victim.
There really isn’t anything fundamentally wrong with seeing a particular duty as a sort of work, even if it isn’t a very sentimental way to look at motherhood and childrearing. In fact, with a little tweaking, the “job” mentality applied to childrearing might work pretty well in the majority of cases, but there’s a big problem with how it’s interpreted today: the obligation to the marriage is severed by the pernicious pairing of division of labor with a “separate but equal” notion about parenting, which destroys the concept of the family. This is the inevitable outcome of socializing the “best interests of the child.”
The result is that the best interests of children are not well served at all by the current regime, because despite how “happy” parents are in any given partnership, kids do better in intact families in study after study in both subjective and objective ratings. Separation of parents is clearly bad for children, so how can a system that treats parents as independent units of child production possibly be in their best interests?
As it is, the policy encourages women to create a less-than-ideal situation for children, because marriage is not part of her “job.” Beyond birthing and caring for children, she has no obligations, and if she has to “work on her marriage” it is simply considered more work for no additional benefit.
In the end, what has happened through socialization of “best interests of the child” (making children’s welfare a public issue), is that we have trained women to see themselves as just what feminists claimed to be rebelling against in the first place: baby-making machines. The only difference is that now they are not performing this labor for their family, but rather the state, and the result is that children’s interests have taken second place.
We must remember that morality is not the business of the state, and never will be. As always, it is simply power and self-preservation that motivates its institutions, and any benefits we derive from them are only achieved by keeping the state subordinate to the people. In allowing courts and government to decide what is best for our children for us, we have handed them a terrible power and made a fatal mistake. As it is, the state has now turned our children into weapons to be used against us, and it cloaks its new authority and power in the feel-good phrase of “the best interests of the child.”
