This week, Jennifer Aniston made a big commotion by saying that a family does not need a dad--a single mom can handle parenting just fine. She was immediately attacked about this stance by many conservative spokespeople, including Bill O'Reilly.
So, what is your take on her comments?
First of all, let's remember that she was promoting her new movie in which the character gives up looking for Mr. Right and takes baby making into her own hands. Naturally she is going to put the movie in a good light--that is her job. If you haven't heard this story, here is the link to a synopsis: http://www.cnn.com/2010/SHOWBIZ/celebrity.news.gossip/08/13/aniston.oreilly.ppl/index.html
Having said that, I was a single mom for many years. Was it easy? Of course not. I never wanted to be divorced. We tried to make it work, but there came a time when divorce was truly the best choice for me, for him, and for our children.
It is my belief that children need both a male and a female influence in their lives. To grow and become the best individuals they can be, balance is important. That balance in the lives of my children came with all the influences in their lives. The female side came from me, their grandmothers, aunts, and the mothers of their friends. The male influences came from their father, their grandfathers, their uncles, fathers of friends, and eventually from my wonderful husband, Monty.
Any single mom can find balance in the lives of their children through extended family and friends. I know what it is like to desperately want to have a child. Gratefully, I never had to suffer through infertility or not finding the right guy. Well, okay, maybe I had not found the absolute right guy, as things turned out. But I did not know it at the time.
I had my children with little difficulty. Had I not, it is possible that I would have made the decision made by many women today--to have one anyway and raise it myself. Why is that wrong? Why is that diminishing dads? These women much prefer to have a dad in the home, but none have shown up. Why should their dreams of motherhood die?
There are ways that dads are diminished in this world. I am not going to get into that on this post, but it does happen every day. Aniston's comments, however, do not. They speak to a conscious choice of an adult woman who weighs the options and makes a choice. Her return comments were well chosen and I applaud them.
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2 comments:
I concur with you. The absence of either mom or dad is hard, but the presence of a bad one can be just as bad. What a child needs most is love and devotion to their needs.
It's an interesting debate. While I don't believe there must be a dad figure to make it workable for a child, I believe that dad figure is the ideal--of course. It's not so much whether or not a dad has to be there as a figurehead as it is the idea of a woman taking science & Mother Nature into her hands ... & thus, intentionally taking the very fabric of creating babies & bit-by-bit changing it into future's eternity.
That's how I see the idea of "not needing a father to make a baby." This changes the argument from the daddy as a figure in the household, to a male as a requirement for making babies.
Bill O'Reilly's argument, for me, is weak.
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