Poll of the Day > How do you feel about male baby-sitters?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Why the fuck are you taking helly seriously lol

Crazy how me and Jen both got warned/suspended itt for saying that men do a certain thing more often than women tbh

And I'm looking back on it and it really wasn't as bad as I thought it was

Clown fiesta

"Uhh, gender norms? Stereotypes much?"

Don't @ me

It's almost like advocating for not hiring people based on how they were born is a bad thing. Funny how that works.

adjl posted...

It's almost like advocating for not hiring people based on how they were born is a bad thing. Funny how that works.

We do it with adoption. Aka we don't just hand off kids to single men. Ever.

This is a neutral statement. I am not to take a position on this as per the moderation team at GameFAQs. How do you feel about this, reader?

Yellow posted...

We do it with adoption. Aka we don't just hand off kids to single men. Ever.

This is a neutral statement. I am not to take a position on this as per the moderation team at GameFAQs. How do you feel about this, reader?

and yet foster mothers are notoriously known for being abusive to the children in their care its almost like the entire system is flawed

Yellow posted...

We do it with adoption. Aka we don't just hand off kids to single men. Ever.

Yep, and that's a bad thing. Child custody matters across the board strongly tend toward "taking care of children is for women, so no children for the men" outside of really extreme cases (like the mother having been documented to be physically and/or sexually abusive, though even then it can still be a crapshoot and there have been many cases where a divorce ends up with children being given to an abusive mother instead of an innocent father). Part of that is abuse statistics (particularly where, unlike child care, it's quite hard to follow up with a kid post-adoption to catch abuse and intervene early), but part of it's also established attitudes about gender roles, which turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy in that men that are raised being told that child care is for women tend to be less interested in developing those skills. The idea that a man just wants to be a father without going through the full motions of starting a family is pretty foreign to many people because of that norm, so whenever a man does express that wish, people assume he's just looking for a new plaything (especially where any single men who do just legitimately want to adopt a kid know that's how they're going to be perceived and choose to avoid the whole ordeal altogether instead of trying to prove their legitimacy).

Is that right? I dunno. Like I said, adoption is particularly tricky because once you hand the kid over, you relinquish pretty much all control over the situation. You can do background checks and other screening to reduce the risk, but at the end of the day, you're still taking a major gamble that whoever the kid goes to is going to be safe, and I can't necessarily fault them for bringing statistics into the mix to help avoiding higher-risk demographics. On the flip side, though, that means discriminating against a whole lot of people that would be perfectly fine parents, and the end result of that optimization is to hand off a whole lot of kids to upper-middle class straight white married couples of the optimal religion at the expense of everyone else whose statistics don't look quite as good, and that's not really a good thing (especially given how many children up for adoption are going to be of different racial/cultural/religious backgrounds, meaning that adoption preference turns into a form of genocide).

Adoption is a case where I think I'm okay with the status quo based on current statistical realities, but recognize that those statistics represent not something that's fundamentally inherent to men (as your "we are the predators" nonsense tried to claim), but the prevalence of gender norms that need to be corrected elsewhere, such as encouraging more men to go into ECE or trying to correct the bias against men in divorce custody battles (specifically in cases where the norm of "women are the caregivers" is the overwhelming basis for the judgement instead of a credible risk of abuse; that norm just needs to go away). As that cultural shift happens, the risks of letting single men adopt children will decrease, and the adoption system can start to get on board with that shift. It's not great, but I think it's the best available option because there really aren't any others.

Yellow posted...

Crazy how me and Jen both got warned/suspended itt for saying that men do a certain thing more often than women tbh

That's not what you and Jen got modded for.

Witness the fact that both adjl and I have *also* said that men are statistically more likely to be sexual predators than women - in fact, no one in this topic has contested that fact at all - yet neither of us got modded.

Yellow posted...

We do it with adoption. Aka we don't just hand off kids to single men. Ever.

Unless you're talking about private adoption agencies, this isn't true.

For public adoption systems in the English-speaking west, no consideration is given towards marital status or sex. A single man is treated exactly the same as a single woman (or a married couple, for that matter) - they have to pass the same background checks and home inspections, have to file all the same paperwork and pay all the same fees, etc. For cases where the birth parent(s) are still in the picture, they have the right to choose who gets their kid and couples are generally favoured over single parents of either sex, but there is no ban in any western country I'm familiar with that prohibits single men from adopting.

Private adoption agencies can set whatever restrictions they like. Some only accept married couples (and sometimes only heterosexual ones), some require you to be a practicing member of a specific religion, so on and so forth. But they don't account for all adoptions.

Honestly, if your logic held that men are simply too risky to ever be considered caregivers, no single father would ever get custody of his kids and no gay couple would ever be permitted to adopt. Yet neither of those things are true.

Oh hey, that works too. Silly me, taking your claim at face value instead of taking the time to verify it. I should know better.

Though it is worth noting that even if no formal policies exist to disfavour single men, I expect they do still get discriminated against more subjectively, due to the aforementioned gender norms/expectations/stereotypes. The prevailing attitude is that it's a lot weirder for a man to just want to be a parent independently of having a relationship than for a woman to do so (see: nobody really thinks twice about single women getting donor sperm), as evidenced by this particular claim, and that can be expected to bias people's assessments of single male applicants.

The same way I feel about any babysitter. Not going to ever have a stranger watch my child outside of some kind of school with multiple adults around

adjl posted...

Though it is worth noting that even if no formal policies exist to disfavour single men, I expect they do still get discriminated against more subjectively, due to the aforementioned gender norms/expectations/stereotypes.

Well, as mentioned, if it's an open adoption (i.e. the birth parents are still in the picture and are not prohibited from contact with their children due to something like a history of abuse) - and that's most of them - the birth parents ultimately get to decide which family to place their children with and, yes, single men don't typically fare well in those cases.

So yes, the system does still work against single men, just not on an official level. And, of course, even if the open adoption route doesn't work, single men are still considered just as viable as prospective parents for children who are wards of the state and/or whose birth parents are not in the picture anymore.

darkknight109 posted...

If you're going with the statistical approach, since they have a son they're actually statistically safer with a male babysitter. Male predators are substantially more likely to target girls while female predators are more likely to target boys. About 70-80% of male survivors of CSA report that their abuser was a woman.

As much as I hate to admit it, that's basically how I see it. I'd rather leave a child with a same-gender caretaker.

women are just better with kids from my experience