Craner, there are a whole load of thing I want to say in response to that, but sadly I don't have the time to concentrate on it right this minute. I will, however, have a response up to it by the end of the night.
(I know I've said things like this on the board before, and then have managed to forget/avoid actually doing them, but this time I will. Promise!
).
Hardly turned out to be 'by the end of the night', but I did promise so here goes:
You said -
"Fine, it's a case-by-case issue, and I used to buy that. But is it true? Think about it. Yes people are fucked up, individually, but, then again we give birth to children, and have to raise them.The best way, ideally, is with a strong mix of masculine and feminine influence, and a stable background. It's ideal, and hard to instill and maintain, but I think it's been generally proved to work. All children from broken homes miss it. I mean, weirdly, I don't wish my parents had remained married, but I also miss the family, who barely exist in my case. Really, I just wanted an older sister, a key to my psychology. "
Well, I don’t think I’d actually say that it’s a case-by-case issue. There are general trends that can be observed, and at a general level I would say that a typical nuclear family set-up – married hetero parents – is slightly more conducive to a positive upbringing than a single parent situation. However, I would always the following caveats: that these are generalisations so there are many exceptions on both sides, that the difference between the two is far from dramatic, that these conclusions are based on my own fairly haphazard observations and so not scientific, and finally that neither models are either anything like perfect or anything like awful, and indeed neither would represent my ideal or ‘favourite’ family model; for that I would agree with Zhao that extended families are to be preferred. I mean, if we’re going by what’s traditionally accepted as working, then after all these have been the norm for most of human history, and indeed continue to be so for a huge proportion of the world’s population.
Also, what I find a bit questionable is your automatic equation of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ with strictly men and women respectively. I think the difference between sex and gender is real and important. There are feminine men, and masculine women. So, if we do believe that a balance of masculine and feminine is crucial to an ideal upbringing, then there’s no reason to think that a 1 man-1 woman couple will be the only structure that can provide this, or indeed that it will provide it in every example. Presumably this is at least part of the reason why gay male-male and female-female couples seem to provide perfectly acceptable upbringing environments, because within the couples there would still be contrasts in personality, different power dynamics and social roles within the relationship, so the child would still receive the variety and balance of input that seems to be important.
There were other things I considered saying, but they sounded too much like attempting to sound clever for the sake of it, which I’ve not very good at anyway. But my main point is that I don’t so much disagree with you as think that you’re drastically oversimplifying things.
