We still should probably make it formal but yes. He’s 21 and will presently inherit almost everything if I die. I started dating his mom when he was almost 5, buddied up right away and took on full time dad status not too long after.
I knew that when his mom and I broke up it was me or nobody fathering that kid. He stayed living with me for about a year while mom got her situation sorted and now lives 5 min away with his mom.
He’s doing pretty well, all things considered. I only messed him up a little, hopefully.
To my great dismay, he’s never followed through on his threats to beat me up.
LOL okay then zecarlo. I’d like to think I know a thing or two about young men and the power of immediate consequences. The same basic ideas have applied to young men I raise, young men I oversaw working bar security and young men who have reported to me at work.
If you do x, y WILL happen has always been a primary tool for shaping the behavior of young men. You just have to be ready and able to actually impose the consequence.
I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the young men you are responsible for don’t respond to the consequences you try to impose.
Good posts! I just want to say that, partly thanks to you, I’ve actually become more outspoken with what I think after you suggested I do so, provided it’s in a respectful manner, online and offline, whether people like it or not (within reason obviously).
If they can’t even attempt to provide for their children, I don’t worry about them following through with anything other than being a lazy drain on society.
And how does that apply to young men who were not raised by a father or have a father figure? A law won’t teach those who grew up without any concept of accountability to be responsible adults.
How do you get child support from a teen father? An unemployed and/or possibly unemployable father? A father who is in prison? A father who already has several children?
The young men I was responsible for were soldiers and they were professional enough to not have to be threatened with consequences.
None of what you bring up suggests that young men don’t respond to incentives or consequences, nor does it make a case for no consequences.
If anything, the type of people you bring up make the case for more consequences, not less.
The law should be a guide for the kind of society and culture we want. I want a society where children are cared for by both parents from the moment they are created, because that’s when the need for care begins.
Not 9 months later.
Let me get this right. You served in a military organization that did not feature serious consequences for bad behavior from its soldiers?
The prisons are full of men who responded to consequences.
That begins in the home.
That starts before someone is old enough to get pregnant.
Reread what I wrote. I didn’t need to impose or threaten consequences because they weren’t irresponsible babies. The law is not a substitute for parenting.
I take it there was no Uniform Code of Military Justice lurking in the background of your unit, threatening consequences from the moment of enlistment.
You know, like civilian law, but for soldiers.
What was this enlightened force that you led without the threat of consequences?
If you wanted responsible men to be the men that end up fathers, then I would think just getting rid of child support would be a fairly direct way to do so. A woman would then be incentivized to pick a man that would support a child as a partner. Currently a woman doesn’t have much incentive to do so (pick a responsible man), since they can get the man’s support without him wanting to support the child.
You could make the same argument for welfare. I have made that argument, and believe that welfare as we implemented it is a significant driver of single motherhood and the downstream products of that, specifically with men raised with no dad.
People respond to incentives. Even mothers.
I view child support very differently because it isn’t sending taxpayer money to someone, it is sending a parents money to their child.
I guess my point was I don’t think incentives is a good justification for child support laws. I don’t think they have done a good job incentivizing irresponsible people to not have sex with each other.
I think the justification for child support is to benefit the child, not manipulate the sexual market to get people to more successfully get responsible partners that will raise children with them. If that was the goal, removing child support responsibilities would be the better incentive I think. FWIW, I think the former (benefiting the child) is enough of a justification for there to be child support laws.
For some people they may but obviously, given the number of Americans incarcerated, for others the punishment means nothing. At least prior to the crime being committed. Criminals tend to lack impulse control.
Maybe children need some fear of consequences but eventually we have to choose to do good, not out of fear, but out of love. For good people with a sense of morals, punishment is not what deters them from doing evil. Maybe that’s my old Sunday School teacher talking through me.
Interestingly, black women could not get welfare until the 1950s I believe.
Child support laws aren’t created to incentivize better behavior. They are primarily about supporting the child. Hence the name. Child support.
Any society-wide behavior changes that are incentivized are just icing on the cake. To re-iterate, I absolutely support the notion of using the law to force uncooperative parents into directly supporting the children they bring into this world. To me, it makes sense to start this process when the child is created, not when it leaves the womb.
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That could explain the data reflected in this graph. The dramatic trend increase seems to coincide with Great Society Legislation in the mid-60’s. The same trend is also seen across other demographic slices, albeit not to the same degree.
The black family managed to survive centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow only to crumble when the government of the USA incentivized single motherhood with direct cash payments. This has been yet another leftist social experiment on a vulnerable population that has been a colossal failure. None of the objectives of The Great Society suite of laws have been achieved, and they’ve had nearly 60 years for the good outcomes to begin kicking in.
We may not know how to best incentivize intact families through government policy, but after almost 60 years we definitely know how NOT to do it.
