Why Dad’s Side of the Family Tends to Miss Out | Hacker News Reader

Why Dad’s Side of the Family Tends to Miss Out

theatlantic.com

15 pointsthrow0101b29 comments

I think modern American society puts lower value on Dads in general. Unless the mom is in prison, she will probably get custody. It is just assumed that it will be better for the kids to spend more time around their mother. Look at nearly all family TV shows and movies…Dad’s a bumbling idiot always screwing up and Mom comes to the rescue.

Even though funnily enough not having a father is related to more issues later in life than not having a mother. Also, 90% of all child abuse is done by the mother.. but yeah..

Do you have a reference for the 90% stat?

Id like the reference as well (assuming Another Brick in the Wall Part 2 isn’t sufficient).

This seems reasonable to me given my own experience but makes me doubt it more without some evidence to support my tendency.

I’ve googled this in the past and the best I could find is that in the US a little more than half of alleged child abuse is perpetrated by women [0] but I think this is challenging to measure accurately. I think most abuse isn’t reported and so crime stats aren’t suitable to answer the question.

There’s some other chatter about getting this number up to 70% [1] but haven’t spent the time to review all the sources and fix an actual percentage in my mind.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/418470/number-of-perpetr...

[1] https://childprotectionresource.online/mothers-are-more-like...

It used to be the exact opposite until a prominent journalist got burned and made it her mission to flip the problem instead of fixing it. Originally the presumptuon was for children under 7 but eventually got extended to 16.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tender_years_doctrine

I think there is strong observation bias here. This might be true for Americans... And maybe even Westerners, but in Asian countries, especially South Asia, people are more close with the paternal side of the family.

For example: myself, a sample of n=1, I'm more involved with my paternal family then the maternal side of the family

A good rule of thumb : a son is a son until he gets a wife, but a daughter is a daughter for all her life. This article is a corollary.

it rhymes so i cant argue

https://archive.is/TJxKL

https://archive.today/TJxKL

This almost feels like a troll article, never even mentioning the possibility of infidelity. So OK I mentioned it now. Was I baited to do it?

EDIT: downvote me if you want but every anthropologist will agree

Anyone can cheat, what does that have to do with the information in the article? The article provided sources. Do you contest the data or methodology?

In case you really didn't see my point, it's that it's easier to tell that the mom's side of the family is really the mom's side of the family, than that the dad's side of the family is really the dad's side of the family, biologically speaking. This gives an obvious cultural-evolutionary reason that many would be 'closer' to the mom's side of the family. It's not about whether men cheat more than women or whether women cheat more than men, and it's not making any kind of normative or moral judgement on anyone.

I think I did not see your point because you did not make one in your original post, you just dismissed the article, leaving up to the audience to read the tea leaves of your comment. The article on the other hand provided data and sources. You added more detail in this reply, which is helpful, but you still struck the same dismissive tone "In case you really didn't see my point..."; this is not helpful framing.

OK sorry I didn't mean to be argumentative or have condescending tone. I honestly thought that my initial reaction to the article would be the same as 95% of people who read it, especially ones who go on hacker news.

I didn't see your original point either. My view of my relatives (aunts/uncles and nieces/nephews) and how well I get along with them isn't affected by the thought of how likely they are related to me in terms of blood (I don't think this is something the majority of people ever think about), but more about frequency of visits, proximity, and how close I am to the mother/father.

> My view of my relatives (aunts/uncles and nieces/nephews) and how well I get along with them isn't affected by the thought of how likely they are related to me in terms of blood (I don't think this is something the majority of people ever think about)

Yes the argument isn't about consciously thinking of the possibility that your father isn't your biological father. It's about how that possibility has affected human culture and biology through biological and cultural evolution. Of course this line of thought is not meant for ones who think like 'love is magical and comes from God' or whatever. Not that I'm saying that you think that. Also it doesn't mean that I support some more extreme vile things that people rationalize with similar arguments. Anyway, that's why in my original comment I was saying that the article was troll-sounding. It's because they didn't even mention the existence of these other obvious ideas, not even to say how they are wrong, if they think they are wrong.

Thank you for your service.

Probably I don't believe what you think I believe. It's also why I was calling the original article as 'bait'. For anyone who doesn't understand it, these kind of evolutionary psychology arguments are sometimes used as dog whistles for supporting racist beliefs but I'm not trying to use it that way.

For example the one saying "thank you for your service" might think I'm doing a dog whistle and they are answering with another dog whistle thinking I support them when they make comments like

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35766066 "Why does the lead photo prominently feature a “racism is a sin” sign and the article immediately mentions PoC victims in Oakland? Isn’t the vast majority of PoC victimhood in Oakland intraracial? Not many Klansmen walking around Oakland. Annoying race baiting from NPR."

but I don't support those kind of comments.

Well what I was referring to there was that you were persisting in an argument with someone who clearly was not going to understand what you are saying, despite your position being perfectly sensible and well reasoned. I think it’s nice when people do this, because even if the person they are arguing with is not helped by it, people lurking may still gain a better understanding of the topic of discussion. Persisting in the argument seems intellectually altruistic, like some kind of internet volunteer work.

I don’t really care what you support, though it is a bit odd that you would dig through someone’s comment history based on a one line post which I don’t think actually had anything to do with your perceived dog whistle hazard. While we’re on the topic though, I’m curious what it is about the comment you quoted that you don’t support?

Exactly. Same reason why Jews are only Jews if their mother is Jewish.

That's not how the tender years doctrine arose.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tender_years_doctrine

Mother is more likely to be a biological parent, yes, but that's not going to be it. The kid certainly won't know.

It's 'Mother Tongue' nor 'Father Tongue'. Women raise the children, they're more likely to raise them with their family members as well.

Geography plays a role: every married guy I know lives 3 streets over from his mother in law, I think actually it's more common for couples to be near the woman's family.

I suggest this is one of those kinds of things, if you were around 100 years ago, would be kind of dead obvious to most people.

> The kid certainly won’t know.

The point of evolutionary framing is not that we have evolved to think about these things, but that they are biologically ingrained such that they incline our entire experience of living without conscious thought.

> Geography plays a role

I believe the article states the opposite is true: more children live closer to their paternal grandparents. I was surprised.

Seriously? My next-door neighbor lives the other side of the US from his mother in law. We lived about one hundred miles from my mother in law, and my father lived at closest about two hundred miles from my maternal grandfather.

Where do you live that all the married guys live so close to their wives' families?

> Geography plays a role: every married guy I know lives 3 streets over from his mother in law, I think actually it's more common for couples to be near the woman's family.

In terms of physical distance, our order is: (1) my father, (2) her mother, (3) her father, (4) my mother. None of them are that close – my father is about an hour away; for her mother, add about 10 minutes; for her father, add 20; my mother lives 3–4 hours away. At least they are all in the same general direction.

In terms of how much we see them, the order is: (1) my father, (2) her mother (although only a little bit less than my father), (3) my mother (a lot less than either), (4) her father (we haven't seen him in > 18 months)

Seeing her mother more than her father, and seeing my father more than my mother, is mainly due to the quality of relationship each of us has with the respective parent.

Replying to my own comment, while this doesn't show distance, it does show behaviour:

"Maternal grandmothers were significantly more inclined than paternal grandfathers and grandmothers to maintain frequent face-to-face contact, as distance between grandparent and grandchild increased. " [1]

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14747049070050...

I can't edit my original comment anymore, but my point in calling the article a troll is that an 'obvious' explanation for the phenomenon is some evolutionary reasons. Evolutionary reasons for human behavior are icky and unpalatable. We don't like to think of evolutionary explanations for feelings like love or hate or tribalism or to think of our biological or cultural evolution. The troll part comes in, where the article doesn't even acknowledge such a possibility, even to argue against it, maybe because they didn't want to be associated with any icky idea even by a mere mention and even if they are not supporting it.

I'll put an example of what the article sounds like if you have any education in anthropology like even college anthropology 101. The article sounds like one about a "hometown sports hero" who between junior and senior years somehow doubled their weight and bench pressing and began informally beating world records of weight lifting. Then the article goes on to give possible reasons for this difference like maybe they got strong support from their school and community and they are doing hard training and eating healthy food or maybe they are growing to become an adult or whatever. Anyway, almost any reader would think hmm maybe they are doing some steroids. That would be an example of the kind of 'troll article' that I meant. They avoid saying the obvious thing, even to refute it, because many would consider the idea as icky.

You're right, and I believe "How the mind works" by Pinker goes over this and the evidence for it. It makes perfect sense for grandparents to pour more resources into grandkids who are 100% certain to be yours. There are plenty of other similar phenomena that are determined by the estimated genetic overlap, like domestic abuse/violence is almost entirely between genetically unrelated people, i.e. between spouses, step parents and their step children etc. The more related the less violence.

I was also surprised they didn't mention it as it seemed like an obvious reason.

Grandparents logically would be biased toward grandchildren via a daughter since odds of it actually being your grand child are higher. (maybe you say you wouldn't care, but many would).

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