Alright, I do want to add my own two cents to this topic, but not on the exact discussion at hand but with something that was bugging me a while back. The story will be long so if you want to get to the point, skip down to the last part.
Most of you know I go to a clinic for Substance Abuse treatment. Well by law it's mandatory you see a psychiatrist there, only they don't like to call them psychiatrists, they like to call them "counselors". Anyway I have a new counselor now because my old one went to Germany to counsel US Soldiers who got addicted to drugs over there and are having a hard time dealing with their addictions. Anyway, she specialized in family problems. Now we're getting to the point here;
I remember a lot of you saying that children being raised in a household could grow up just fine with a single parent, or two parents of the same gender. Well... I grew up with my father who was single/a bachelor and shit was always tough, especially for me because I didn't have a mother around. When I was a child, I never experienced abandonment issues (my mother never actually abandoned me, she just suffered from PTSD and we never saw her). As any other child I was a happy little kid, whether me and my dad were poor or not living in North Las Vegas (look up the crime rates there on Google if you don't believe me about how bad the neighborhood is. Some years it gets worse than Detroit) he always strived to not only put food on the table, pay the bills, but also get me the stupid little toys I wanted and games and shit. Around the time I was growing up (90's - that's my era) the Gameboy Color was out and the Pokemon games were a huge fucking fad. Kids were buying the trading cards and everything. My dad would sometimes go without eating so I could get a stupid little Pokemon game and be happy (wish he told me that shit then, but then I never would have asked for the game if I knew...). So yeah, I was a happy ass child. All the other kids in the neighborhood used to come to my house because I was the only kid whose parents ever bought them anything. Everything I could ever want, so why be sad, right? Well...
Eventually as the years went on me and my dad grew extremely close. I hear a lot of people tell others how they love someone so much that "they would die for them", well I loved my father so much that I lived for him. He's dead now, rest in peace, but anyways. We grew extremely close because he was the only family I ever had. My brother was a dickhead and a gangbanger, and by now we moved completely away from Las Vegas Nevada to get away from the fucked up neighborhood (and a fucked up mother, forgive me because she's actually doing pretty good now). But around my early teenage years my father had met someone. They got together, planned on getting married, had a kid, the whole deal. This chick, Annie, comes to me (I'm 13 at the time) and tells me that we're going to be a family and everything's good. Cool. Well she treats me like her son and everything's all good, but fuck if by the time I'm 16 everything turns upside down, which it does. She's pregnant with my brother, and starts treating me like complete shit. Telling me shit like "I'm not your fucking mom, don't call me that!" or "No wonder your mom didn't want you!". Anyway to skip ahead a bunch so we don't carry this story on longer than it has to be, that brought up some fucked up emotions that I guess I was just bottling in, and my whole life starts to turn around. Drugs, hanging around gangs, the whole deal. But Kate leaving my life also had a lot to do with that, most of you know that story.
Anyways, they eventually broke up, Annie and my dad, however I was left fucked up emotionally. So when I got into counseling for my methadone clinic I asked my counselor about all kinds of things, including why I was like that because of Annie, and here's the important part, she said (not word for word, but close):
When a child grows up without a mother or father because they passed away or abandoned the child slowly over time the child receives emotional distress because of it, even if the child is unaware it is secretly burrowing itself into the child's mentality. There are three different specific times a person will actually experience the emotional trauma of abandonment, death, or the general absence of a parent. First, it could be when they are past the toddler age, around ages 6 to 10. Here the child will act out, often throw fits, and generally be rebellious to their parents. Most children lose these traits after the pass the toddler threshold into late childhood. Second, and most common, they will experience emotional stress during their teenage years. The reason for this is because those "bottled up" feelings of abandonment are now colliding with a new foe; puberty. During puberty a teenager's emotions are being thrown around, and they can often show emotions which give similar signs to bi-polar disorder or even PMS (for men), however, it is just puberty. But when puberty comes in it sometimes brings out anything the teenager had previously repressed, one of those issues possibly being parental absence. Thus, the teenager can be more aggressive than usual, and have more severe mood shifts, and even thoughts of suicide. This is the most common time for a person to experience the trauma left by parental abandonment. The third possible time however, could be when a person is between the ages of 35-45. Between these ages most males and females often experience something dubbed in laymen's terms as a "mid-life crisis". What is actually happening is, due to the maturing and aging of the brain, emotions are, again, being shifted around. Again, this could possible bring up emotional stress left by parental absence.
Here's where it gets interesting:
We now know that when a child is being raised, it is best for them to have a masculine and feminine presence in their lives, thus a mother and father. With a mother and father, a child can receive aspects from both and allow he or she to develop into a stable adult, with a perfect balance between masculinity and femininity. However, when one parent is gone, the child can receive what I like to call a "double dose", which can be unhealthy for a developing mind. Parents are the most important aspects in a child's life because not only does a child look to them as the nurturers, the providers, but they also look to them as their teachers, the ones who are to teach them of the world, as their guardians who are to protect them from the big bad outside world, and finally, and their companions, who will love and stick by the child's side constantly. And for the most part unless a child is orphaned or raised by parents with an emotionally distant relationship, this is true. A child will learn the most about the world, and society not from school, or their friends, or even their other family members, but their parents. They will look to their parents to see how to act, how to talk, and what to do in certain moments, even if the parents don't realize it. In a sense, the child is constantly observing the parents who are the most influential people in his or her life. For example, if a child sees his or her dad acts in an angry or mean manner around a different race of people, the child will take that in and absorb it into his or her's mind.
Thus, we come back to a feminine and masculine presence. When one is taken out of the equation, the child only has one to look up to. Therefore instead of receiving an equal dose of both, they are "double dosing" themselves on masculinity or femininity. This is bad. Their mind is developing and soaking in everything. What they see and hear now will influence who they become in their later life. Thus no matter hard one tries, a mother could never provide the masculine presence a child needs, and a father could never provide the feminine presence a child needs. The natural order of things has always been that a child needs a mother and father.
