Damn Pay Attention To Us Already - Tumblr Posts

My parents separated when I was 4 and my sister 2. My dad got to have us every two weeks for the weekends and half of the holidays. As soon as he got a serious girlfriend he stopped raising us, spent his entire weekend working and let his gf supervise us and decide what we would do on vacation etc. It didn’t help that she didn’t like us and had her own two kids a boy one year older than me and a daughter a year younger than me and favored them with her son being the Golden Child tm.

My mom left home at 7:30 am and got home by 9:30 pm at best but she never stopped to make an effort, she would asked about our days, she would make sure that my half brother (born 5 years after the divorce) had followed his treatment for his type 1 diabetes, and on the weekends she had with us she still continue to take care of us even if it was falling asleep watching Nemo for the 200th time.

Children can be tricked by the fun parent lame parent schtick but they can also see who puts in the effort and who doesn’t.

Anyone ever think about how the classic ‘dad gets custody on weekends’ arrangement that MRAs complain about is actually misogynistic? If one parent constantly gets you up in the mornings, often puts you in after school programs because she works, and only spends quality time with you when you’re both tired between work and bedtime, your relationship with that parent is gonna be strained. If one parent lets you sleep in and watch tv, never had to work and can spend all their time with you, you’re obviously going to prefer that parent. On top of that, it sets up a system where the mother has to do most of the actual ‘parenting’ such as taking kids to school, making sure they do homework, etc, while the dad mostly just hangs out with the kids. The dad doesn’t have to worry about the kids when he’s working, because in a way he functionally still has a wife to do that for him. I knew kids on this schedule whose dads didn’t make them do homework, didn’t enforce bedtime, basically any of the hard parts of parenting. Even in the best case scenario, the mom is still going to be seen as the ‘mean parent’ by the child, despite working 5 times as hard as the dad and having much more of a strain on her career and personal life than the dad.

Its really just the classic misogynistic "cool fun dad vs. frigid nagging mom" but for divorced parents and I hate it