Vindictive mothers, deadbeat fathers

Vindictive mothers and deadbeat fathers are the scum of the earth.

Those mothers who punish children by keeping them away from their fathers and those fathers who bring children into this world and wilfully neglect and/or abdicate their parental duties and responsibilities for tenuous reasons should be deemed criminals, and treated as such.

Over the years, I have heard several stories–and even received hundreds of messages and e-mails through my blog–regarding vindictive and deadbeat mothers and fathers and they irk me to no end. But recently, a mother who I have known for some time reached out to me with her story of her ex-husband, a police officer, who is now re-married and refuses to visit his son or contribute a cent towards his education.

Despite the fact that this man’s son recently passed for one of the most prestigious colleges in Port of Spain–thanks to the hard-working, struggling single mother of this man’s two sons–the man has refused to assist with the purchase of school books, uniforms or transportation from Chaguanas every day. Crying her eyes out as hopelessness and desperation set in with the first week of school looming, she reached out to me for help.

The court system, she says, is slow and she has since stopped calling him because “officer father” puts his new wife on the phone to verbally abuse the mother of his only two children. What kind of man would punish a son of whom he should be damn proud?

Now, whilst I want deadbeat parents to be punished for their delinquency, the type of punishment should not be imprisonment and nowhere as harsh as the Deadbeat Parents Punishment Act that former US president, Bill Clinton, signed into law in 1998.

Of course, when court-ordered maintenance is not paid, the parent subjects themselves to the possibility of imprisonment for contempt, but even in that situation, imprisonment benefits none of the parties involved because when one party goes to jail, and possibly loses their job as a result, the child/children will definitely get nothing. And if the other parent is vindictive enough, the only uselessly possible benefit will be satisfaction.

And speaking of vindictiveness, there are a lot of parents, especially mothers, who see the need to weaponise their children in order to punish the other parent for ending a relationship. The only thing that illustrates a greater lack of care and consideration for the well-being of children than a vindictive mother keeping a child away from a caring father is a vindictive father refusing to assist a reasonable mother with the maintenance of a child. I say “reasonable” because in my view, any mother who goes out of her way to alienate children from their fathers solely because of spite does not deserve any type of assistance from the father or the state.

There are some deadbeat fathers who claim that they were “trapped.”

And there are some deadbeat fathers who would say that they did not want to have a child with that particular person–or at that specific point in time of their lives–but the reality remains that there is a child and that child needs to be taken care of at least until the age of 18.

Now I’m not saying that “accidents” don’t happen in this realm, but many of these parents insist on taking chances and risks and then complain when the end result is a life that they are now jointly responsible for.

On the other side of the coin is the fact that some mothers do attempt to “trap” fathers and I do have a problem with a mother who forces a child upon an unwilling father and then complains that he plays no part in the child’s life. Especially, if the child is the result of an affair.

As controversial as my views are on this topic, if raising a child is a joint venture, so too should the decision to bring the child into existence.

I have always been, and will always be in support of abortion within the first trimester of a pregnancy because, quite frankly, some parents do not deserve to be parents.

Vindictive mothers and deadbeat fathers are destroying the fabric of our society with their poor parenting skills that leave sons fatherless and daughters bitter. These parents are the same ones who are surprised when the fatherless sons turn to a father figure on the block and the bitter daughter ends up being an irresponsible mother.

Until we start seeing this moral decay from BOTH parents as a major reason for the unravelling of the moral fabric of our country, we in real trouble.

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"Vindictive mothers, deadbeat fathers"

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