About a month ago, I had an op-ed in The Boston Globe about the rise of single motherhood and what it means for fathers — ironically, at a time when equal parenting as an ideal has been making a lot of inroads. A couple of days later, there followed this commentary from Shannon LC Cate on the Strollerderby parenting blog. I meant to reply to it sooner, but first I was busy with other things and then I decided to put it off until Father’s Day. So, here is it.
Ms. Cate’s post is titled “Unwed Motherhood on the Rise; Paternalists on the Warpath.” Evidently, to point out that in general, children are better off having a father (and that, among other things, the glorification of the mother-child family unit takes us back to the not-very-feminist notion of child-rearing as women’s work) is to be a “paternalist on the warpath.”