The Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, Australia, Adele Horin, September 12, 2008
Meltdown . . . Britney Spears shaves her head at
the height of her very public breakdown.
When Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton and Britney Spears ran
amok, the public blamed their mothers. Their fathers -
Lohan's had served time in jail and had addiction problems -
escaped rebuke entirely.
Now an Australian study provides some evidence that bad mothering has
a worse effect on children than bad fathering.
It shows that mothers who exhibit "toxic" behaviours - from being
cold and indifferent to being abusive, manipulative or over-controlling
- are far more likely to warp their children's outlook on life than
fathers with similar behaviour.
Wayne Warburton, a research fellow at Macquarie University's Children
and Families Research Centre, said: "Mothers have a really powerful
effect on the way their kids view the world and themselves, probably
because kids spend more time with their mothers, especially in the
crucial early years."
Dr Warburton asked 441 university students to fill out detailed
questionnaires on the parenting styles of their mothers and fathers, and
on their own patterns of thinking.
He asked them to recall 72 parenting behaviours, including "making a
child feel ashamed", being unloving or rejecting, and frequently telling
the child they were stupid or would fail. He also asked questions
designed to uncover destructive thinking patterns in the students, such
as being "clingy" out of a fear of being abandoned.
He found young adults were two-thirds as likely to develop unhelpful
patterns of thinking if the toxic parenting they had experienced came
from their father rather than their mother.
If a range of poor parenting behaviours existed, they tended to be
found in the same parent, the study found.
Just over 22 per cent of the mothers and 14 per cent of the fathers
were classified as toxic.
Dr Warburton said he was surprised that toxic mothers outnumbered
toxic fathers. "When I first saw the figure I thought many of the people
came from single-parent families but that wasn't true. I'm at a loss to
explain it."
He said while mothers had more influence on their children, it was
surprising that fathers had two-thirds the effect of mothers, given
their lower levels of contact. "Fathers still have a significant effect
on the development of their kids' patterns of thinking."
The Visayan Daily Star, Bacolod City, Philippines, BY CARLA GOMEZ, February 28, 2009
Bacolod Regional Trial Court Judge Ray Alan Drilon has annulled the marriage of a Negrense couple after a DNA test showed that the child borne by the wife was not the biological offspring of the husband who works abroad.
The family court judge ruled that the marriage of the couple, whose names are being withheld by the DAILY STAR on the request of the court, was null and void.
Due to fraud committed by the wife in getting her overseas worker husband to marry her, properties acquired during their marriage are awarded in favor of the husband, the judge said in his decision, a copy of which was furnished the DAILY STAR yesterday.
The judge also declared that since the overseas worker is not the biological, much less the legitimate father of the child of the woman, the Civil Registrar is ordered to change the surname of the child to the mother's maiden name and remove the name of the plaintiff as father of the child.
The complainant said he was working as an electronics engineer in the United Arab Emirates and on his return to the Philippines in 2001, his girlfriend of 10 years with whom he had sex, showed him a pregnancy test result showing that she was pregnant.
On receiving the news he was overjoyed and offered to marry her. Shortly after he went to Saudi Arabia to work, and his wife gave birth to a baby girl in the same year.
The birth of the child only five months after their marriage puzzled him but his wife told him that the baby was born prematurely, so he believed her, the husband said.
Read More ..
An adulterous Spanish woman who conceived three children with her
lover has been ordered to pay £177,000 in 'moral damages' to her
husband.
The cuckolded man had believed that the three children were his until
a DNA test eventually proved they were fathered by another man.
The husband, who along with the other man cannot be named for legal
reasons to protect the children's identities, suspected his second wife
may have been unfaithful in 2001.
Females 'stray to gather the best possible genes for their offspring'
Infidelity may be natural according to studies that show nine out of 10 mammals and birds that mate for life are
unfaithful.
Experts found animals that fool around are only following the urges of biology.
New studies using genetic testing techniques show that even the most
apparently devoted of partners often go in search of the sexual company of strangers.
Females stray to gather the best possible genes for their offspring, while males are driven to father as many and as
often as possible.
"True monogamy actually is rare," said Stephen T Emlen, an expert on evolutionary behaviour at Cornell University.
Up to three million Britons may be wrong
about who their real father is , experts claim. But using DNA paternity
tests to discover the truth can cause its own problems.
BBC, U.K., May 16, 2003
Dad's got blue eyes, Baby brown...
When Tessa found out she was pregnant after fertility treatment, she felt
a mix of delight and doubt.
This wasn't simply pre-baby nerves - she suspected that her husband might
not be the father. For Tessa had started sleeping with a colleague when the
stress of the ongoing treatment became too much.
Keen to build a family with her husband, she let him believe the baby was
his. But her lover threatened to reveal all if she ended the affair, and Tessa
soon fell pregnant again. This time, her lover started to make nuisance calls
to her home.
Tessa had no choice but to tell her husband. "I said to him, 'I've had an
affair and you may not be the father of my children.' So with that, he went
up the stairs, got dressed and left. And that was it," Tessa says in Women Who
Live a Lie, a programme for the BBC's Five Live Report.
THERE IS A story I used to find hilarious in my high school years about
a not too bright man. He was light skinned, his wife was of similar hue,
but their first child was born with very dark complexion (darker dan Bello,
blacker dan Blakka).
When the man wondered aloud about the baby's complexion his wife assured
him that the child was born dark because the child was conceived in darkness
(they had sex with the lights off). The man accepted the explanation. Because
he loved his wife dearly, he also ignored the fact that the child had other
obvious signs of resemblance to the young dark skinned man who did their
gardening. To fix the problem, the husband put flood lights, strobe lights,
spotlights and forty other lights in the bed room so there would be no more
darkness to create dark babies.
"Supporters of paternity
identification bills point to a 1999 study by the American Association of
Blood Banks that found that in 30 percent of 280,000 blood tests performed
to determine paternity, the man tested was not the biological father."
Read More ..
Michael Lautar was devastated when he
learned his first wife was cheating on him,
and then crushed to discover the then
5-year-old girl who called him "Daddy"
wasn't really his daughter.
Next came the sucker punch.
Lautar is under court order to pay nearly $800 a month in
child support and other expenses, despite the fact his
ex-wife has admitted in Allegheny County court papers that
Lautar is not the girl's father. The child was born during
their marriage. After the couple divorced, the mother
married the girl's biological father. The mother, the father
and the daughter live together in Moon, according to papers
filed in Allegheny County Common Pleas Court.
"I'm stuck in this rip-off, this fraud," said Lautar, 40,
of North Strabane. "It's paternity fraud, is what it is. ...
And the state is enforcing this fraud."
Lack of free Family Court Ordered DNA Paternity testing abuses Dads and Kids.
"The Labour Government is abusing fathers and children by failing to legislate for free DNA testing
to establish paternity", is how Jim Nicolle, spokesperson for the New Zealand Child Support Reform
Network, responds to United Futures call for Family Court Ordered DNA paternity tests.
