Jamie Walker wrote:
>
> On Tue, Aug 08, 2000 at 07:50:41PM -0400, lou wrote:
>
> > born, the woman usually has primary care for it. Often the father goes out
> > without ever needing to worry about childcare because the mother is at home,
> > where the mother usually has to ask the father to babysit. A mother is
> > usually the one to take a day off of work because a child is ill, not the
> > father, yet when the relationship breaks up he should take custody? That
> > doesn't make a lot of sense to me. It would if child rearing and
> > responsibility were equally shared prior to the breakup.
>
> I spend a lot of time looking after kids that aren't mine, simply because
> I like doing it. You can rest assured that if/when it comes to having
> kids of my own, I will be spending a *lot* of time looking after them.
> Despite this, the prevailing attitudes in this country (and many others
> judging by comments here) mean that I would have very little chance of
> getting custody in a relationship breakup.
The last figures I saw for my state show fathers getting custody
in 75% of the disputed custody cases. However, that does not
include people who didn't try for custody because they thought
they would not win.
> And I don't think that's any more fair than the glass ceilings for women
> in employment. Personally (I don't expect anyone else to agree) I'd be
> glad to trade salary and promotion opportunities for a fair shot at
> keeping hold of any kids I might have in future. Obviously I don't _plan_
> on ever being in that situation, but who knows?
I have a friend who forced the university he worked at to extend
parental leave to male faculty. He will probably pay for that.
But he was the child's primary caretaker during that time. His
wife had to go back to work almost immediately after the child
was born.
Of course, after he did that some other male professors have
availed themselves of the leave and I'll bet that they just saw
it as a long vacation and changed not a single diaper.
Annette
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