Irresponsible Parents

I am so angry I cannot even think! I love my kids and I would gladly give my life for them. I cannot comprehend how a person can rant about their car/house/dog (fill in the blank with anything else that can be replaced) and not a word (other than to complain about the amount of child support) about their kids!

I would certainly be upset if I lost my house or my car. I would probably be inconsolable if I lost one of my beloved pets, but the ONLY thing in this world that cannot be replace is one of your children! Here I am trying to make time stand still so I can have more time with my kids and people cannot be bothered to show up for visitation. Or complain about a few $ a day in child support. It takes more thatn $3 a day to feed, clothe, and doctor a child!

Grrrrrrrrrrrrr. Then the icing on the cake is when they have another kid with someone else.

I made a deal with my ex ..

He gets the house the car and all the contents while I get the children.

I knew where his heart lay.

By the way I got the kids.

its funny cuz i was thinkin about this earlier about how people dont wanna pay child support but they brought a child into the world. i was thinkin about well i know whats behind that kind of thinking is that the person thinks this twisted crap is that they are payin for their ex to have some good time. if someone is livin the way theyre supposed to then it takes a lot for the kids needs people know this its almost like when they get divorced they divorce the kids too or they still wanna see them but dont wanna pay to provide their needs which if thats the case they shouldnt have custody anymore & forfeit all rights. there was this man my husband worked with & come to find out his ex ran a daycare but also a meth lab & she was hooked on the crap. they made a bust in the middle of the nite & called him to come get his kids cuz she was goin to jail & he got custody. he had always paid his child support but in that situation thats how things were. like tishie said if u offer them all the stuff except the kids & they dont put up a fight u know where their heart lays. just a note that im in no means just talking about fathers it goes both ways lots of times i know of a few instances rite off the top of my head where i live where women are wild strung out & men have kids or other family members

I agree that it is not gender specific, but men can father a lot more children than women can bear.

How do you look yourself in the mirror in the morning?

If my ex is to be spoken about its really easy, if anything he feels hard done by because his children do not see him very much.

The fact he pays NO maintanence and hasn't since I left him with five children is not a problem for him in the least. He is quite pleased he can do as he pleases with his money.

He sends a token £20 per child at Christmas and sometimes remembers the odd birthday...

If he or other men or women feel that the children do not notice let me assure them they do. I NEVER run him down (apart from on here as I feel I can do so freely) I don't have to children may be young but they are not stupid.

As my nine year old daughter says ... IF he remembers, we get money for birthdays but he forgot mine last year.

She is one of the lucky ones in that she has a new dad who adores her and her brothers but some are not so lucky and only have the one dad which is so so sad.

My niece's dad is like that. When my sister got pregnant at 17, his parents told him that if he agreed to never see her or have anything to do with her, they would pay every cent of his college. So guess which side he chose....

Well he is married with kids of his own now. My sister has had to fight him tooth and nail for even a scraping of child support. She has sent him pictures of her, letters, emails etc... and 16 years later my niece has never met him once. He doesn't seem to care at all. I think though that if he would meet her and see what a wonderful child she is he would be upset that he didn't get any time with her. But that's his loss. She is better off without him.

Your niece IS better off without him. I just don't understand how we as a society just accept this type of behavior. In my grandparents time this type of a character flaw would even carry over to your employment.

I would be crushed if one of my kids decided to have kids with someone like that. What makes you think that the kids YOU have with him/her will be different? My cousin's first wife was like that. In his defense he was the first to have kids with her so he really didn't know her character (but then again, why the hell are you having kids with someone when you don't know their character), but two other men created families with her after she just left the two kids she had with him behind.

Even with all of my preaching, my foster daughter had a baby with a loser like this. He has two older children that he never sees, and guess what, he's only seen my granddaughter once; right after she was born when my daughter brought him to see him. She IS better off without him. But why is it ok that he gets to just keep having kids and not support them either financially or emotionally?

I'm actually kind of surprised that the government isn't stepping in here. I know the decision to be a parent is the most private important decision you can make but in John's case, the government is supporting his three kids by three different women.

When he does work, by the time child support catches up to him he either quits or gets fired. Rumor has it that he has another girl pregnant.

It's people like that who give those gov't programs a bad name. They are set up to help people who genuinely need it. Granted it can't all be on him because the women do have the opportunity to make him wear a condom or use other forms of birth control but even in those cases, accidents happen. And it's terrible that our tax dollars go to people who abuse the system. But in that case I still feel like it's better to help those who need it and have a few take advantage then take it away from all and have good, honest people struggle.

I guess the best you can hope for is to educate and hope they make the right decision. My friend's ex was kind of like that. He has a kid with a woman he isn't with but still takes care of their child to an extent. But he is so down on himself claiming he had such a terrible upbringing and can't do anything about it. While my friend who was dating him has a father who went blind from cancer and can't work and her mom has had to pick up a second job to keep up the house and family. Yet she is going to school and working and breaking the cycle.

What is really sad is that the children are the ones who suffer. They don't deserve to be brought up in a household like that and haven't done anything to deserve it. Hopefully they will see how terrible the situation is and make better decisions later on in life.

I'm sorry your foster daughter still hooked up with a loser. Your granddaughter deserves better than that. I hope she can see what he has done and not make the same mistake again.

I hope I'll be able to teach the baby some of the things that her mother learned too late. It is a cycle. It's sad that Amy fell into the cycle, but then her parents were not good role models. They each had kid after kid after kid; each with different people. None of them have a whole sibling.

There was quite an embarrasing situation when one of the father's exs moved back to town with her kids. One of them was Amy's sister. It was actually one of the teachers that figured the familial relationship out. Amy lived with her father, her father knew one of his other daughters (same age) was moving to town but couldn't be bothered to even explain this to his 12 year old child. The two girls did not get along and the teacher pointed out that they were sisters and should behave better.

I cannot even imagine what that does to a child. To meet someone a few months younger than yourself and discover she's your sister. And so publically!

It amazes me what people do and how they think and act when it comes to children. Divorce is a terrible thing and everyone's involved in it. This may not be true across the board but most kids blame themselves for the divorce and may never get over it even though it's clearly not their fault. I'm not a parent yet but I can't imagine having the kids going back and forth every week/weekend with their parents separately and as an adult I'd have trouble letting them go for that time away with the other parent. The kids are always in the middle of it. I hear all sorts of stuff from a lot of people who have been through divorce and it makes you not want to get married or have children, but it angers me even more when I hear how the children and/or their visitation is a burden because of more important things. I feel sorry for the children and the person who has to still deal with the other parent who was the reason for the divorce - not the person who filed, but the person who failed.

That is so true voice. And what an unstable life for them. To be treated as if you are nothing by one or both of the two people in the world that are supposed to teach you unconditional love.

I married my husband after I saw how well he treated his ex-wife and mother and my mother, etc. I think there's a certain amount of reaping what one sows and having a situation where one or another partner does/does not support the children has a lot to do with the marriage and choice of partner too. My niece walked out on her husband and two adorable young girls within the last year, searching for her own dreams. It is very sad and upsetting and almost unimaginable to me but I look at her father, my brother, and her upbringing and a certain amount of that doesn't surprise me?

I do think that there is a certain amount of “nurture” involved in the choices we make as adults. I don’t how the cycle started in our family.

I knew my Great-Grandpa very well. He was a kind and loving man. He treated my great-grandma almost like a doll. Not in a condescending way, his love and respect for her was plain for all to see. Grandma definitely ruled the roost. Grandpa had a double standard though. He was strict with the boys and very permissive with the girls. He saw a lot more than he let on too. It wasn’t that he didn’t know what was going on.

He was a clever man, he thwarted my attempts at being naughty many times without me even knowing he was doing it. I remember one time my cousin and I were going to have a cocktail party. We snuck Grandma’s good crystal out to our fort along with snacks and candles. We couldn’t get our hands on wine so we took some beer. Our plan was set for midnight. We snuck out of the house, poured our beer and sat down to have our party. We didn’t even get a sip when Grandpa yelled out the door “it’s time to come in now girls.” ??? Of course it was, we were in bed for two hours before we had our party! We left everything and came in the house and went to bed. I got up early to get Grandma’s good glasses and put them back in the cabinet but they were gone! After we fell asleep Grandpa went out and cleaned up our mess and washed the glasses and put them back in the cabinet before Grandma knew we took them! I didn’t know what happened until years later when Grandma told me. He stopped our behavior. He didn’t need to punish us, or have us know he was right, or even tell our parents what we’d done. It was enough for him to stop us.

For some reason my Grandmother, their daughter, married the biggest *** she could find. TWICE! When her first husband died very young she managed to find an even bigger jerk. She was the maid, cook, and chief bottle washer. I cannot think of a single thing that my grandfather ever did around the house. I do not remember him ever saying a kind word to my grandmother. Orders were barked to her and she rushed to comply. He treated my mother and Aunt like dirt from day 1. How do you go from having a father that treats you like a princess to one that treats you like dirt?

My Aunt married a man that treated her the same way her step father treated her mother. And now her daughters have married very abusive men. I was very frustrated with the youngest one. We are very close and had many discussions about all of this. I used to tell her “you’re going to marry someone that will treat you well right? You see what life is like for your mother and your sister, but you’re smarter than that.” She married the worst one of them all. Her husband put her in the hospital several times. She only left because she was afraid of how he was treating their infant daughter.

She is now a teenager and I am not happy with the boys she goes out with. I cannot for the life of me figure out what is attractive about being called “fat, dumb, and stupid”. WHY? Like her mother and Aunt she is a beautiful, intelligent young woman and yet she finds these losers so attractive.

my hubbys oldest girl is 24 now but when she was 7 he & his first wife divorced he paid every bit of child support til she was 18 thing is on one of his visit weekends we went to get her & they had split up & gone to another state my husband went to court over this until he was bout to lose his job so he just finally gave up next time he saw her she was 12 & then 21 a few christmases ago they went thru child advocate & all that time even though he didnt see her he paid which they automatically took it out anyway so i dunno if left up to him if he would have or not. well they did try to get him to sign over custody cuz his ex got remarried & he was like NO! but things have a way of mending themselves cuz theyre slowly getting a relationship its just messed up he missed her childhood actually over those years he got raises but child support stayed the same i dunno what goes thru peoples heads his ex never pressed getting more with the raises maybe cuz she didnt want to deal with visitation i think all that time it was based on $10 an hr & $15 an hr is what he made when she turned 18. its just all sad that kids have to suffer when its all said & done