they should give a medal for parenting of this quality

unclehobart

unclehobart

New Member
Mom Arrested for Watching TV as Daughter Kills Son
Sat Sep 28,11:58 AM ET

LAS CRUCES, N.M. (Reuters) - The mother of a 10-year-old girl who beat her four-year-old brother to death on the instructions of their stepfather was arrested for watching television during the incident, officials said on Saturday.



Natasha Guerrero, the children's mother, was arrested on charges of negligently permitting child abuse resulting in the death her son, four-year-old Devon Booth, said Las Cruces Police spokesman Mark Nunley.

Devon's 10-year-old sister kicked, punched and hit him allegedly on the instructions of their stepfather, Louie Guerrero, 38.

The boy was being punished for bed wetting and drinking from the toilet, and was beaten late on Sept. 21 and into the next morning. He died in an Albuquerque hospital on Monday.

The complaint said the stepfather instructed the 10-year-old sister to punish Devon while the mother watched television in another room. He was arrested earlier in the week on charges of child abuse resulting in death.

Both parents are in the Dona Ana County Detention Facility and a grand jury hearing on the charges is scheduled for Thursday, said a spokesman for the Las Cruces district attorney's office.

The 10-year-old girl was not charged because of her age. She and two other children in the home are with the state child protective services and will likely be placed in foster homes.
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http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=578&u=/nm/20020928/ts_nm/crime_child_dc&printer=1

No comment possible without boiling over into a vexing rage.
 
"if I let her kill him, I won't be charged" said the father in a make believe quote.
 
The kid sounded like he had some mental problems...Most likely caused from earlier abuse.

Also notice the words stepfather and mother. Just another reason why fathers are better parents... :mad2:
 
Facts to back it up...

This appeared as an article in the Washington Times (12/19/95 - A19) and is distributed by the Texas Fathers Alliance

85% of prisoners, 78% of high school dropouts, 82% of teenage girls who become pregnant, the majority of drug and alcohol abusers - all come from single-mother-headed households. Less than 1% of any of these categories come from single-father-headed households. This seems to indicate that the problems children encounter are not related to single-parent households, but are related specifically to single-mother-headed households. So, should we blame the mothers or the fathers? Perhaps, neither. There is no question that father-absence has reached epidemic proportions. According to Wade Horn of the National Fatherhood Initiative, we must reverse the trend in 7 - 8 years or it will be too late to do so.

And, how has our government responded to this crisis? By continuing to drive fathers out of the family. It is bad enough that some fathers abandon their families, but it is unconscionable that our federal and state policies drive fathers away from their families. With 80+ percent of divorces involving children resulting in sole-mother-custody, combined with a "no man in the house rule" and "presumptive sole-mother-custody" in welfare cases - we are not blameless from a policy perspective. We must change our policies, practices and procedures to specifically include fathers in families. If not, we can be certain that social spending will continue to increase and we will be plagued with an ever burgeoning population of maladjusted children who will fill our prisons and wreak havoc on society.

Social research data reveal that our blind reliance only on the nurturing value of mothers is inadequate and misplaced. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, a child living with his/her divorced mother, compared to a child living with both parents, is "375% more likely to need professional treatment for emotional or behavioral problems and is almost twice as likely to repeat a grade of school, is more likely to suffer chronic asthma, frequent headaches, and/or bedwetting, develop a stammer or speech defect, suffer from anxiety or depression, and be diagnosed as hyperactive."

However, these afflictions were surprisingly uncommon in the 15% of single-parent households headed by men. A study of all state child protective services agencies in the country - by the Children's Rights Coalition, a child advocacy and research organization in Austin, Texas - found that biological mothers physically abuse their children at twice the rate of biological fathers. The majority of the rest of the time, children are abused because of single-mothers' poor choices in the subsequent men in their lives. Incidences of abuse were almost non-existent in single-father-headed households.

The data show that placing children only with mothers is likely to be detrimental to children and society, so why do we continue public policies favoring sole-mother-placement? Have we become so paternalistic toward women that it anesthetizes our common sense?
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Biased site warning...

You want more???

This conference was called by Governor Wilson because of the widespread concern about crime, educational failure, drugs, social decay, etc. and the perception that these are connected with family breakdown, in particular with the erosion of the weakest link in the family, the father's role.

Anthropologist Margaret Mead has emphasized that, unlike the mother's role, which is biologically based, the father's role is a social creation. Male dogs and cats have no reproductive importance after their minuscule sexual performance is over. The emergence of a similar male rolelessness in the inner cities was becoming apparent some decades ago and is now becoming obvious in the larger society.

At present the law appears to be less concerned with how to strengthen families than with how to provide for ex-families or fatherless families created by Illegitimacy. It is becoming better understood that these fatherless families breed most of the criminal and underachieving classes. Many politicians think the problem is one of punishing the male criminals generated by such fatherless families--building more prisons, hiring more police, passing "three-strike" laws, squeezing money out of ex-husbands ("deadbeat dads") for the purpose of subsidizing ex-wives or ex-girlfriends and "their" children.

Success in providing for these fatherless families means there will be more of them, that fathers will become still less needed and less motivated, and in consequence there will be further weakening of families and more of the resulting pathology this conference is concerned about. The weakening of male motivation means less male productivity, less male willingness to undertake family responsibilities, more fatherless families, more fatherless children, more crime, less economic growth. A society which cannot motivate its men to be family providers will deteriorate, as ours is doing. A society which threatens husbands with a fifty percent divorce rate combined with virtually automatic loss of children and home and property is forfeiting this motivation.

It is too little understood how male motivation is related not only to family and social stability but to the economic growth of society. Thanks to family stability and the male motivation it created, the twenty years following World War II were a period of astonishing, indeed unprecedented, growth. America's industrial plant, already the wonder of the world during the war, doubled during those twenty years, the GNP grew 250 percent and per capita income increased 35 percent between 1945-1960--as much as it had during the previous half century. Joseph Satin could say, "Never had so many people been so well off." William Baumol could say, "The future can be left to take care of itself." That was when families were stable--and headed by fathers. America's prosperity was based on growth, not on trying to pinch budgets here and there, to squeeze one program in order to finance another, to borrow from next year's revenues.

As family stability eroded, so did the growth. In 1989, "Sixty Minutes" ran a program called "New York Is Falling Apart," showing streets sinking into the ground, bridges collapsing, Mayor Koch closing the Williamsburg Bridge on the grounds that it is "better to be inconvenienced and safe than to be convenienced and dead."

Judith Wallerstein says only half of the male students she followed in her study of divorced families completed college, forty percent of the young men were drifting--on a downward educational course, out of school, unemployed. When so many of them have seen their fathers expelled from the homes they bought for their families, when they themselves face the same fifty percent chance of divorce and the loss of their children and their role, they wonder why they should work as their fathers and grandfathers did in the years after the War.

If you ask a man why he works at his job, he will bring out his wallet and show you pictures of his family. This motivation has been weakened even for the lucky fifty percent who still have families. Males have lost confidence that society wants them to be heads of families rather than providers for ex-families. This is what men hear when President Clinton tells them, "We will find you. We will make you pay."

Most men still would like to be fathers, but our society is giving them little assurance that they can have families--that they will be able to spend their own paychecks to provide for their own families rather than to subsidize ex-wives and pay for other things judges and bureaucrats deem proper.

A judge will try a divorce case in the morning and place the children in the mother's custody. He will try a criminal case in the afternoon and send a man to prison for robbing a liquor store. The chances are three out of four that the criminal he sends to prison grew up in a female headed household just like the one he himself created that morning when he tried the divorce case. He can't see any connection between the two cases. The reason he can't is the time lag. The children he placed in the mother's custody were perhaps toddlers who would not yet rob liquor stores or breed illegitimate children. But they will grow older. They will become teenagers, boys capable of committing crimes of violence, girls capable of breeding illegitimate children. And then the chickens will come home to roost.

In 1980, crime increased by a startling seventeen percent. L.A. Police Chief Daryl Gates was flabbergasted. Nothing in the economy, he said, could account for such an increase. What did account for it was the huge increase in divorce and illegitimacy in the mid-1960s--plus the anti-male bias of the divorce courts which changed the father headed families into female headed families. The judges who placed the children in these families hoped they could force the fathers they exiled to subsidize the families they destroyed--to pay to have their children brought up in female headed households where they were more likely to be abused, neglected, impoverished, delinquent and sexually confused. They would like to blame the fathers for their own inability to create an alternative to the family.

The welfare system is equally responsible for subsidizing (therefore creating) female headed households. Like the divorce court judges, welfare bureaucrats would like to make biological fathers pay. They fail to understand what Margaret Mead explained, that fatherhood is not a matter of biology but a social creation. If these (merely) biological fathers are to pay, they must become (or be allowed to remain) real fathers in Mead's sense, men with a role such as that taken away from ex-husbands by the divorce court. They need to be given better motivation than "We will find you. We will make you pay." This latter motivation will not create real fathers. Real fathers must be created, as Mead says, by society. Our society is doing the opposite--destroying millions of fathers through its divorce courts and its welfare system.

Much of the social breakdown now going on is the result of the attempt to find taxpayer-funded alternatives and ex-husband-funded alternatives to fatherhood, the creation of which must always be one of society's primary responsibilities. The anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski said that if the family ever ceases to be the pivotal institution of society, we shall be confronted with a social catastrophe compared to which the French Revolution and the Bolshevik Revolution are insignificant.

There is no substitute for it. We should stop trying to find one and recognize that the weakness of today's family is the consequence of society's failure to support the father's role, the role most in need of society's support. The biological weakness of the father's role is not a reason for throwing fathers out of the family but a reason for strengthening their role within it.

A Georgia judge named Robert Noland routinely places children in the mother's custody when he tries a divorce case, and justifies what he does by saying, "I ain't never seen a calf following a bull. They always follow the cow. So I always give custody to the mamas." The reason Judge Noland never saw a calf following a bull is that cattle don't live in two-parent households. If we want to live like cattle, Judge Noland has the right idea.

--Daniel Amneus, Ph.D.
Men's Defense Association
Contributing Editor, The Liberator

For more information on either the National Center for Men or
the Men's Defense Association:

James Winston: [email protected]
Daniel Amneus: [email protected]

PS - Dr. Amneus is author of The Garbage Generation
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Same site...
 
Gato_Solo said:
85% of prisoners, 78% of high school dropouts, 82% of teenage girls who become pregnant, the majority of drug and alcohol abusers - all come from single-mother-headed households. Less than 1% of any of these categories come from single-father-headed households.
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Ok, Gato, I'm a father, and I think I'm a pretty good one, but what the hell is this? What percentage of the population comes from single father homes? A whole lot less than those that come from single mother homes, I'm sure. To use statistics this way to get what you want out of them is deplorable.
 
PuterTutor said:
Gato_Solo said:
85% of prisoners, 78% of high school dropouts, 82% of teenage girls who become pregnant, the majority of drug and alcohol abusers - all come from single-mother-headed households. Less than 1% of any of these categories come from single-father-headed households.
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Ok, Gato, I'm a father, and I think I'm a pretty good one, but what the hell is this? What percentage of the population comes from single father homes? A whole lot less than those that come from single mother homes, I'm sure. To use statistics this way to get what you want out of them is deplorable.
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I think what you're looking for is in bold-face now. Other than that, you'll have to read the whole article.
 
No, that's what I'm saying, they are saying that 85%, 78%, 82%, etc of criminals, teenage pregnant girls, etc. are coming from single mother homes, and then less than 1% of any of those categories come from single father homes.

The point I'm saying is, less that 1% of ALL people come from single father homes. So to say that they are any better is foolish.
 
Well...I did say it was a biased site...

However, these afflictions were surprisingly uncommon in the 15% of single-parent households headed by men.
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In other words, you have, let's say, 100 families. 50% are both parents, 35% are single mothers, and 15% are single fathers. Try that breakdown, if you would. The quote comes from the first article I posted...
 
15% ?

That's alot more than I thought it would be. I still think they are twisting the stats to favor them, they are more than willing to throw numbers out for what the single mothers do, but only use vague terms when referring to single father households.

I should mention, as I said, I am a father, and I think I could be a damn fine single father, however, I also feel my wife could be a damn fine single mother as well, without turning the children into psychopaths.

Getting back to the topic, though. You said:
Also notice the words stepfather and mother. Just another reason why fathers are better parents...
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I disagree with this, fathers are not better parents, they are half of a parent team. I'm not so idealistic to say that parents should stay together for the sake of the children, what I'm saying is, no matter who gets the children, it's the fathers that run off, and never see their children again, or likewise, mothers that won't let the fathers see their children regularly that are the problem. And if your statistics included those kind of situations, where a father isn't around at all, whether by choice of mother or father, you would see that most of the problem children are coming from those situations.
 
According to that study, those were included. As faras I am concerned, my kids come first. My kids know this. They're mother, my ex, feels differently. I still have contact, much to her chagrin, and I will always have that contact. I'll ask you this much, though...

How many fathers per year kill their own children?
How many mothers a year kill their own children?
How many step-fathers kill children?
How many step-mother's kill children?

What are the facts in each case?

You can't compile that much data and still have 100% accuracy, so we rely on statistics from the justice department. Biological drives will also play a part. If you and your wife, God forbid, divorce, and she remarries, then her new husband will be less likely to care for your children as he would his own. I'm not saying abuse, but the spectre is there if you want it to be. You, as the biological father, have a vested interest in continuing your blood-line...the new guy may not. Your *ex*-wife, providing she can still bear children, will still be able to continue her line through the new guy. Makes it more simple, doesn't it?
 
PuterTutor...go here and read pages 3, 4, and 5. As this is from the US Justice Department, I'm assuming that there is no bias. Note the word assume.
 
Page 4

Parents are responsible for 60 percent of all crimes, Stepparents and parent's boyfriends and girlfriends account for another 19 percent. Males are considerably more likely than females (73 percent versus 27 percent) to be perpetrators. This gender difference holds true even among babysitter offenders, although males are much less likely than females to be babysitters. Biological fathers account for two-fifths (41 percent) of all offenders, and step-fathers and parents' boyfriends account for nearly one-fifth (18 percent). Men account for 92 percent of caretaker sex assault, 67 percent of aggravated assault, 68 percent of simple assault, and 58 percent of kidnapping offenders.
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Seems to me that the men are the ones with the problem here, and the natural fathers are the worst of the lot. True, the 18 percent from step-fathers, or boyfriends is disturbing, but 41% from biological fathers.
 
You must also remember that these are from homes which also have other types of domestic violence. If there is abuse already, the results are not as disturbing, but, alas, all of the other sites were wildly biased against fathers or against mothers. I do find it strange that you will take the latest statistics at face value, and dismiss the earlier ones out-of-hand. True, one is from a father's rights website, but statistics are statistics. Perhaps the later one better fits your view on the topic. (That was not a slight on your character). Perhaps you'll agree that the topic is quite difficult to find the truth to.

How about this...

In 100 homes where domestic abuse of children is present,
Biological fathers are responsible for 41 cases...
Biological mothers are responsible for 39 cases...
Step-fathers/boyfriends are responsible for 18 cases...
Step-mothers/girlfriends are responsible for 2 cases...

That means...

A child is safer with a biological father and step-mother than with a biological mother and step-father...Do the math... ;)
 
True, les. But remember, those stats from the Justice Department were taken from homes with violence already present. Only a very small percentage of homes actually suffer through domestic violence...Reported or not...which is why the definition of domestic violence is always changing. Did you know that a raised voice and pointing fingers is enough to qualify for DV in most states of the US and a few provinces in CA now?
 
Leslie said:
lol if you look at it that way, they're safest with no man around at all :p
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Unfortanatly, I think there may have more truth to that than you realize.

You are right, Gato. I do like statistics that match my beliefs better. But on the whole, I would also trust the Department of Justices statistics more than I would trust statistics from a special interest group.
 
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