Maggie Gallagher recounts an Amtrak conversation with a college student:
“Kids just accept whatever their family situation is. It doesn’t matter,” Matthew told me. After all, he was raised by a single mom and doing just fine.
Sure, he was doing fine, in a lot of ways.
But then I pulled out my big gun: “What about you?” I asked him. “Do you think you’ll matter to your kids?”
Matthew seemed taken aback by the question. Obviously he had never looked at it from that perspective. He thought for a moment and then followed his train of thought to the only logical conclusion — a train wreck:
“No,” he said. “Not really.”
Abandon your kids early enough, he implied, and fatherlessness is all they know. They won’t need you. Kids adjust.
Read Maggie’s whole piece here.