General Chat

I'm watching this programme about women who leave a relationship and leave their children behind

Men do this all the time and don't get slated for it, why make a whole programme about women who do what men have been doing for ever.....

It's called double standards. People seem to see it as perfectly acceptable for a man to leave the children with their ex but not a woman. It doesn't seem to occur to them that sometimes leaving a child/ren in the home that they know, if only for a short time while they get themselves sorted out with a place to live might actually be best for the child/ren.

Things are changing, I remember reading an article in a magazine a few months ago. It was about women who had lost custody of their children because they were the breadwinners and their husbands were the ones who looked after the children, or at least took charge of the childcare arrangements. Attitudes are taking longer to catch up.

I don't think that the person who leaves (man or woman) is necessarily selfish, just because they leave their kids behind. There could be many reasons why they do. After all is it right to drag your children away from a safe, secure (although not happy) home where everything is familiar to them and replace it with, for example, a life of living in someone elses home and sleeping on the settee indefinitely. There are, of course, exceptions to this but, to me at least, others will disagree, it is better to find another home, and possibly a job, before even thinking of uprooting the children and even then it's not always best for the children to then move them out of their home, each case has to be taken on its own merits.

Of course there are some selfish ones out there (again men and women) but not all.

my lovely daughter in law left her controlling workshy ex along with her two children, boys aged 15 and 17. She left him the house as well, everything paid up to date and out of £7,000 in the bank account she took £2,000. She also left hum with a thriving taxi business. She left the boys because she had nowhere to go, plus they were near their school and had their friends. Within six months her husband had lost the business, the house was repossessed and he and the boys moved to family and then to a run down grotty council estate. He blamed everything on her and alienated the two boys by filling their heads with a load of lies about her. Fortunately the youngest has been in contact and is now living with her and my son - although he's 21, but a bit naive. Never once has she uttered a word to him to blacken his father's name and boy, does she have some words. However, she was villified by her friends for leaving the boys - as you say - double standards

Any particular "typical woman"