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Bitter BM's Library Of LIES!!

Mrs. Behavin in TX's picture

First, let me apologize for the length of this post/rant. I came across this website called "The Liz Library" while looking for new articles and studies on PAS. It seemed to have a lot of keywords that contained information on topics like PAS, Father's Rights, Custody Stepparents, etc... I thought it might be helpful so I clicked on the site and scanned through some of the "reports" and "facts". Boy was I WRONG! This site is basically just a collection of biased "facts" according to some bitter BM named Liz. Here's the website: http://www.thelizlibrary.org/index.html

I can't even begin to describe the fairy-tales being masquaraded as actual data statistics. It's just sick. Maybe I am misunderstanding something, but I am pretty sure that it's nothing more than a site encouraging divorced wome to downplay and minimize the role of their ex-husband and father of their children and to limit his involvement with his own children!!

One example this Liz woman quotes is a so-called professional counselor that states:

'Personally, I think a lot of children would be better off if we encouraged and allowed them to view their fathers as more like uncle figures.'

Um..WTF!?!?! HUH!?!?

Liz also has a section devoted to "Myths And Facts". Here a few of her myths and facts that really ENRAGED me:

MOTHER ABSENCE: THE MYTHS AND THE FACTS

Myth -- Studies have shown that nonmaternal care, e.g. daycare, has no ill effects.

Fact: Nonmaternal care of babies and preschool children has been linked to behavioral problems at older ages.

Fact: Research indicates that maternal deprivation may have long-term negative physical consequences on the development of infants and young children.

Myth -- Stepmothers are acceptable substitutes for children's real mothers. [This is the cherished belief of many re-coupled nonprimary caregiving fathers who seek custody, and also of the custody evaluators who indulge them.]

Fact: "The most important relationship in a child's life is the attachment to his or her primary caregiver, optimally, the mother. This is due to the fact that this first relationship determines the biological and emotional 'template' for all future relationships. Healthy attachment to the mother built by repetitive bonding experiences during infancy provides the solid foundation for future healthy relationships. In contrast, problems with bonding and attachment can lead to a fragile biological and emotional foundation for future relationships."

Fact: "It has been consistently found that stepfamilies are not as close as nuclear families (Kennedy, 1985; Pill, 1990) and that stepparent-stepchild relationships are not as emotionally close as parent-child relationships (Ganong & Coleman, 1986; Hetherington & Chlingempeel, 1992, Hobart, 1989) Many clinicians and researchers assume that stepfamilies tend to become closer over time. However, previous longitudinal studies conducted on stepfamilies have found little empirical support for this (Hetherington & Clingempeel, 1992; Kurdek, 1991).

Fact: "The one most significant factor that neutralizes the advantages of remarrying is the psychological dilemma the child goes through over whom to love. The child seems to be polarized, for example, between loving the woman (the mother) who is now, as it usually happens, hated by the father, and the new woman (the stepmother) whom the father deeply loves. Virginia Rutter describes this conflict as "divided loyalty". She further explains that the child feels torn because their parents are pulling them in opposite directions. The symptoms of this divided royalty are that they brew up bad behavior or depression, a forced psychological path to resolve the conflict between the parents (Rutter). On the other hand children whose parents remain single do not experience this because no new figure (stepparent) is introduced to trigger that psychological trauma."

Fact: "Adolescents, however, would rather separate from the family as they form their own identities. "The developmental needs of the adolescent are at odds with the developmental push of the new stepfamily for closeness and bonding,".

Fact: "Only about 20% of adult stepkids feel close to their stepmoms, says the pioneering work of E. Mavis Hetherington involving 1,400 families of divorce, some studied almost 30 years. 'The competition between non-custodial mothers and stepmothers was remarkably enduring," she writes in For Better or For Worse: Divorce Reconsidered. 'Only about one-third of adult children think of stepmoms as parents,' suggests Constance Ahrons' 20-year research project. Half regard their stepdads as parents. About 48% of those whose moms had remarried were happy with the new union. Only 29% of those whose dads had remarried liked the idea of a stepmom.'

Fact: "Stepmothers are also found to be more problematic in their relationships with stepchildren; while children, particularly girls, also experience higher stress when they are living with their stepmothers. (Jacobson, 1987 in Visher & Visher, 1993). Visher & Visher (1979) suggested that teenage daughters identify strongly with their mothers and resent any woman who replaces their mother for the father's affection.

Michael Lamb says that fatherlessness is not really a risk. It's about the relationship with the caregiving parent, the level of support a child receives, and the harmoniousness of the environment.

Fact: "Children raised in families with stepmothers are likely to have less health care, less education and less money spent on their food than children raised by their biological mothers, three studies by a Princeton economist have found. The studies examined the care and resources that parents said they gave to children and did not assess the quality of the relationships or the parents' feelings and motives. But experts said that while the findings did not establish the image of the wicked stepmother as true, they supported the conclusion that, for complex reasons, stepmothers do invest less in children than biological mothers do, with fathers, to a large extent, leaving to women the responsibility for the family's welfare."

Fact: "[C]hildren experiencing multiple transitions, experiencing them later in childhood, and those living in stepfamilies fared poorly in comparison with those living their entire childhood in stable single-parent families or moving into two-parent families with biological or adoptive parents. Other studies show benefits of stable single-parent living arrangements for children's socioemotional adjustment and global wellbeing (Acock & Demo, 1994), and deleterious effects of multiple transitions (Capaldi & Patterson, 1991; Kurdek, Fine, & Sinclair, 1995), supporting a life-stress perspective."

Myth -- "The psychological literature indicates that children's overall adjustment following divorce does not differ between those living with custodial mothers versus custodial fathers. This finding holds true even with infants and young children." [Leighton E. Stamps, Ph.D. in Age Differences Among Judges Regarding Maternal Preference in Child Custody Decisions, referencing Mark Bornstein, HANDBOOK OF PARENTING (1995) http://aja.ncsc.dni.us/courtrv/cr38-4/CR38-4Stamps.pdf]

Fact: In a LaTrobe University therapeutic mediation study, McIntosh and Long found that the factors that most predicted children's poor emotional well-being one year after initial measurements were father's lower education, high conflict, shared care, and [a component of shared care] mother's low emotional availability during the year. Nonpredictors of children's emotional well-being included the mother's education, the amount of time since the parents' separation, and the father's relationship or closeness with the child.

Fact: Adolescents in single-father families report the highest level of delinquency, followed by those in father-stepmother families. The gender of the single parent is significant; adolescents from single-father families are more delinquent than are those from single-mother families. Single-father families are characterized by somewhat lower levels of direct and indirect parental controls than are single-mother families.

Myth -- Mother-absence is no different from father-absence; it's a single-parent family, and "gender" of the parent is irrelevant.

Fact: Boys living with their mothers scored significantly higher in scholastic, athletic and physical domains. In reading and spelling, girls living with their mother outperformed both girls and boys living with their father. In spelling, boys living with their mother outperformed both girls and boys living with their father. In other words, boys and girls raised by their father did not perform as well in academic areas as did the boys and girls from mother-resident families."

Fact: Losing a mother is more detrimental to children than losing a father. "The role of a mother in African families is even more essential to the well-being of a child than the role played by the breadwinner father, according to a study published in the latest issue of the journal Demography. The Oxford University research team found that if a child loses their mother before they are 15 years old, that child is likely to be shorter in height, poorer and have less schooling as than those who live with their mothers until that age. They discovered that motherless orphans were nearly two centimetres shorter, had a year less of schooling and were likely to be 8.5 per cent poorer over the course of their lifetime. Although children who lost their father were also found to have a lower final height and receive less schooling, this could not be directly linked to the death of the child's father. "

Fact: Gender may be irrelevant, but motherhood isn't. "...children residing without biological mothers fare worse than those without biological fathers, across most outcomes. In addition, only longitudinal measures of mother absence directly influence school outcomes. The time lived away from the biological mother is related to adolescents' grades and school discipline, while the number of mother changes significantly reduces adolescents' college expectations."

Fact: "Using data from four national surveys, Biblarz and Raftery (1999) show that mother-absence is much more detrimental than father-absence to children's educational and occupational attainment. They find that once parents' socioeconomic status is taken into account, children raised by single mothers are much better off than children raised by single fathers or fathers and stepmothers, and are just as likely to succeed as children raised by both birth parents. Biblarz and Raftery conclude that the pattern of effects across family types and over time is consistent with an evolutionary perspective which emphasizes the importance of the birth mother in the provision of children's resources (Trivers 1972). According to this view, children raised by their birth mothers do better than children raised apart from their birth mothers. Furthermore, being raised by a single birth mother is better than being raised by a birth mother and step-father since step-fathers compete with children for mother's time and lower maternal investment."

Fact: "Recent work on the determinants of children's human capital investments suggests that the absence of a child's birth mother puts the child at risk. Given mothers' greater involvement in school activities, biological mother absence may have a more negative influence than biological father absence. Those investments that are typically made by a child's mother -- in food, health, and education, for example -- are made at a lower level when the child is raised by a non-birth mother."

Fact: "Children's residing in father-stepmother households, which suggests that the re-marriage may present even greater difficulties for male children than father absence."

Myth -- Stepfathers are less engaged with their stepchildren than biological fathers are with their own offspring, and are more likely to injure or kill the children with whom they reside than are biological fathers.

Myth -- "Fatherlessness" places children at risk of numerous developmental problems.

Fact: "Likewise, the controversial family structure studies that Hart cites which suggest differences in fathers' and mothers' contributions to child development are irrelevant and flawed. For example... data that finds that delinquency is twice as high in cases where the father is absent than when he is present... no such problem has been found in studies of lesbian two-parent families. Thus, we can safely deduce that the elevated rate of delinquency does not result from 'fatherlessness'... recent evidence suggests that delinquency rates are lower when the mother is alone with her son than when she has invited another man to live with her... such negative outcomes are even less common when she has invited a woman to live with her (Tasker and Golombok 1997; Brewaeys et al. 1997). The clear implication is that what places children at risk is not fatherlessness but the absence of the resources that a QUALIFIED second parent (bio mother) can provide...

Fact: Mother-absence is what places children at risk. "Socioeconomic attainments of the respondents correlated significantly with what the researchers call a "Distance From Mother" scale, which calculated the number of obstacles between a child and those maternal contributions. The greater the number of obstacles, the lower the respondent's socioeconomic status ranking... Compared to children raised by single mothers or both biological parents, men from nontraditional family backgrounds other than mother-headed households are almost twice as likely to occupy the lowest occupational stratum..."

Fact: "New partners had little effect on mothers... For fathers, however, cohabiting or visiting with a new partner had a particularly detrimental effect on positive engagement [with their own children]... The difference between single fathers and those who had a new romantic partner is noteworthy, given that both groups were similar in that they lived apart from their child and did not have a romantic relationship with the biological mother... Fathers with a new partner who were engaging less in their children provide an interesting contrast to the result that mothers with a new cohabiting partner reported them to be higher than married, cohabiting, or visiting fathers on positive engagement and instrumental support. In essence, fathers with a new partner were interacting less with their children, yet men who found themselves thrust into the father role were interacting more."

Myth -- Single fathers who have more money than single mothers will be better providers of material necessities and advantages for children.

Fact: Children living with custodial fathers are more likely to be without medical insurance.

Fact: Single fathers spend more money than single mothers on eating out, alcohol ,and tobacco, and they spend less on children's education. They also spend a larger portion of their total expenditures on eating out, alcohol, tobacco, and recreation, and a smaller share on children's education.

Myth -- Post-divorce, children do just as well emotionally in father-custody as in mother-custody.

Fact: Remarried custodial fathers are no more involved with their children than they were when married to the children's mothers; while somewhat more involved when still single, when married, they revert back into a pattern of letting the mother-figure in the household rear the children. "Repartnered resident fathers are located in the multidimensional space about halfway between unpartnered resident fathers and resident fathers who are married to resident mothers, indicating that repartnering may pull resident fathers back toward the parenting patterns seen in biological two-parent families."

Fact: Notwithstanding widespread media disinformation conflating children in mother and father custody as generally suffering detriment that was attributed to their custodial parent's relocation, the actual numbers from Sanford Braver's study of college freshman from divorced families indicated that the most well-adjusted and satisfied children were those in the custody of their mothers whose fathers moved away. Children in the custody of their fathers scored significantly lower on personal and emotional well adjustment than children who remained in the custody of their mothers, had significantly more hostility, and ranked lowest of all groups in general life satisfaction.

Myth -- Mothers perpetrate more child abuse than fathers, which is one reason that children are at more risk of abuse in father-absent homes.

Fact: "Children living with their only their mothers experienced maltreatment under the Harm Standard at a rate of 26.1 per 1,000 children. Children living with only their fathers: 36.6 per 1,000."

Fact: PHYSICAL ABUSE: Children living with only their mothers: 6.4 per 1,000 children. Children living with only their fathers: 10.5 per 1,000 children. "When specific types of abuse under the Harm Standard are examined, it is apparent that the findings described in the previous paragraph stem from the disproportionate incidence of physical abuse among children in father-only households..."

Fact: NEGLECT: Children living with only their mothers: 16.7 per 1,000 children. Children living with only their fathers: 21.9 per 1,000 children.

Fact: EMOTIONAL NEGLECT: Children living with only their mothers: 3.4 per 1,000 children. Children living with only their fathers: 8.8 per 1,000 children.

Fact: SERIOUS INJURIES: Children living with only their mothers: 10.0 per 1,000 children. Children living with only their fathers: 14.0 per 1,000.

Fact: MODERATE INJURIES: Children living with only their mothers: 14.7 per 1,000 children. Children living with only their fathers: 20.5 per 1,000.

Fact: ALL MALTREATMENT: Children living with only their mothers: 50.1 per 1,000 children. Children living with only their fathers: 65.6 per 1,000.

Fact: ALL ABUSE: Children living with only their mothers: 18.1 per 1,000 children. Children living only with their fathers: 31.0 per 1,000."

Myth -- "Equality under the law" means that men and women are the same in all ways.

Fact: "Equality" under the law means that WHEN men and women are the same in all ways, the law will treat them that way, and that when they are not, the law will not default to what is characteristic of "man" as the standard. Thus, "equality under the law" means more than merely consideration of each person as an individual. It also means that that "consideration" will not be cast in terms of standards and rights that can attain only to non-gestating human beings. The law will not determine what is "reasonable" with reference solely to what would be "reasonable for a man;" the law will not determine what is "just" by reference solely to what could be "achievable by someone who cannot gestate;" and the law will not ignore reproductive differences between mothers and fathers where they do indeed exist and have effect.
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AGHHHH! Basically this dumb ass-hat is saying that Stepmothers and Bio Fathers are inferior and unqualified?!?!?!

Jsmom's picture

Couldn't read it all. Made me want to punch someone. Again we are cast aside as having no purpose...

disneymom78's picture

Sounds like another delusional BM with WAY to much time on her hands... Probably aint got a job and sitting around updating her blog all day...

they8ntmine's picture

FACT: This is one crazy lady!!!! (stated by They8ntmine 2010)

I wanted to go into more that made me mad!! But I'm just so hot right now about this ladies statements...

I am really big into father's rights as my dad raised me and my sisters and he did one hell of a job!!!

Mrs. Behavin in TX's picture

I know, when I read some of her crap "facts" I wanted to punch her out as well! Here's the SCARIEST thing: I think she is actually IN the legal field :jawdrop:

StepMadre's picture

I started reading this and got so upset I had to stop! What a psycho!!! I guess anyone can put anything on the internet and some fool will believe them, but omigod! This woman has some serious issues! I forwarded the site to my mom (a counselor) and she was horrified and showed it to her colleagues (two of whom work specifically with troubled children) and they were all disgusted and shocked. To "Liz:" Eight psychologists and counselors (six of which have Ph.D's) think you're deranged and need extreme therapy. They were most upset, as am I, at the thought that naive people might actually think this woman knows what she's talking about and that those are real statistics!! I guess it's "Make Up Your Own Statistics and Facts Day." Did you know that one in five lawyers has a fetish for purple socks? Oh, and you have twice the chance of being run over by an elephant on roller skates as you do being slapped by a bearded lady while driving your own car? True facts! I just made them up and that makes them true. Here's one more: Five out of five BMs are crazy bitches who should have been sterilized at birth.
(to be clear, i'm joking about psycho BMs, not the normal ones)

they8ntmine's picture

thanku stepmadre.. Elephants have been skating rampantly in our neighborhood, I will now be more careful!!!

Mrs. Behavin in TX's picture

What makes me sick is that she is citing all of these professional publications that supposedly support her "facts". In reality though, she is twisting their words and taking their statements out of context to match her psychotic agenda.

P.S. If you click on the bottom link that says website maintained by... it takes you to this hypocritical and ironic mission statement of hers: Honesty On the Internet. Haha, yeah that's a damn joke! http://www.thelizlibrary.org/site-index/site-index-frame.html#soulhttp:/...

keepinit2gether's picture

Tasker and Golombok 1997;Brewaeys et al. 1997...

I looked this up and the study was on children born in fatherless homes from infancy....but having lesbian parents. Funny thing is most lesbian couples have a fem and a masc.Which means one woman takes on the role of father. So if this study was done today it would not be considered fact. This woman may be in the legal field but im sure her only fans or supporters are bitter ex wives. I also found it pretty funny that her facts and resources are all radically out dated and only from one area.

Most of these papers and studies she pulled words from were done in a time where divorce a scandal and being gay was unacceptable. Times have certainly changed. Gay men and women are now legally able to adopt(that tips the scale big time. There are more divorces and step parent scenarios. Kids are exposed to these things much earlier, so even though tough its not unheard of or a culture shock. Mothers work and more mothers are allowing fathers to take on full time care giving. More young girls are having babies who grow up only knowing two families. These studies are not accurate. Even for those times though because the studies didnt include close relatives or individuals involved daily. Who is to say these single mothers didnt have their own father in the home? or the lesbian couple didnt have a brother who came everyday and taught the son to pee like a man? Or the gay men couple didnt have a full time nanny who nurtured the child as her own. None of these factors have been included. Whether people want to deny it or not. You do not have to give birth to be someones mother or sperm to be a father. All this article does is play into a divorced woman with a personality disorder irrational mind set. For exes to act the way they do they have to have a mental illness or two!