Except for 40 years of social scientific consensus on child outcomes on every measured indicator of child well being..

(????)

Your scenarios aren’t nothing, but they’re precious little. The advice-giving you’ve described probably amounts to about an hour over 18 years and is perfectly feasible to outsource in any case. And while you could probably round up further examples, you’ve already hit the highlights, so the rest will be rather less deeply personal and even easier to outsource. After all, it’s not that you don’t want kids to have access to trusted adults with useful experiences who can give authoritative advice. It’s just that I don’t see that a case has been made that gender is nearly so pervasive an issue that you need a full-time live-in advisor.

For example, you want kids to be exposed to music and sport, but you don’t ban people with tin ears from having kids because they can’t teach their kids about music – you make it easy for them to outsource that bit. And, to take a more pointed example, the majority of gay kids are born to straight couples, so a responsible straight couple would naturally ensure that their kids have access to responsible gay adults who if the need arises could advise on gay-specific issues from a position of experience. But there’s no way that that needs to be a full-time job and in the same way there’s no reason to think that the gender-specific component of parenting needs to be full-time either.

They tend to try and force the discussion into a sort of “list” mentality. In this way they can undermine the “list” by claiming this or that other gender could physically do the job.

I’m afraid however the importance of natural Mothers & Fathers is much more sublime, and even sublimely obvious.

In this regard I am thinking of various empirical studies. One points to the fact that young women who have their married father in the home actually experience their first period (menstruation) later in life. Here we have an actual measurable physiological phenomena linked to father presence. If something so physiological can be measured imagine the infinitely more subtle aspects of socialization, psychology, emotion, spirituality, esteem, and love.

OR
Social scientists (and casual observers) have noted that young men raised in environments without constant positive (married) Father presence will group together and engage in #1. Acts of ritual violence #2. Sexual predatory patterns.

Essentially gang activity.

On this score I have much more to say (being a man & a son to a Father) My Father stands as a towering figure in my life. Someone who I constantly check and re-check my own life by and through. Absent fathers still maintain this role. With the exception that they teach the majority of their sons that a man is not required to be a husband to the mother of his child nor a father to his sons and daughters.

And so repeats the process of perpetual; child abandonment among the nations back and poor.