Kids are our responsibility
CASES of child maintenance after couples separate are most common at the courts.
Men constantly offer peanuts for the upkeep of the children they fathered.
It is common to see headlines reading: “Man offers $20 for three kids”, or something along those lines.
That is unfortunate because these men are accepting the fact that they are the fathers of these children yet they refuse to take care of them because they are no longer in good books with their mother.
While it is understandable that someone can have irreparable differences with their wife or lover, there can never be a good reason for anyone to neglect their children because of those differences.
Your children are your responsibility as a man no matter how much they disgust you or how much you hate their mother.
It is advisable to continue loving your children and do your best to nurture them into responsible adults that will not separate from their mates and make their children live under a single parent.
It is wise for a man not to wait to be dragged to court over maintenance because the parental love in him should push him to naturally provide for them.
That there is the potential for the children’s mother to also benefit from the money or even abuse it as the guardian in charge is a fact that men can do very little about.
Men must realise that if maintenance money was to be used strictly by their children whilst their mother suffers, the children will also not be happy.
A suffering mother is angry and an angry mother will make life unbearable to her children and this can even affect their attitude towards important things in life such as education.
So, even after separation, men must be prepared to cater for the welfare of not only their children, but the mother who is taking care of them.
However, women must not take advantage of the privileges that come with being the guardians in charge.
They must prove to be loving parents just the same way men would have proved to be responsible by paying maintenance.
They must not only ensure that maintenance money is used for their children’s benefit, but also play a role to provide for those children in whatever way they can.
The worst mother is one that sits on her laurels and waits for her ex to pay maintenance for the children, taking the money as a salary or pension of some sort.
Most children lose respect for such mothers and encourage other women to separate from their husbands so they can earn that shameful salary.
There is a good number of couples that separated, but still play their roles as responsible parents with mutual respect for each other.