Walsh: I’ve heard people talking about the family structure. How do you address that… as a Congressional Representative, how do you address something that is… family means something different to everyone you talk to?
If I just keep talking, I might bump into some words that make sense….
Tapio: The traditional family where there’s a mother and a father and children being raised has historically been the best way to pass on information from one generation to the next. That’s the most natural, the nuclear family, right? Now not all families meet that criterion, but that is the standard that we want to encourage. Single parents have a more difficult time teaching the understanding of each gender… that comes to the table. So somebody has to teach children how electricity works, how the internal combustion engine works, and how just things work. Usually that falls to the guy, right? The female talks about family structure and generally some sort of a nurturing role in the raising of the children. If you don’t have that when you’re raising children, it becomes more difficult.
Also, if you take away the idea that there needs to be some sort of a moral instruction being taught, and if you don’t have a moral instruction being taught and it’s not taught in the house or the home and it’s not taught in schools, then you don’t really have this community or some sort of a hope and purpose
Walsh: Do you think those gender roles are somewhat dated, as you talk about the mother being the nurturing person and the father’s going to teach you about the combustion engine, do you think positioning it like that feels a little out of date with where we are as women in the society right now for example, and as men, as men have a greater impact into raising their children than maybe they did when our dads were dealing with us as infants?
Tapio: I can understand why you would ask that question, but the natural—it gets into a… how you look at the world. At the end of the day, the female bears the child, the closest connection to a child, the child needs the loving arms of a mother. And there’s a connection there, would you disagree with that?
Walsh: I think a child needs the loving arms of an adult. I don’t know that it has to be the mother versus the father.
Tapio: Do you have children?
Walsh: I do.
Tapio: Do you feel like you have a closer connection to your nurturing side of your children than your husband does?
Walsh: I have one child, and… I think we have different relationships, but it’s also based on her personality as well, as far as which parent she… connects with on certain days for certain things. Do you have children?
Tapio: I don’t. I don’t. But I have thought about this. This is a very long conversation, but there are specific needs that children have. The biggest problem when you have—everybody wants to belong. Everybody wants to have an understanding of how they fit into the past and present…. No matter how far you go in life you’re always tethered to your nuclear family, the people that kind of brought you into this world. It’s really what gives you some sort of grounding and roots…. It holds the trunk of life, you know? And if you take that away from people, it could cause some damage, and I really would caution people to—there’s a need for a husband and a wife, or a mother and a father to provide different… types of instruction to a child, because a child wants to, they need to have a relationship with a father. If you take that relationship out of a relationship for a girl, it will change the way her life is when it comes to her adult life [Lori Walsh interviewing Neal Tapio, transcribed from SDPB Radio, 2018.04.23, audio file #1, timestamp ~12:55].
Walsh served in the Marines, so surely she’s had to grit her teeth through worse situations. But I am impressed by the composure she kept as Neal Tapio, non-parent, tried to tell her how to raise her child.
I literally held my breath while I read this. As a single mother of a boy in the 60’s, I think I did a fine job raising a wonderful man, also a Marine by the way. Reading this was like waking up on the Ozzie and Harriet show.
Mike Henriksen
2018-04-24 11:32
1955 called, and even THEY don’t want him back!
Roger Cornelius
2018-04-24 12:03
Sheila,
You beat me to it, I was going to say Tapio is stuck in the era of “Leave it to Beaver”.
It is obvious that Tapio has no sense of family diversity in the year 2018. We can all hope that a child will be raised by a loving mother and father, but that isn’t the reality.
Aside from the traditional family that Tapio sees, we likely have as many single parent (both women and men) raising children. In recent years we have many lesbian and gay couples that are raising children. Unfortunately, there are more and more grandparents raising children and doing a good job.
When we talk about family and raising children we have to be inclusive.
Porter Lansing
2018-04-24 12:09
Hear, hear Roger. AND, the children raised in these diverse and inclusive families are the one’s taking on the GunHuggers, NRA/Putin and the “scared to death” conservative talk show hosts.
mike from iowa
2018-04-24 13:03
Do you have children?
Tapio: I don’t. I don’t. But I play a petulant child in the lege. So being a perfect parent would be natural for me.
Paul
2018-04-24 13:12
So many thoughts right now and the only one I dare put here is:
YOU CANNOT FIX STUPID, ignorance yes, STUPIDITY can’t be fixed. Tapio – you fit the stupidity column
grudgenutz
2018-04-24 14:08
Tapio: “But I have thought about this. This is a very long conversation, but there are specific needs that children have. The biggest problem when you have—everybody wants to belong. Everybody wants to have an understanding of how they fit into the past and present…. No matter how far you go in life you’re always tethered to your nuclear family, the people that kind of brought you into this world. It’s really what gives you some sort of grounding and roots…. It holds the trunk of life, you know? And if you take that away from people, it could cause some damage, and I really would caution people to—there’s a need for a husband and a wife, or a mother and a father to provide different… types of instruction to a child, because a child wants to, they need to have a relationship with a father. If you take that relationship out of a relationship for a girl, it will change the way her life is when it comes to her adult life.”
There were no words there that Tapio bumped into or that bumped into each other that made any sense.
Darrell Reifenrath
2018-04-24 14:20
The child he has is the one he sees when he looks in a mirror.
Ryan
2018-04-24 14:39
Yep, Neal sure likes to make it easy to pick on him for being ignorant.
On a side note, Roger C. got me curious about the current makeup of american families. Turns out that about 69% of children are raised in a home with two parents. So Roger’s comment about “…we likely have as many single parent (both women and men) raising children.” is not quite accurate, but I still think all the comments calling Tapio stupid are accurate.
Tapio’s comments make me think of a quote from Robin William’s character in Good Will Hunting regarding the difference between first-hand knowledge compared to second-hand (it’s a long quote, but brilliant):
“Michelangelo? You know a lot about him. Life’s work, political aspirations. Him and the pope. Sexual orientation. The whole works, right? I bet you can’t tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling. Seeing that. If I ask you about women, you’ll probably give me a syllabus of your personal favorites. You may have even been laid a few times. But you can’t tell me what it feels like to wake up next to a woman and feel truly happy. You’re a tough kid. I ask you about war, you’d probably throw Shakespeare at me, right? ‘Once more into the breach, dear friends.’ But you’ve never been near one. You’ve never held your best friend’s head in your lap and watch him gasp his last breath lookin’ to you for help. If I asked you about love, you’d probably quote me a sonnet, but you’ve never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable. Known someone that could level you with her eyes. Feelin’ like God put an angel on Earth just for you, who could rescue you from the depths of hell. And you wouldn’t know what it’s like to be her angel, to have that love for her be there forever. Through anything. Through cancer. And you wouldn’t know about sleepin’ sittin’ up in a hospital room for two months, holding her hand, because the doctors could see in your eyes that the terms ‘visiting hours’ don’t apply to you. You don’t know about real loss, ’cause that only occurs when you love something more than you love yourself. I doubt you’ve ever dared to love anybody that much.”
Tapio is a mouth speaking a message not worth listening to.
Charlene Lund
2018-04-24 15:01
I tuned in part way through the interview. I guessed it was Tapio talking. It was all I could do to keep the radio on – he was disgusting when talking about Islamism and the key tenets of killing and slavery if a person wants to leave. I sure hope he finds a time when he can no longer spout that BS. Luckily or planned, Lori had an interview with someone who had a broader and more tolerant view of the world and its people.
jerry
2018-04-24 15:10
What I like about Tapioca is that he is the real voice of the republican party as it now exists. If there was ever any doubt about how haters and traitors are, listen to Tapioca and you will then know the party. All of us should be grateful that this miserable individual is not a parent. He seems like the father who gave his kid back his guns so he could massacre innocent people having a meal at a Waffle House.
Well said jerry, this is now Trump’s republican party and with it comes so many monumental mistakes that republicans now have to accept.
The party of fiscal conservatives is dead with the obituary waiting to be written.
All across the country there are Tapio’s and Al Novotny’s running for political office on the coat tales of Trump with their hate and contempt for our Constitution and our form of government now being their enemy.
Roger Cornelius
2018-04-24 16:32
Cory,
That sounds about right, my comment was based pretty much on my observations of people I know.
Ryan
2018-04-24 16:38
Cory,
I saw some similar statistics. I think the one you just linked in particular gets bogged down by having so many variables, but if the point you are making is the image of the “normal” american family is evolving, I agree completely.
I know some people raised by single parents who grew up to be great adults. I know some people raised by straight, married couples who grew up to be pieces of crap. I don’t know off hand if I know anybody raised by a same-sex couple; nobody comes to mind.
For what it’s worth, in my own (sometimes) humble opinion, I think love and attention are the important factors in raising “good” humans, not the marital status, gender, sexual orientation, or divorce rates of the parents. It would appear to be easier for two-parent homes to provide the love and attention necessary to keep a kid’s head on straight, based on some of the statistics I saw for juvenile delinquencies and quality of life. I doubt a parent’s gender or sexual orientation matters.
It sort of seems intuitive – all other things being equal, the more “parent hours” a child gets in his or her formative years, the more likely the child is to be well-adjusted in his or her adult years. If a single parent has the ability to give a child enough love and attention, the child will be fine. If a married couple has neither the time nor the attention for their “normal” american family, their kids are doomed despite the apparent advantage (and so are the rest of us when we have to interact with those damaged kids).
Darin Larson
2018-04-24 17:12
If Tapio is the product of a nuclear family with a traditional upbringing, when do we start questioning (Like Trump) what the hell is going wrong?
Ryan
2018-04-24 17:16
Well put, Darin.
Britt Long
2018-04-24 17:41
I wonder what fathers did in the 4 or 5 million years of human life that preceded the internal combustion engine…………..
Ryan, right. The Pew stat shows that fewer families conform to the traditional template than don’t.
I do agree, speaking practically and generally, that two heads are better than one. Two hearts are better than one. Four hands are better than two. Even in our house, life is not quite as easy for my offspring when only one of us is home than when both of us are home. The more loving arms available to hug our little ones, the better.
The proper moral reaction to a single parent is not to say, “Hey, you’re a bad parent for being single. Why don’t you get married?” The proper moral reaction to a single parent is, “Let me help.”
Ryan
2018-04-24 20:10
Agreed, again. Unfortunately I think we both know that proper moral reactions are not exactly plentiful in Neal Tapio’s life.
T
2018-04-24 20:37
The “trunk of life” sometimes is bad root structure, just because there is a “tradional” nuclear family doesn’t exactly mean it is healthy. A need “for husband and wife” to provide different type of instruction?
Ya instruction like here son grab me a beer, while I hit your mother…….,
The answer isn’t his words
The answer is respectful nurturing
By a healthy nurturer
PS I had to google this interview
I didn’t believe it was real
Donald Pay
2018-04-24 21:28
Yeah, he’s kind of caught up in some fantasy of “the traditional family.” There is no such thing. Every family is different from every other family.
Still, I think fathers are very important, not because they can teach electricity. They are important because they have arms for hugging, too, and they can change diapers and they can tell funny stories at bedtime, and they can cook dinner, and they can go down to the pond and catch frogs and snakes and turtles, and they can make up games and play them till you can’t stand them, and they can be the patient when doctor daughter wants to put toothpaste on your back and they can bandage up a cut, and they can teach you how to ride a bike and they can teach you to drive, and they can go to the same kids movie several times and try not to fall asleep. Kids just want you to be there and be doing regular things with them. Yeah, the electricity question may come up. And the sex question. And the religion question. And dads have to try their best to answer. It’s not that moms don’t do that stuff, too.
Dads are all different, though, I guess. My dad wasn’t all that involved with my brother and me. Most dads in the 1950s were not that involved with the kids, other than being a sperm donor, and explaining about electricity. Thinking back, it was rather sad, and it put dads and sons and daughters in a position where they didn’t really know their fathers. I was determined to not be a “traditional” father, and I succeeded.
Anne Beal
2018-04-24 21:54
Why is it that stating the obvious, that the ideal family includes both biological parents, is taken to be offensive?
Why don’t you run your “Fathers-are-unnecessary” past the advocates of shared parenting? They will be the first to straighten you out on the subject.
Go ahead. Let’s get a public debate on the subject.
I’ll bring the popcorn.
Anne Beal
2018-04-24 22:17
This whole post wouldn’t bother me were it not for the fact that CAH has been a high school teacher, molding young minds, and now we find out he disparages the ideal of married parenthood. A math teacher, no less, who can’t do the math proving the fastest highway to a life of poverty is single motherhood? OMG.
Porter Lansing
2018-04-24 22:22
Go home, Anne. You’re drunk …
Roger Cornelius
2018-04-24 22:28
I had to reread Cory’s original thread and subsequent comments and no where could I find where “Cory disparages the ideal of married parenthood”.
Facts do matter.
Roger Cornelius
2018-04-24 22:31
Porter
Can you give a second opinion on how “Cory disparages the ideal of married parenthood”.
Having known Cory for sometime now, he seems to be the ideal of married parenthood.
Debbo
2018-04-24 22:35
I had plenty of things to say about this post, then I read all your most excellent comments and, well, yeah. All that.
Debbo
2018-04-24 22:37
Hahahahaha! Oh wait. She’s serious?
Anne, reading comprehension is obviously not your strong suit.
Porter Lansing
2018-04-24 22:38
Attacking a teacher for BS reasons crossed the line.
Dana P
2018-04-24 22:40
No Anne, that isn’t what Cory said. AND Mr Tapio was very specific in this interview about gender roles and what they “should” be.
Listening to this entire interview almost made me drive off the side of the road and into a ditch. Tapio is…… out there. Lori Walsh put it very nicely when she asked him if his gender role ideas are “outdated”.
Listening to Tapio go on and on about gender roles, sharia law, etc…….straight outta Handmaid’s Tale. He probably watches that series with much glee.
Lars Aanning
2018-04-25 00:29
The person whom Lori Walsh next interviewed appeared sane…
jerry
2018-04-25 02:35
“Go home Anne, you’re drunk” is giving more credit to spirits than should be given. The real culprit is jealousy. It looks as though Anne resents the fact that teachers in South Dakota are no longer the lowest paid in the country and it irks Anne and her ilk to no end. Annie is just like Tapioca and the rest of the haters and traitors of this country who have bought a stain across this great nation.
Porter Lansing
2018-04-25 04:54
Sure, Roger. When Senator Tapio says that a “nuclear family” is ideal, when less than half of today’s kids live in one, it’s horribly damaging to the development of those children. Are they to think they’re not normal? To think that others have more privilege than they? To think because even though their single Mom loves them unconditionally, works two jobs to give them what others have and tells them they’re special that they are in truth second class? Or because they have the love of two fathers that they don’t measure up to the judgement of Neal Tapio? No, Senator. Love is the answer. Not your demand that everyone live the life that you, in your holier than though, almighty powerful perfection deem socially correct.
But as I live it, I am also not so insecure that I have to blanket-disparage others who parent in different configurations.
It’s like with religion. I don’t need everyone else to be an atheist to affirm my choice not to believe or worship. I don’t have to puff myself up by shouting that everyone else is inferior to me.
I recognize there are many worldviews that can lead my neighbors to good moral civic behavior.
I recognize there are many ways to raise good, smart children.
I also recognize that my choice to raise a child in a monogamous, heterosexual, lifelong partnership does not guarantee that my child will be good and smart. My lifestyle choice is not a magical blessing; we still have to work at it.
Anne, if you want to criticize anyone, maybe you should criticize Tapio. What’s he doing not raising a child? Tell him to get his sperm in gear and start doing the real work of transferring information from generation to generation.
mike from iowa
2018-04-25 07:48
Did Fred Flintstone ever inhabit a bar like Homer Simpson?
Porter Lansing
2018-04-25 08:02
@MFI … Fred and Barney used to tip a few at the Bedrock secret society, the Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes.
Dicta
2018-04-25 08:22
“who can’t do the math proving the fastest highway to a life of poverty is single motherhood?”
And what sort of dunce can’t discern between correlation and causation? Couldn’t be any confounding factors here, no sir.
grudgenutz
2018-04-25 09:04
Whatever you do, whatever you say, do NOT encourage Neal to point his sperm toward a human egg.
JonD
2018-04-25 09:17
“when doctor daughter wants to put toothpaste on your back” Speaking as the single father of a now-grown little girl, that made me laugh! Thank you Donald Pay.
owen reitzel
2018-04-25 09:36
A good story here. Maybe Anne should read it. I’m with you Roger. I didn’t see where Cory bashed the traditional family.
I know my LGBT people in MN pretty darn well and this Tapio fellow maybe is just confused about his own sexuality. He has never been married and lived in Minneapolis for a time. Minneapolis is the San Francisco of the Midwest for the LGBT and is where many single people go to find themselves. I should go ask my gay boys and see what they think.
Jenny
2018-04-25 12:51
It’s just so obvious….. the people that talk most about gender roles and such……are usually…well, you know
Roger Cornelius
2018-04-25 12:53
As can be expected, Anne was on DWC last night spreading her ‘big lie’ that Cory disparages the ideal of married parenthood.
Porter Lansing
2018-04-25 12:58
Tapio ignores the sort of “Christian Sharia” being implemented by the conservatives in power. He ignores how conservative Christians who wish to ignore the law are being given permission to do it. He forgets that HE represents a faith with leaders who want to criminalize homosexuality, defund women’s health clinics, and lead Christian prayers in public schools.
If any of those other religions even suggested doing what Christians in the government are doing RIGHT NOW, maybe Tapio would have a point. Until then, he can’t even handle being in the same room as people who don’t share his beliefs because he thinks he’s surrounded by enemies. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2018/01/19/sd-republican-interfaith-dialogue-tears-at-the-christian-fabric-of-our-nation/
Jenny
2018-04-25 13:06
Cory would be the first one in SD to stand up for families without judging what kind of family you have, be it same sex, blended, traditional, one person only, Christian, Muslim, Jewish. Cory is the true patriot here! :)
Jenny
2018-04-25 13:12
There is nothing more beautiful then seeing two beautiful gay married men in MN raising children in my neighborhood and my neighbors not thinking anything of it. It is so commonplace here and I just love seeing the love this gay couple has for its children and very well-behaved children at that. :)
We’d better watch out—Donald Trump is on the edge of turning everybody into a nuclear family.
Roger Cornelius
2018-04-25 16:07
Trump – Watching Trump interact with French President Macron the past few days would make you think there was a real case of ‘puppy love’ happening between the two.
Holding hands, playing kissy, massaging each other under the guise of removing dandruff, was all just a little too cute.
grudgenutz
2018-04-25 18:03
They acted like a pair of dogs getting to know each other, each seeking to assert primacy.
Not that there’s anything wrong with being gay… although I wonder if Tapio’s worldview would say there is. After all, in Tapio’s view, a gay man without children would be failing to participate in the most natural and effective means of transferring information from generation to generation.
Anne Beal
2018-04-26 08:15
Tapio’s comments were long-winded and rambling. But he finally got to the point, perhaps missed by the readers here, (functional illiteracy is rampant among recent college graduates, according to a new study) when he said:
“…because a child wants to, they need to have a relationship with a father. If you take that relationship out of a relationship for a girl, it will change the way her life is when it comes to her adult life.”
Now that I have explained this to you, would the rest of you like to explain why you think that’s so fallacious?
Long-winded and rambling—agreed. Even the most literate readers would have trouble discerning Tapio’s point. Tapio bears the blame for any lack of clarity.
But he is clearly wallowing in an obsolete, sexist worldview.
The problem here is not a lack of functional literacy (though Tapio could use some lessons on functionally literate public speaking); it’s Anne’s fabrication of points that no one is making. No one here says that fathers are not important. No one here denies that good parents make a huge difference in a child’s life. But why is Tapio focusing on the influence of father figures on daughters? Why in his expansive ramble does he not also make time for the other three corners of that relationship square—moms to daughters, dads to sons, and moms to sons? Couple that dad-daughter line with the sexist combustion-engine line, and a functionally literate reader may responsibly conclude that Tapio is wallowing in out-of-date gender stereotypes and patriarchal fantasies of men saving girls from their feminine helplessness.
I thought I made myself clear above, but I’ll try again: I’m not denigrating anybody’s method of parenting. I don’t need to deem alternative family arrangements as fallacious to affirm my own family arrangement. Tapio’s fallacy is not his declaration that fathers can have positive influence on daughters or his claim that two parents can teach kids different things. His fallacy is his claim that his conception of proper child-rearing (rooted, don’t forget, in theory, not in practice) is superior to anyone else’s.
Ryan
2018-04-26 09:25
Funny how everyone wants to call out stereotyping, gender role idiocy, and racism when it’s Neal Tapio running his big dumb mouth about combustion engines and foreigners, but everyone defends the same behavior when somebody accuses white males of being terrorists.
As I mentioned several times, I think Tapio is dumb and his ideals are outdated at best, but aren’t the underlying facts he is using to prop up his stupidity true? There are likely many exceptions, but I bet Neal is right that educating children about the mechanics of “how just things work” usually does come from a father figure rather than a mother figure. And he is probably correct that family structure and the “nurturing” role does fall on the mother figure more often.
So what’s wrong with just stating facts, guys?
Or wait. Maybe it isn’t the “facts” you disagree with – maybe it’s his smug arrogance; maybe it’s his absolute lack of experience in the areas he talks about most; or maybe it’s his not-very-subtle attitude of bigotry and superiority over people different than him.
Yeah, that stuff bothers me, too.
Jenny
2018-04-26 10:23
To make your point even clearer, Cory. My dad was as traditional as can be and I wish he would have taught me things like carpentry, how to repair cars, how to drive a big combine! He just took the boys out in to learn that, not the daughters. I wish he would have rambunctiously played rough sports with me! I wish I could have seen him more often instead of working all the time. Instead I was stuck with a traditional household role of girls stay inside doing housework, cleaning and learning sewing (I hated it) , playing the piano (even when you’re not interested in piano) Girls miss a lot when not having the same opportunities as boys. Having a traditional father is actually similar to not having a father in a way, if you really think about it.
Jenny
2018-04-26 10:44
Having an old-fashioned traditional father is similar to not having a father at all. I need to stress the old-fashioned Ward Cleaver traditional two-parent so-called 1950s family where girls wore dressed and did the housework, cleaning and cooking. (This is my opinion and my opinion only, so people like Ann Beal won’t rush off and claim that I said having a father is bad for girls.) I had one of the those very traditional fathers and I can’t say it was very fun.
Donald Pay
2018-04-26 11:09
Ryan, Do men know how things work, or do they just think they know how things work and barge ahead? My experience with this question is that men are more likely to think they how things work and how to fix things that don’t, even though they don’t have a clue. Women know they don’t know, and they know the man doesn’t know, either, but no matter what the woman says, the man is going to go ahead and do what he is going to do. So, the man takes things apart, learns a little bit, maybe by accident he fixes something and learns a bit about how it works. Maybe he has to ask a friend, but he does try to fix it and learns something. The woman, of course, says, “Well, that took three days to fix and we could have just taken it to an expert and gotten it done in an hour.” Then the next time, the man says, “Here let me handle that. I can fix it.” And daughters get the impression that Dad is a mechanical wizard. I think men’s bullheadedness is good for something. We do eventually learn how to do stuff, because we don’t like to admit we’re incompetent. But let’s not kid ourselves that that trait doesn’t come with some drawbacks, too.
Ryan
2018-04-26 11:21
Donald, I must know different men and women than you know, however I wasn’t commenting on whether men have inborn knowledge of mechanics – I was commenting on whose role it more often is to help kids learn said mechanics.
But honestly, I was attempting to use sarcasm to show a double-standard in some of the comments on this blog regarding apparently acceptable stereotyping versus unacceptable stereotyping. There should be a sarcasm font, because it goes unnoticed online too often.
Roger Cornelius
2018-04-26 11:28
Anne Beal chastises and belittles DFP readers about their lack of literacy, yet it is Anne that said, “Cory, disparages the ideal of married parenthood”, Cory made no such reference or comment.
Anne was apparently homeschooled by Betsy DeVos.
I’m also hearing Tapio is having some trouble following election law about not placing signs near polling places. Anyone seeing Tapio signs too close to the courthouse?
I literally held my breath while I read this. As a single mother of a boy in the 60’s, I think I did a fine job raising a wonderful man, also a Marine by the way. Reading this was like waking up on the Ozzie and Harriet show.
1955 called, and even THEY don’t want him back!
Sheila,
You beat me to it, I was going to say Tapio is stuck in the era of “Leave it to Beaver”.
It is obvious that Tapio has no sense of family diversity in the year 2018. We can all hope that a child will be raised by a loving mother and father, but that isn’t the reality.
Aside from the traditional family that Tapio sees, we likely have as many single parent (both women and men) raising children. In recent years we have many lesbian and gay couples that are raising children. Unfortunately, there are more and more grandparents raising children and doing a good job.
When we talk about family and raising children we have to be inclusive.
Hear, hear Roger. AND, the children raised in these diverse and inclusive families are the one’s taking on the GunHuggers, NRA/Putin and the “scared to death” conservative talk show hosts.
Do you have children?
Tapio: I don’t. I don’t. But I play a petulant child in the lege. So being a perfect parent would be natural for me.
So many thoughts right now and the only one I dare put here is:
YOU CANNOT FIX STUPID, ignorance yes, STUPIDITY can’t be fixed. Tapio – you fit the stupidity column
Tapio: “But I have thought about this. This is a very long conversation, but there are specific needs that children have. The biggest problem when you have—everybody wants to belong. Everybody wants to have an understanding of how they fit into the past and present…. No matter how far you go in life you’re always tethered to your nuclear family, the people that kind of brought you into this world. It’s really what gives you some sort of grounding and roots…. It holds the trunk of life, you know? And if you take that away from people, it could cause some damage, and I really would caution people to—there’s a need for a husband and a wife, or a mother and a father to provide different… types of instruction to a child, because a child wants to, they need to have a relationship with a father. If you take that relationship out of a relationship for a girl, it will change the way her life is when it comes to her adult life.”
There were no words there that Tapio bumped into or that bumped into each other that made any sense.
The child he has is the one he sees when he looks in a mirror.
Yep, Neal sure likes to make it easy to pick on him for being ignorant.
On a side note, Roger C. got me curious about the current makeup of american families. Turns out that about 69% of children are raised in a home with two parents. So Roger’s comment about “…we likely have as many single parent (both women and men) raising children.” is not quite accurate, but I still think all the comments calling Tapio stupid are accurate.
Tapio’s comments make me think of a quote from Robin William’s character in Good Will Hunting regarding the difference between first-hand knowledge compared to second-hand (it’s a long quote, but brilliant):
“Michelangelo? You know a lot about him. Life’s work, political aspirations. Him and the pope. Sexual orientation. The whole works, right? I bet you can’t tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling. Seeing that. If I ask you about women, you’ll probably give me a syllabus of your personal favorites. You may have even been laid a few times. But you can’t tell me what it feels like to wake up next to a woman and feel truly happy. You’re a tough kid. I ask you about war, you’d probably throw Shakespeare at me, right? ‘Once more into the breach, dear friends.’ But you’ve never been near one. You’ve never held your best friend’s head in your lap and watch him gasp his last breath lookin’ to you for help. If I asked you about love, you’d probably quote me a sonnet, but you’ve never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable. Known someone that could level you with her eyes. Feelin’ like God put an angel on Earth just for you, who could rescue you from the depths of hell. And you wouldn’t know what it’s like to be her angel, to have that love for her be there forever. Through anything. Through cancer. And you wouldn’t know about sleepin’ sittin’ up in a hospital room for two months, holding her hand, because the doctors could see in your eyes that the terms ‘visiting hours’ don’t apply to you. You don’t know about real loss, ’cause that only occurs when you love something more than you love yourself. I doubt you’ve ever dared to love anybody that much.”
Tapio is a mouth speaking a message not worth listening to.
I tuned in part way through the interview. I guessed it was Tapio talking. It was all I could do to keep the radio on – he was disgusting when talking about Islamism and the key tenets of killing and slavery if a person wants to leave. I sure hope he finds a time when he can no longer spout that BS. Luckily or planned, Lori had an interview with someone who had a broader and more tolerant view of the world and its people.
What I like about Tapioca is that he is the real voice of the republican party as it now exists. If there was ever any doubt about how haters and traitors are, listen to Tapioca and you will then know the party. All of us should be grateful that this miserable individual is not a parent. He seems like the father who gave his kid back his guns so he could massacre innocent people having a meal at a Waffle House.
Ryan, Roger C., let’s add this midway statistic: in 2014, Pew Research reported, “Fewer than half (46%) of U.S. kids younger than 18 years of age are living in a home with two married heterosexual parents in their first marriage” down from 73% in 1960 and 61% in 1980.
Well said jerry, this is now Trump’s republican party and with it comes so many monumental mistakes that republicans now have to accept.
The party of fiscal conservatives is dead with the obituary waiting to be written.
All across the country there are Tapio’s and Al Novotny’s running for political office on the coat tales of Trump with their hate and contempt for our Constitution and our form of government now being their enemy.
Cory,
That sounds about right, my comment was based pretty much on my observations of people I know.
Cory,
I saw some similar statistics. I think the one you just linked in particular gets bogged down by having so many variables, but if the point you are making is the image of the “normal” american family is evolving, I agree completely.
I know some people raised by single parents who grew up to be great adults. I know some people raised by straight, married couples who grew up to be pieces of crap. I don’t know off hand if I know anybody raised by a same-sex couple; nobody comes to mind.
For what it’s worth, in my own (sometimes) humble opinion, I think love and attention are the important factors in raising “good” humans, not the marital status, gender, sexual orientation, or divorce rates of the parents. It would appear to be easier for two-parent homes to provide the love and attention necessary to keep a kid’s head on straight, based on some of the statistics I saw for juvenile delinquencies and quality of life. I doubt a parent’s gender or sexual orientation matters.
It sort of seems intuitive – all other things being equal, the more “parent hours” a child gets in his or her formative years, the more likely the child is to be well-adjusted in his or her adult years. If a single parent has the ability to give a child enough love and attention, the child will be fine. If a married couple has neither the time nor the attention for their “normal” american family, their kids are doomed despite the apparent advantage (and so are the rest of us when we have to interact with those damaged kids).
If Tapio is the product of a nuclear family with a traditional upbringing, when do we start questioning (Like Trump) what the hell is going wrong?
Well put, Darin.
I wonder what fathers did in the 4 or 5 million years of human life that preceded the internal combustion engine…………..
Ryan, right. The Pew stat shows that fewer families conform to the traditional template than don’t.
I do agree, speaking practically and generally, that two heads are better than one. Two hearts are better than one. Four hands are better than two. Even in our house, life is not quite as easy for my offspring when only one of us is home than when both of us are home. The more loving arms available to hug our little ones, the better.
The proper moral reaction to a single parent is not to say, “Hey, you’re a bad parent for being single. Why don’t you get married?” The proper moral reaction to a single parent is, “Let me help.”
Agreed, again. Unfortunately I think we both know that proper moral reactions are not exactly plentiful in Neal Tapio’s life.
The “trunk of life” sometimes is bad root structure, just because there is a “tradional” nuclear family doesn’t exactly mean it is healthy. A need “for husband and wife” to provide different type of instruction?
Ya instruction like here son grab me a beer, while I hit your mother…….,
The answer isn’t his words
The answer is respectful nurturing
By a healthy nurturer
PS I had to google this interview
I didn’t believe it was real
Yeah, he’s kind of caught up in some fantasy of “the traditional family.” There is no such thing. Every family is different from every other family.
Still, I think fathers are very important, not because they can teach electricity. They are important because they have arms for hugging, too, and they can change diapers and they can tell funny stories at bedtime, and they can cook dinner, and they can go down to the pond and catch frogs and snakes and turtles, and they can make up games and play them till you can’t stand them, and they can be the patient when doctor daughter wants to put toothpaste on your back and they can bandage up a cut, and they can teach you how to ride a bike and they can teach you to drive, and they can go to the same kids movie several times and try not to fall asleep. Kids just want you to be there and be doing regular things with them. Yeah, the electricity question may come up. And the sex question. And the religion question. And dads have to try their best to answer. It’s not that moms don’t do that stuff, too.
Dads are all different, though, I guess. My dad wasn’t all that involved with my brother and me. Most dads in the 1950s were not that involved with the kids, other than being a sperm donor, and explaining about electricity. Thinking back, it was rather sad, and it put dads and sons and daughters in a position where they didn’t really know their fathers. I was determined to not be a “traditional” father, and I succeeded.
Why is it that stating the obvious, that the ideal family includes both biological parents, is taken to be offensive?
Why don’t you run your “Fathers-are-unnecessary” past the advocates of shared parenting? They will be the first to straighten you out on the subject.
Go ahead. Let’s get a public debate on the subject.
I’ll bring the popcorn.
This whole post wouldn’t bother me were it not for the fact that CAH has been a high school teacher, molding young minds, and now we find out he disparages the ideal of married parenthood. A math teacher, no less, who can’t do the math proving the fastest highway to a life of poverty is single motherhood? OMG.
Go home, Anne. You’re drunk …
I had to reread Cory’s original thread and subsequent comments and no where could I find where “Cory disparages the ideal of married parenthood”.
Facts do matter.
Porter
Can you give a second opinion on how “Cory disparages the ideal of married parenthood”.
Having known Cory for sometime now, he seems to be the ideal of married parenthood.
I had plenty of things to say about this post, then I read all your most excellent comments and, well, yeah. All that.
Hahahahaha! Oh wait. She’s serious?
Anne, reading comprehension is obviously not your strong suit.
Attacking a teacher for BS reasons crossed the line.
No Anne, that isn’t what Cory said. AND Mr Tapio was very specific in this interview about gender roles and what they “should” be.
Listening to this entire interview almost made me drive off the side of the road and into a ditch. Tapio is…… out there. Lori Walsh put it very nicely when she asked him if his gender role ideas are “outdated”.
Listening to Tapio go on and on about gender roles, sharia law, etc…….straight outta Handmaid’s Tale. He probably watches that series with much glee.
The person whom Lori Walsh next interviewed appeared sane…
“Go home Anne, you’re drunk” is giving more credit to spirits than should be given. The real culprit is jealousy. It looks as though Anne resents the fact that teachers in South Dakota are no longer the lowest paid in the country and it irks Anne and her ilk to no end. Annie is just like Tapioca and the rest of the haters and traitors of this country who have bought a stain across this great nation.
Sure, Roger. When Senator Tapio says that a “nuclear family” is ideal, when less than half of today’s kids live in one, it’s horribly damaging to the development of those children. Are they to think they’re not normal? To think that others have more privilege than they? To think because even though their single Mom loves them unconditionally, works two jobs to give them what others have and tells them they’re special that they are in truth second class? Or because they have the love of two fathers that they don’t measure up to the judgement of Neal Tapio? No, Senator. Love is the answer. Not your demand that everyone live the life that you, in your holier than though, almighty powerful perfection deem socially correct.
T, if I quote it, it’s real! :-)
Disparage married parenthood? Ha. I live it.
But as I live it, I am also not so insecure that I have to blanket-disparage others who parent in different configurations.
It’s like with religion. I don’t need everyone else to be an atheist to affirm my choice not to believe or worship. I don’t have to puff myself up by shouting that everyone else is inferior to me.
I recognize there are many worldviews that can lead my neighbors to good moral civic behavior.
I recognize there are many ways to raise good, smart children.
I also recognize that my choice to raise a child in a monogamous, heterosexual, lifelong partnership does not guarantee that my child will be good and smart. My lifestyle choice is not a magical blessing; we still have to work at it.
Anne, if you want to criticize anyone, maybe you should criticize Tapio. What’s he doing not raising a child? Tell him to get his sperm in gear and start doing the real work of transferring information from generation to generation.
Did Fred Flintstone ever inhabit a bar like Homer Simpson?
@MFI … Fred and Barney used to tip a few at the Bedrock secret society, the Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes.
“who can’t do the math proving the fastest highway to a life of poverty is single motherhood?”
And what sort of dunce can’t discern between correlation and causation? Couldn’t be any confounding factors here, no sir.
Whatever you do, whatever you say, do NOT encourage Neal to point his sperm toward a human egg.
“when doctor daughter wants to put toothpaste on your back” Speaking as the single father of a now-grown little girl, that made me laugh! Thank you Donald Pay.
A good story here. Maybe Anne should read it. I’m with you Roger. I didn’t see where Cory bashed the traditional family.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2014/09/04/for-the-first-time-since-the-1950s-there-is-no-typical-u-s-family/?utm_term=.beb6ecde4076
I know my LGBT people in MN pretty darn well and this Tapio fellow maybe is just confused about his own sexuality. He has never been married and lived in Minneapolis for a time. Minneapolis is the San Francisco of the Midwest for the LGBT and is where many single people go to find themselves. I should go ask my gay boys and see what they think.
It’s just so obvious….. the people that talk most about gender roles and such……are usually…well, you know
As can be expected, Anne was on DWC last night spreading her ‘big lie’ that Cory disparages the ideal of married parenthood.
Tapio ignores the sort of “Christian Sharia” being implemented by the conservatives in power. He ignores how conservative Christians who wish to ignore the law are being given permission to do it. He forgets that HE represents a faith with leaders who want to criminalize homosexuality, defund women’s health clinics, and lead Christian prayers in public schools.
If any of those other religions even suggested doing what Christians in the government are doing RIGHT NOW, maybe Tapio would have a point. Until then, he can’t even handle being in the same room as people who don’t share his beliefs because he thinks he’s surrounded by enemies.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2018/01/19/sd-republican-interfaith-dialogue-tears-at-the-christian-fabric-of-our-nation/
Cory would be the first one in SD to stand up for families without judging what kind of family you have, be it same sex, blended, traditional, one person only, Christian, Muslim, Jewish. Cory is the true patriot here! :)
There is nothing more beautiful then seeing two beautiful gay married men in MN raising children in my neighborhood and my neighbors not thinking anything of it. It is so commonplace here and I just love seeing the love this gay couple has for its children and very well-behaved children at that. :)
We’d better watch out—Donald Trump is on the edge of turning everybody into a nuclear family.
Trump – Watching Trump interact with French President Macron the past few days would make you think there was a real case of ‘puppy love’ happening between the two.
Holding hands, playing kissy, massaging each other under the guise of removing dandruff, was all just a little too cute.
They acted like a pair of dogs getting to know each other, each seeking to assert primacy.
Why doesn’t he have kids? Is he gay?
Not that there’s anything wrong with being gay… although I wonder if Tapio’s worldview would say there is. After all, in Tapio’s view, a gay man without children would be failing to participate in the most natural and effective means of transferring information from generation to generation.
Tapio’s comments were long-winded and rambling. But he finally got to the point, perhaps missed by the readers here, (functional illiteracy is rampant among recent college graduates, according to a new study) when he said:
“…because a child wants to, they need to have a relationship with a father. If you take that relationship out of a relationship for a girl, it will change the way her life is when it comes to her adult life.”
Now that I have explained this to you, would the rest of you like to explain why you think that’s so fallacious?
Long-winded and rambling—agreed. Even the most literate readers would have trouble discerning Tapio’s point. Tapio bears the blame for any lack of clarity.
But he is clearly wallowing in an obsolete, sexist worldview.
The problem here is not a lack of functional literacy (though Tapio could use some lessons on functionally literate public speaking); it’s Anne’s fabrication of points that no one is making. No one here says that fathers are not important. No one here denies that good parents make a huge difference in a child’s life. But why is Tapio focusing on the influence of father figures on daughters? Why in his expansive ramble does he not also make time for the other three corners of that relationship square—moms to daughters, dads to sons, and moms to sons? Couple that dad-daughter line with the sexist combustion-engine line, and a functionally literate reader may responsibly conclude that Tapio is wallowing in out-of-date gender stereotypes and patriarchal fantasies of men saving girls from their feminine helplessness.
I thought I made myself clear above, but I’ll try again: I’m not denigrating anybody’s method of parenting. I don’t need to deem alternative family arrangements as fallacious to affirm my own family arrangement. Tapio’s fallacy is not his declaration that fathers can have positive influence on daughters or his claim that two parents can teach kids different things. His fallacy is his claim that his conception of proper child-rearing (rooted, don’t forget, in theory, not in practice) is superior to anyone else’s.
Funny how everyone wants to call out stereotyping, gender role idiocy, and racism when it’s Neal Tapio running his big dumb mouth about combustion engines and foreigners, but everyone defends the same behavior when somebody accuses white males of being terrorists.
As I mentioned several times, I think Tapio is dumb and his ideals are outdated at best, but aren’t the underlying facts he is using to prop up his stupidity true? There are likely many exceptions, but I bet Neal is right that educating children about the mechanics of “how just things work” usually does come from a father figure rather than a mother figure. And he is probably correct that family structure and the “nurturing” role does fall on the mother figure more often.
So what’s wrong with just stating facts, guys?
Or wait. Maybe it isn’t the “facts” you disagree with – maybe it’s his smug arrogance; maybe it’s his absolute lack of experience in the areas he talks about most; or maybe it’s his not-very-subtle attitude of bigotry and superiority over people different than him.
Yeah, that stuff bothers me, too.
To make your point even clearer, Cory. My dad was as traditional as can be and I wish he would have taught me things like carpentry, how to repair cars, how to drive a big combine! He just took the boys out in to learn that, not the daughters. I wish he would have rambunctiously played rough sports with me! I wish I could have seen him more often instead of working all the time. Instead I was stuck with a traditional household role of girls stay inside doing housework, cleaning and learning sewing (I hated it) , playing the piano (even when you’re not interested in piano) Girls miss a lot when not having the same opportunities as boys. Having a traditional father is actually similar to not having a father in a way, if you really think about it.
Having an old-fashioned traditional father is similar to not having a father at all. I need to stress the old-fashioned Ward Cleaver traditional two-parent so-called 1950s family where girls wore dressed and did the housework, cleaning and cooking. (This is my opinion and my opinion only, so people like Ann Beal won’t rush off and claim that I said having a father is bad for girls.) I had one of the those very traditional fathers and I can’t say it was very fun.
Ryan, Do men know how things work, or do they just think they know how things work and barge ahead? My experience with this question is that men are more likely to think they how things work and how to fix things that don’t, even though they don’t have a clue. Women know they don’t know, and they know the man doesn’t know, either, but no matter what the woman says, the man is going to go ahead and do what he is going to do. So, the man takes things apart, learns a little bit, maybe by accident he fixes something and learns a bit about how it works. Maybe he has to ask a friend, but he does try to fix it and learns something. The woman, of course, says, “Well, that took three days to fix and we could have just taken it to an expert and gotten it done in an hour.” Then the next time, the man says, “Here let me handle that. I can fix it.” And daughters get the impression that Dad is a mechanical wizard. I think men’s bullheadedness is good for something. We do eventually learn how to do stuff, because we don’t like to admit we’re incompetent. But let’s not kid ourselves that that trait doesn’t come with some drawbacks, too.
Donald, I must know different men and women than you know, however I wasn’t commenting on whether men have inborn knowledge of mechanics – I was commenting on whose role it more often is to help kids learn said mechanics.
But honestly, I was attempting to use sarcasm to show a double-standard in some of the comments on this blog regarding apparently acceptable stereotyping versus unacceptable stereotyping. There should be a sarcasm font, because it goes unnoticed online too often.
Anne Beal chastises and belittles DFP readers about their lack of literacy, yet it is Anne that said, “Cory, disparages the ideal of married parenthood”, Cory made no such reference or comment.
Anne was apparently homeschooled by Betsy DeVos.
Roger! You worked Betsy DeVos into the conversation! Drink! :-D
If only I drank something harder than tea.
Roger for the win! I’ll have a drink for both of you!
Thanks, Debbo, enjoy a nice libation.
🍻
Tapio should talk less and listen more, but his ilk are too ignorant and self-righteous to do that.
I’m also hearing Tapio is having some trouble following election law about not placing signs near polling places. Anyone seeing Tapio signs too close to the courthouse?