Children need, want and deserve both a mother and father

In an Orlando Sentinel opinion piece, Kathleen Parker writes that when there is a single parent in the household, parent and child both lose. “Winning custody — an odd terminology to describe the offspring of a once-intense heat — conveys a burden that is unknowable to the inexperienced. Hell is the closest word we have to describe it,” she writes. Parker, a single mother herself, does not spend the bulk of her piece railing at those who leave but simply explores the consequences; she is not pursuing men who are not fathers and emphasizes that leaving can be due to other than divorce. This is a touching missive, even if there is little new here in the way of fact or possible solution.