The Paternity Testing Myth

Okay, if you're a frequent listener of the Dad Starting Over podcast and you find yourself saying, "Yeah, that sounds like me," well, you don't need another podcast episode. What you need is support. The Help for Men Brotherhood is where men go when they're done pretending that they got it all handled. You know, your dead bedrooms, your divorce, your loneliness, your rebuilding life. We have private forums, frequent live Zoom meetings, one-on-one coaching courses, all my books at no additional charge. And yes, we get together in person. Real men and real conversations. So stop doing this alone and join the Help for Men Brotherhood today at help4men.com/join. I look forward to seeing you in the next member meeting.

A lot of guys that watch my material, all the videos that I put out, Dad Starting Over, as well as now Help for Men, and Check it out, help4men.com. They're hurting. They've been traumatized. They've been hurt by, more often than not, the women in their lives. They've been cheated on, sometimes multiple times by multiple different women. And because of this, they take their anger to the internet and they commiserate with other guys who are also hurt, traumatized by bad women in their lives. And they begin to form a picture in their mind of, "Wow, this is way more common than I thought." And these guys get a sense of camaraderie, a sense of belonging, almost like a tribal thing, belonging to a group of fellow victims. And as anybody that knows human psychology will tell you, victimhood is highly contagious and somewhat addictive. This is not a gender thing. We see it on both sides of the aisle. A lot of women complaining about men and how it's all the men's fault. A lot of men complaining about women and how it's all the women's fault. And what a lot of people do on both sides of the gender aisle is that they will cite statistics to prove their point. A lot of men in my comments like to throw out things such as, "You know, women file 80 to 90% of all divorces." Technically not true. Actually, the number is closer to 70%. Still pretty alarmingly high, but you know, if we want to be technical, rational dudes about all this stuff, we need to stick to the facts. Doesn't help our case helping men shine a light on, you know, certain sexist discrepancies in the world of relationships or whatever it may be. It doesn't help our cause to make shit up or to amplify stats that are already bad enough on their own. We don't need to bump up another 10, 20% to prove a point. 70% in that example's plenty horrible, right? Well, another example that I see often is that when it comes to the world of paternity testing, which for those that don't know means man gets a test of his child to see if the child is biologically his, some men will say, You know, in the world of paternity testing, 30% of the time, the kids are found not to be biologically connected to the father. In other words, holy crap, women cheat a lot and have kids by men outside of their marriage. Just look at the stats with the paternity testing. Again, it doesn't help our cause to hyperinflate numbers to, you know, really prove a point like, oh my gosh, these women are so horrible. The true number is, and there has been studies, we've looked at, you know, genetic testing across large population sizes. We have a study done by Anderson, 2006, and Wolf, 2012. These are both the authors of certain studies, and both studies from 2006 and 2012 agree the number is between 1 and 2% of the time. Not 30, not 20, not 10, not even 5. Between 1 to 2% of the time. Now, a lot of guys hearing that will say, let me go to Google and I'll Google paternity testing and, you know, rates of infidelity and all this other stuff. And they'll come up with, see, here's a number. Guys, you got to be smart about this, okay? I know you're hurting. I know you want to, you know, cast stones at the gals that hurt you. But look at who is telling you these stats. It's people selling paternity tests. There are industries out there that are preying upon your pain as a hurt dude. These same industries prey upon women too. They take your acutely emotional negative feelings that you're having and they're trying to spin that to extract money from you. Now, we may have some, like, legitimate paternity testing clinics or blood test genetics clinics or however it works, And they may come to me and say, well, actually, we have stats that show, let's take a conservative number and let's say like 15% of the time it's the yes, the paternity test comes back and shows that the kids don't belong to the dude. So what do we make of that? Well, let me give you an analogy to paint a picture here. Let's say that I suspect that my brother, I don't have a brother, but let's pretend I do. Let's say I suspect that my brother is a drug addict. And I drag him into a clinic, we get a blood draw, and voilà, he's got heroin and cocaine and other things in his system, right? And then I would go to that clinic, I would say, just curious, for people that drag their significant other, their loved one, whatever it may be, into the clinic for a drug test, what percentage of the time are the drug tests positive? And the people running that clinic would say, oh, probably like 90% of the time. Okay, pause right there. Do we take that information and then do we extract from that, you know what, 90% of the time our loved ones are on drugs? Or 90% of the loved ones— brothers, sisters, uncles, husbands, whatever—

are on drugs?

90% of us out there are on drugs. Why do we say that? Well, just ask this clinic. They're the ones doing the blood testing. No, guys, think about this for a minute. People that drag their partners into a drug testing clinic have a reason for doing so. They're watching the behavior on the part of their loved one, and they're saying, "This doesn't look good. Something makes me suspect that they're on drugs. Let me drag them in." And voilà, drug test positive. Same kind of thing with the paternity testing. Who are people that are dragging their kids into a clinic to do a blood test to test for paternity. People that suspect that something's going on, something's not so good, probably a chaotic dysfunctional relationship at baseline. And the guy's like, this woman's been acting strange ever since she got pregnant, yada yada yada, uh, her mother cheated on dad, whatever it may be. All these things are coming together to say something's not right here, let me take the kid in for paternity testing. And Oh my gosh, sure enough, she cheated. It's not my kid. Do we then take that information and apply that to the masses and say, Ralph Brewer Brewer Brewer, do you realize that 30% of the time the kid doesn't belong to the father genetically? If we want to be smart about this, the only thing we can do is look at non-biased studies. We're not looking at people that drag their kids into genetic testing because they suspect that their partner is cheating on them. That's not a good sample size. Look at genetic testing as a whole. Giant swaths of the population, tens of thousands of people, and we have studies that show it's around 1 to 2% of the time. Again, a lot of you are hurt. I've been there and done that, dude. I get it completely. But don't allow your pain and your very real and very human trauma to cloud your judgment, to send you down paths of hate where frankly it doesn't belong. Yes, women are capable of some terrible, awful things. Yes, human beings cheat. Not always, not most of the time, but they do. And yes, women belong to the human race. Men do shitty things. We have our own little, you know, special flavor of shitty things that we do as men. And women have their own special shitty flavor of terrible things that they do. Let's not get things twisted and start throwing in facts where there's no truth behind them. It makes you look desperate, and people hearing that completely discount everything else that you have to say after you throw out numbers like, you know, women file 90% of the time, you know, 30% of the time the kids don't belong to the dad, and so forth. As soon as people hear that, they do the eye roll and go, "Oh God, he's one of those." So don't be one of those. Be smart about this.

We're men.

We are logical creatures. We're scientists. We're engineers. We can't allow our emotions to cloud our judgment like this. Which is ironically something that a lot of us guys like to say about the women in our lives. That they allow their emotion to cloud their judgment. That they don't see things logically like we do. Maybe we need to look in the mirror a little bit here.