i recently found out that in brazil if you live with a child for a few years and later discover you’re not the biological father the courts can still force you to pay child support.
even if the paternity was based on a lie the obligation stays in the name of the child’s best interest.
i find this absurd. is it like this in your country too?
Not absurd If you raise a child you are the father regardless if its biological or not. I do think this opens up room for some absurdities tho
imagine this situation. a guy raises a child for 3 years believing it’s his. then he finds out his partner cheated and decides to do a dna test, only to discover the child isn’t his.
do you really think it’s fair for him to be punished twice? first by the betrayal, then by being legally forced to carry the consequences of a lie he never chose.
honestly, that has to be one of the worst feelings someone can experience. protecting the child matters, but completely ignoring the fraud and the psychological damage to the deceived person feels deeply unjust.
if you raised a child for three years thats your child biological or not
i feel most men would want to stay with the child as well
im a woman so i would more than likely be birthing a child (if i were to have one) but in a situation like this i would def wanna help the child
the issue isn’t whether someone can keep loving or helping the child, it’s whether the state should force that outcome when the entire situation was built on deception.
"punished" "consequence" lol. raised for three years and don't have a minimal of love enough to call it his child and take care of them? thats a sociopath
that’s a huge oversimplification. no one is saying feelings can just be switched off. the point is that love cannot be imposed by law, especially when it was built on fraud.
feeling confusion, anger, or even distancing after discovering a betrayal like this doesn’t make someone a sociopath, it makes them human. sociopathy is a lack of empathy, not having a trauma response.
choosing to care for a child is one thing. being legally forced to carry the consequences of a lie that shattered your life is something very different.
feeling confusion, anger, or even distancing after discovering a betrayal like this doesn’t make someone a sociopath, it makes them human. sociopathy is a lack of empathy, not having a trauma response
the lack of empathy for the child who did nothing wrong is exactly the question here. being pissed off about the situation is fine. not feeling a bond and wanting to help the child after three years? yeah thats a sociopath there im sorry. the state shouldnt force it because there shouldnt be a need to force it in the first place
you’re seriously underestimating the impact of trauma here. love turning into anger or emotional shutdown after a betrayal like this it’s a very common human response.
discovering that the child you cared for for years isn’t biologically yours and that the person you trusted most lied to you the entire time can completely break someone’s sense of reality, identity, and trust. that kind of shock messes with people in deep ways.
empathy for the child matters, no one disputes that. but erasing empathy for the deceived person and pathologizing his reaction as “sociopathy” is just moral shortcutting. trauma doesn’t come with clean, socially acceptable emotions.
saying “there shouldn’t be a need to force it” ignores reality. if love and care were guaranteed outcomes after fraud, the law wouldn’t need to force anything in the first place.
discovering that the child you cared for for years isn’t biologically yours
it shouldnt matter. it is your child
the betrayal is there and feeling traumatized its normal but none of this is the child's fault and you still raised them. and yes i do think that not feeling that bond and the need to care for your own child is sociopathy lol idk what to tell you
that’s exactly where we disagree. saying “it shouldn’t matter” ignores how human bonds actually work. relationships don’t exist in a vacuum, they’re built on trust. when that foundation is destroyed, the impact doesn’t disappear just because it shouldn’t matter.
Emotional distance or even rejection after a betrayal this severe isn’t sociopathy, it’s a trauma response.
you’re framing “not feeling the same bond” as a moral failure, when in many cases it’s a defense mechanism.
choosing to care for a child is one thing. demanding that someone maintain the exact same emotional bond after discovering the entire relationship was built on a lie is something very different.
The betrayal was from the mother. The child didn't do anything. What you're saying doesn't even make sense. The relationship with the child inevitably changes in a way but it shouldn't be completely flipped. Treating them as just a consequence and not a actual human being is moral failure
i understand that the child did nothing wrong, and no one is saying they should be treated poorly. that’s not the point.
the point is that when someone is deceived for years about something as central as paternity, the emotional impact is inevitably huge. love and attachment can easily turn into confusion, anger, or even rejection, it’s a trauma response, not a moral failure.
in this specific case, do you really think the best solution is to force the deceived man to pay for the child? do you honestly think that’s the fairest solution?
nono i dont think foyth is trying to downplay what the non-bio father feels, it's more that the kid would go through ten times worse trauma if they knew the father who had cared for them for many years simply up and left after the paternity test. a lot of couples stick it out through cheating, growing apart, etc. for the sake of their kids and other dependants, while acknowledging the feelings of betrayal and all that between themselves
if love and care were guaranteed outcomes after fraud, the law wouldn’t need to force anything in the first place.
yeah foyth is being very optimistic about humans here, but this is even more reason for why brazil should enforce such strict child support laws in the first place no?
i dont even think you should necessarily stay with your partner. you can just separate and its justifiable. abandoning the child is a whole other thing
i have one nephew who is little and not blood related to me (my father raised my sister who was his ex-wife child with another man) and i would give everything to her if i needed to and i barely even see her imagine if i raised her for three years lol
i mean looking more into it, it looks like the father has to make the payments if he has a strong bond with the kid (which makes sense? like he would've done so anyway?), and maybe some payments during pregnancy as well, which kind of makes sense
that one case with the father and his identical twin both having to pay child support is hilarious though, those guys were running some devious duos in their town
yeah it kind of stinks to pay a lot for a kid who's not your own, but given that the cheating already happened, i think the child's future outweighs the non-bio dad's mental. getting a negative paternity result and just running off doesn't really feel like a good guy winning ending... every outcome will be complicated from then on
i wouldn't say that.. just looks like brazil child support laws are more comprehensive (cover more time) and are a bit more strict than the US. i'm sure there are little case examples of rulings going both ways.
but i cant tell if there was recent news that prompted him to make the post lol
i agree that everything here is complicated and that there’s no “good” ending. but i think you’re starting from some flawed assumptions.
saying “he would’ve paid anyway” only makes sense if he had chosen that with the truth on the table. here, the bond was built on fraud. continuing voluntarily is very different from being legally forced after the lie is exposed.
putting the child’s future above the man’s mental health as if it’s an unavoidable trade-off creates a false dilemma. it shouldn’t be one or the other. the biological father exists, and the person who cheated and lied also bears direct responsibility.
framing the man’s reaction as “just running off” minimizes the psychological impact of discovering that years of your life were built on a lie.
no one is saying the child doesn’t matter. the question is why the system consistently chooses the easiest solution, keeping the current payer, instead of the fairest one, which would be holding the people who caused the situation accountable.
like imagine you're boaster, you're going into your second year with crashies and you've progressed from tiktok to OF and patreon,
and suddenly you're informed that crashies has had a whole girlfriend back in NA this entire time
do you keep him on the team and continue to pay out his contract, or do you kick him out because he's not yours?
even if crashies had another love behind your back, you keep him on for the sake of the team, and because you know that some of what you two had was real... relationships are messy, and they aren't defined only by how they begin
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