Who Is John Rosemond?

[debrand]

journalstar.com/lifestyles/article_631006fe-6d93-5a6d-939c-2526c101e21c.html

While doing a search on spanking, I came across his name. According to sites that support him, he has been called :

He’s been called a tyrant. Dictatorial. Draconian.

Some have gone so far as to compare him to Adolf Hitler, he said

Oddly enough, I can't find any original sites that call him these names. The only sites that claim he is being called names like Hitler are sites that support him.

Read more: http://journalstar.com/lifestyles/artic ... z1Zg5FM4W4

Here are some quotes from the article:

Families in America are in big trouble, Rosemond said from his Gastonia, N.C., home.

“In America we have lost sight of what child rearing is all about. We cling so closely to our children, that we have forgotten rearing of children is all about helping them get out of our lives and into responsible, contributing lives of their own.â€

If parenting continues on this path, Rosemond fears it will lead to the demise of what he sees as an already unraveling culture.

“I think it is going to be impossible to sustain a viable culture on the track we are on currently for a number of reasons, including the fact that we cannot agree on how to raise children,†Rosemond said.

“If we stay on the track we are on, we are going to unleash the forces of deconstruction.â€

In essence, Rosemond said, families need to go back to a simpler time, when parents raised kids the way their parents raised them; when the Bible and the Golden Rule guided their path; when kids were raised with the “three Rs — respect, responsibility and resourcefulness.†When theories about building children’s self-esteem were nonexistent.

“I am absolutely convinced that modern psychology has done more harm than good to the American family,†Rosemond wrote in the introduction to his book.

“The reason child rearing — once a fairly straightforward, matter-of-fact affair — has become so difficult, so emotionally taxing, so beset with problems, is that instead of going to their elders for child-rearing advice, American parents have been listening to mental health professionals tell them how to raise children for more than a generation,†he wrote.

“We need to go back and raise children with the same attitude and principles that prevailed in the 1950s and before,†Rosemond said.

Back to when children were seen, but not heard; when nearly everyone believed if you spared the rod, you spoiled the child; when adults recognized children as “fundamentally sinful,†rather than “fundamentally good,†according to Rosemond.

Read more: http://journalstar.com/lifestyles/artic ... z1Zg5tmNyY

[Rosa]

He's a conservatice newspaper columnist - my hometown newspaper runs his columns. Not sure what else he's done.

I would bet the adjectives are supplied by him, and come from his hate mail - every columnist at every newspaper gets called names like that, many of them get called worse. Bloggers with readership get it in email instead. We used to get ranters on the phone at the newspaper on weekends when only Classifieds was answering the phone - the world is full of them.

[debrand]

What is up with people wanting to go back to an earlier time? Our grandparents lived in blatantly racist and sexist time periods. Perhaps being taught that kid should obey without question contributed to the acceptance of things like segregation.

[Rosa]

Thank you for saying that. I was faced yesterday with a very lovely woman, the mother of a friend, explaining that when the kids were little the only thing they were ever punished for was "defiance". Now, she's a nice person, a loving mother, and that's lightyears better than the "set them up to fail and then beat them" school, but still...obedience is not the prime virtue of any person.

I feel like an alien half the time in conversation with other parents because I value reason and kindness over obedience.

[BravaAmica]

John Rosemond is very conservative but he doesn't advocate spanking, beating your kids with a plumbing line or emotional abuse. I have one of his books (Parent Power, I think it's called) and find it matter of fact: kid does A, he gets B, do not raise your voice, enforce the consequence in a non-judgemental manner without anger. I do think his views on child development (as listed in the book I have) are archaic and one-size-fits all.

[ricky_ticky]

His parenting philosophy is conservative and Christian based, and many people despise what he says about gender roles. I take what I can use and leave the rest. Despite having a traditional agenda, he has written positively about his own upbringing by a single mother working her way through (nursing?) school. His main point is that many American families tend to revolve around the needs, desires, and judgments of the children rather than the adults, a structure that I have seen played out in friends' families. Rosemond claims that parents should not feel guilty for meeting their childrens' basic needs and giving them love, while choosing not to go into debt or sacrifice adult interests and activities in order to meet all of the childrens' wants.

[Guest Anonymous]

Rosemond is the nekkid potty training guy. He's really moved it into popularity and a rather common practice. I'll give him credit, I've seen my grand kids nekkid potty trained and bunches of other kids. Where I draw the line with him is his philosophy behind mothers and potty training. His posit is that mothers are lax on training kids because they don't want to give up the nurturing aspects of their relationships and move to becoming an authority figure. Ummm John, Moms can still nurture while leading and guiding.

edited to correct misinformation

[koolmom]

I've heard and read Rosemond's columns, and sometimes he sounds logical, but for the most part, he tends to run to extremes regarding child advice. Interesting he was raised by a single mom; wonder how much of his own "needs, desires and judgments" were met while his mother was working? As a single mom myself, I definitely had to "sacrifice" many of my "wants and desires" in the interests of my children's well-being, but was proud to do it in the face of duty, as so many of these so-called conservatives are always crowing we don't do enough of. Can I drop my kids off at YOUR house, Dr. Rosemond, while I join the girls for Canasta Night?" No? Why not? YOU said I COULD, right?

Was child-rearing always so "straight-forward and matter of fact?" Or did it just get relegated as such, as children were not seen as fully independent human beings until some of those experts dared to observe that youngsters needed more than originally thought. "Now, now, Junior/Sweetie, I don't have time to hear about your day at school, run along wi' ye", was probably heard time and time again.

Go to "elders" for advice? In my case, it would have been getting my abusive father to sit down and dole out what I'd already been receiving for the past 25 years or so. I pretty much ascertained his methods of child-raising were NOT going to be repeated. Both my mothers LEFT said father, and they most likely (my bio mom re-married another abusive male) were not the first people I thought of consulting on those matters. Although my then-husband was not abusive, his own family had their share of long-time alcoholics, self-centered spendthrifts and otherwise others who were not in the least interested in participating in a (mine) new family's "legacy". I would have liked to have asked his mother for advice, but she checked herself out four years before I'd met her son. His sister did the year we were married. So Grandma and Auntie's seats were already vacant.

"We cling so closely to our children...?" What? Where's the ruler we're supposed to gauge ourselves by so we know how far apart to stand from our children, Doc? Is it the one hanging from the strop by the back door? Please, show me, okay?

I must have stood WAY TOO CLOSE to my children, because they have this nagging habit of talking to me every day even though they're full-fledged adults living away from me, and my 30-year-old son has this quirky deal where he always says, "Love you, Mom" after every phone and IM conversation. Where did I go wrong?

And I hate to burst your bubble, Doc, but it's NOT ALL ABOUT helping them "get out of our lives" and getting them into "responsible, contributing" lives on their own. Yeppers again, Doc. Let's hear you say that when Susie and Buddy Rosemond (your offspring) kind of FORGET to stop by the nursing home where, if they follow YOUR advice, you'll be languishing there all alone, no thanks to YOUR OWN THEORIES! Idiot!

While we're on the subject of the good ol' days of child care, my father's 70-plus-old cousin (my aunt) shared a harrowing family secret at a get-together recently. She said that her grandmother (my great-grandmother) was the care-giver of a number of child relatives (her and my own dad, for one). Great-Gran had the ritual of if any child disobeyed, she would whip ALL the other children, irrespective of involvement; pull their pants down, ages nor gender notwithstanding, and whip the whole group, a la Abu Ghraib-style. AND, if there were any mothers in the vicinity,

they were ordered, yes, that's right, ordered to stay out of it. Is THAT the kind of wistful nostalgia you're pining for, Doc? If that is, you can put that where the sun doesn't shine.

[Juliakitty]

He's a child psychologist who writes books and newspaper columns bashing other child psychologists. I actually agree with a fair percentage of his childrearing advice, but I can't stand the tone he uses, like he's right and everyone else is wrong and the past was perfect and the present sucks (how did we get to the present? why are we all screwed up? he doesn't answer those questions). He also gets obsessed with weird things, like getting his panties in a wad (so to speak) about the age of other people's children at toilet training.

[Marian the Librarian]

Agree with other posters here - Rosemond's tone is pompous and smug, "I know better than everyone else." I do remember reading columns and books of his where he endorsed corporal punishment as a way of "getting the child's attention." So I don't know if he's backed off on the whole spanking issue; I haven't read anything by him in quite a while.

Ironically, I agree with two of his points: he's down on a lot of TV watching (made a very cogent argument once that it contributed to increasing divorce rates in the US in TV's first decades). I also concur with his view that parents should not be glommed on to their kids forever, as are some of our favorite fundie patriarchs who keep their arrows locked into the "multigenerational faithfulness" quiver well into adulthood (Botkins/Reins/Maxwells/fill-in-the-blank).

[kpmom]

What is up with people wanting to go back to an earlier time? Our grandparents lived in blatantly racist and sexist time periods. Perhaps being taught that kid should obey without question contributed to the acceptance of things like segregation.

Yeah, you notice it's generally (like 100%) white people calling for the return to earlier times. And it's rarely young, modern, college educated women calling for it either.

[Hane]

When his column was in my local paper, I used to read it and agree with some of his points, but he was/is rigid to a degree that defies common sense. In one column, he decreed that all kids in a family, regardless of age, should have the same bedtime, because choosing to do otherwise would be "annoying and inconvenient" for their parents.

He also sounded off on mothers and daughters dressing alike. He lumped together a mom and daughter both dressed like 1980s Madonna with another pair in matching preppy golf shirts, cardigans, and shorts. It pissed me off--particularly because my 7-year-old daughter had just seen pretty Victorian-style mother-daughter outfits in a Christmas catalog and asked if we could PLEASE get one of them. I made us copies of one of them and she was thrilled. It was unnerving to see this total stranger construe a sweet little bonding thing as an evil plot to level the parent-child playing field.