If youre a reader of John Rosemond's parenting columns, which run in The N&O on Tuesdays, you might expect him to be strident in person. Not so. He's actually pretty soft-spoken and subtly funny, in that two-beats-later you get the joke kind of way.
Rosemond was at The N&O this week at the invitation of Executive Editor John Drescher, who wrote a column in April (read it here) about a recent firestorm Rosemond caused when he told the mother of a girl whose boyfriend's "response to almost anything my daughter says is a cut or put-down, a dismissal of her accomplishment or mocking" that the young man was a "find." How's that? "He's not into partying, playing video- and online games, proving that he can drink more beer than his friends and still remain conscious, and dressing in oversize, ill-fitting clothes that make him look like a 6-foot toddler. From your description, he's a find! Do everything you can to keep him!" is what Rosemond said, calling the verbal denigration "one annoying habit."
That particular column made me absolutely livid, although, in general, I'm probably one of exactly three people in The N&O newsroom, given how many times I've heard the man's name used in vain there, who can say she agrees with Rosemond at least half the time. Most detractors, Rosemond said, react to him emotionally, which gets in the way of their ability to actually think.
Rosemond, whose columns appear in 200 newspapers, spent an hour talking off the cuff, or rambling as he said, and taking a few questions. He tours the country giving speeches, having spent 150 nights away from home last year. His mission? "I’m doing two things: women's liberation and marriage restoration."
He has quite a lot to say about women, in fact, or "the modern American mother," as he referenced repeatedly. Why focus on women and their parenting? The brain of "the modern American mother" has been polluted by parent babble, he said. "No man in America has come home and said, “Honey, has the new issue of Parenting magazine come yet?' ”
My notes on some of the thoughts Rosemond shared, many of which you will be familiar with if you read his column. This is NOT verbatim, by any stretch:
