John Rosemond visits N&O: When will women get it?

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:

Today’s parents are not thinking in terms of children’s character. Parents used to have a long-range view. Our parents were trying to raise good citizens. (This was the subject of his most recent column. Read it here.)

My mother insisted I do my best and in conjunction with my teacher determined what my best was. If my best had been Cs, my mother would have been perfectly satisfied as long as I did my best.

Fifty years ago, parents did not help with homework. It was rare if they asked whether you even had homework. They expected you to be responsible. If a teacher had called my house about my behavior, my mother would have thanked her and said she’d take care of it. Teachers today are reluctant to call home. They call with great trepidation because more often than not the parent becomes defensive, becomes the child’s advocate and attorney. Teachers ask me, “What’s going on? Why can’t parents accept that children misbehave?" Parents believe parenting produces the child. Parenting is an influence in a child’s life, an influence that is high when a child is small and as the child grows that influence wanes.

My mother knew the greatest human quality is free will, a person’s own decision-making capability. My mother knew a child is capable of making decisions that have no bearing on how the parents behaved in the past. My mother knew no matter how well she parented, I was capable of leaving her and making a decision that was "depraved, degenerate and disgusting."

In the confusion of the current parent babble, the female anxiety level concerning child rearing is at an all-time high. The next day, it will be even higher. And the next day, it will be even higher. A terrible, terrible thing has happened to the American female. Today’s mother is obsessed with detail. My mother was willing to let the little details fall where they may.

Today’s mother is a micromanager, obsessed with detail, in a state of high stress and anxiety, and she drives other people crazy.  Women have managed to let their authority over children slip away. They have all of this authority now in the board room, in the military, in politics etc, but they let their authority over children run through their fingers.

When a child is born, a woman backs right out of the marriage and leaves the man standing there. She gives in to peer pressure to conform to this ludicrous standard of good mothering.

I always ask audiences whether they believe children today are happier than they were 50 years ago. Nobody ever says yes. Depression in children today has increased by a factor of 5 or 10.

Funniest moment: This is the new posture of parenting (he says as he bends down, hands on knees, face at an invisible child’s eye level). “We haven’t talked in 30 minutes. Have you had a feeling in the last 30 minutes that you need to talk about?”

Before, if a woman had a parenting problem, she’d go to mom or grandma or an aunt, somebody older than her. They’ve stopped doing that. What does Grandma know? She doesn’t have a Ph.D.

Raising children has become bad for the mental health of women in America. When are women going to get it?

Mothers put the child before the husbands. Children need to see that those two people are in a relationship, that they pay more attention to each other than to me! They need a demonstration that a marriage is operating here, and that’s lacking in America today.

Men come home from work and get down in the floor and play with their children. Why? They say because the children haven’t seen them all day. Well, neither have their wives. Today’s family is more a relationship between mother and child than husband and wife. And men compensate for the relationship of the (ex)wife and children (that little ex was the joke ...  see? subtle!) by accepting the new ideal to be a child’s best buddy.

So the American child today is being raised by a micromanager and a buddy. What they need is leadership. Somebody with complete confidence in his or her authority has a calm leadership. Parents today have no authority.

Parents need to teach children manners before academics.  They need to be told what their obligations are to other people. Today, it’s all about the obligation to the child. A child needs an education built on a solid foundation of character.

And for the record: Rosemond, who has been writing the column since the 1970s, said he’s been wrong and admitted it exactly three times.