Book makes a case for old-fashioned parenting
From the title alone, you can probably guess that John Rosemond’s new book, “Parent-Babble: How Parents Can Recover from Fifty Years of Bad Expert Advice” (Andrews McMeel Publishing), isn’t going to bring deafening cheers from the psychological community.
He doesn’t care; he’s more interested in getting a message out.
“I’ve been somewhat of an iconoclast for some time now,” said Rosemond, who has been a licensed family psychologist for 40 years but these days devotes his time to writing, lecturing and generally stirring things up.
Rosemond believes that the changing society of the 1960s, when old methods were challenged and often rejected, led to a breakdown in parenting.
As a result, kids today, Rosemond says, are illbehaved, impolite, beset with emotional problems and not as happy as kids were back in the 1950s. They’re a mess.
“I realized in the late ’70s, early ’80s that a, psychological teaching was inadequate to explain human behavior, and b, a lot of theories proposed at that time were unsupported by research,” he said recently from California, where he was speaking to several parents groups.
Rosemond’s solution is a return to the child-raising strategies of 50 years ago. That’s not what the authors of hundreds of contemporary “how to raise your kids” books might have in mind.
“Parenting books are a tremendously lucrative enterprise for publishers because of these neuroses that have been instilled in female parents,” Rosemond said. “These books