Parenting Critic John Rosemond

In my post of 10/23/18, I reviewed Lukianoff and Haidt’s book, The Coddling of the American Mind. This book looks not only at political correctness as an impediment for finding truth in the universe, but what the authors see as a related issue: why the rates of depression, anxiety, drug abuse and suicide have been rapidly increasing in college-aged kids and others over the last few years.

They document the rise on campuses of efforts to “protect” students from “microaggressions” and the need for “safe spaces” and other such nonsense, assuming that exposure to other opinions and the occasional ethnocentric or racist comment, even offhandedly, is some sort of psychological trauma.

This seems to be the culmination of a major change in typical parenting styles that began in the 1970’s that has been brilliantly documented by psychologist and columnist John Rosemond. He discusses how parents now seem to treat their children as equals whose opinions on and feelings about everything are just as valid as those of adults, and are somehow not reactions to parents refusing to set appropriate limits with them. 

He believes, as I do, that the relationship between the parents should be the most important one in the house, not the relationship between either parent and a child (although of course the latter relationships sometimes have to take precedence). This has the effect of making children act out and actually feel worse about themselves, in addition to not taking other people’s rights and feelings into account as often as they should.

Basically, he is accusing such parents of being chronic enablers interfering with their child’s development of independence and responsibility. He takes a lot of heat for saying this, just as I do (to a much smaller degree since I have a much smaller audience). He is accused of “parent bashing.” When asked about this, he says he is indeed a parent basher and is proud of it.

He blames a lot of these parenting problems on advice from the mental health community as well as their invention of psychiatric pseudo-diseases. Even picky eating has been turned into a mental disorder  - Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID).

Rosemond is one of my heroes. He was kind enough to give me a positive blurb for my book on family dysfunction and mental disorders. He is the author of a quote I frequently steal from him, "Taking responsibility for something and self-blame are horses of two entirely different colors. The former is empowering; the latter is paralyzing."

I totally agree with the vast majority of his opinions.

Of course, there are some areas on which we don’t see eye to eye. He does not write about how cultural developments have led to a lot of the parenting changes of which he writes - e.g., the high prevalence of guilty yet angry parents due to the culture wars. IMO, the problematic changes are not just due to bad advice from the Dr. Spocks of the world. 

He over-generalizes about all psychiatric diagnoses not actually being diseases because they are not accompanied by clear-cut, easily-seen brain pathology. Actually, this is due to our limited knowledge of very complex brain circuitry. And he seems to think that screen time per se is more detrimental to young children than I might think it is, as I focus more on how any damage from too much screen time is more a reflection of what happens when parents do not set limits than it is of any direct effect. 

But no matter. The world needs more people like Dr. Rosemond.

Parental Guilt: a Double Edged Sword Inside a Conundrum

When I write about dysfunctional family dynamics on my blogs, in response I often get parents and adult children reacting in completely opposite ways to the very same post: the parents think I am putting the blame all on them, and the adult children likewise feel I’m singling them out. Of course, the parents had the issues that are creating difficulties before the kids ever came into existence, so this makes them somewhat more responsible, but they are reacting to binds that they themselves were put into by their own  parents. In turn, their parents were reacting to their parents, and so on.

Of course, when people feel blamed for something they don’t really like, but sort of know they had something to do with, they tend to feel guilty, which tends to make them defensive. Defensiveness, in turn, causes them to tune out discussions of what they might be able to do differently in order to fix the family problem. That would be bad enough, but there is something else that amplifies this problem even more. The fact that they felt guilty even before reading my stuff is often the main problem that caused them to give off destructive double messages to their kids in the first place.

The women’s movement was great in terms of opening up fulfilling opportunities for women for which they are more than qualified. However, it is also a big factor in creating a lot of parental guilt as when both parents are working, this has made many of them feel like they are neglecting their kids. As I have written, the Phyllis Schlaflys of the world pile on the guilt. This cultural argument has two effects on the parents: anger at their kids for complicating their lives, and attempts to make up for their frequent absences by overindulging their kids and trying to be friends with them.

The latter behavior creates all the issues that parenting columnist John Rosemond has been writing about for years: it makes the kids feel inadequate. My view on this is slightly different than his: I think the kids start to believe that the parent’s constant need to cater to them is evidence that the parents need to be caretakers to remain mentally stable, so the children start to act as if they are inadequate so the parents can continue to feel needed.

If the parents’ anger predominates, this can lead to acting out by the child to provide the parent with a feeling of justification for being angry and therefore not as guilt-ridden.

If the parents go back and forth between compulsive caretaking and anger, the child develops one of the major characteristics of borderline personality disorder: spoiling behavior. When the parent gets too angry the child tries (and usually succeeds at) making the parent feel guilty, but then when the parent feels too guilty, the child finds ways to make them angrier.

Because the issue of parental guilt is so central, this creates a conundrum for anyone trying to get the family to discuss what is really going on so that it can be stopped or at least minimized – including any family member attempting to do this, a therapist trying to help the family, or a writer of blogs trying to get people to focus on real issues rather than looking for scapegoats or facile explanations for the self -defeating behavior of family members. When any of these folks bring up what the parents are doing “wrong,” this tends to make the parents feel even guiltier, which is the source of the problem in the first place. The problem then gets even worse rather than better.

When I had such a parent in therapy, I was able to find a way to finesse this, by discussing how their child may be mis-reading them, which tends to be a less guilt-inducing way to put it. Also, I can empathize with the bind that the parents are themselves feeling, having formed a preliminary hypothesis about why their own parents acted as they did.

This is much more difficult to accomplish when writing for the public, because readers tend to quickly focus more on anything that seems at first glance to be less than empathic with their own plight. I do talk about how the problems have been passed down from prior generations, so if we have to blame anyone, let’s blame Adam and Eve and be done with it. I also make use of a great quote from John Rosemond: "Taking responsibility for something and self-blame are horses of two entirely different colors. The former is empowering; the latter is paralyzing." However, I can’t discuss these ideas in detail in every single post or they would all be twice as long as this one. And anyway, disclaimers like that are often ignored in the heat of the moment.

The Culture Wars, Parental Guilt, and Out-of-Control Children: The Dilemma

 

The following post comes mostly from chapter 2, Don’t Blame Us,  of my last book, How Dysfunctional Families Spur Mental Disorders:

The women’s movement in the United States, combined with economic changes that made surviving on only one income increasingly difficult for families, led to one of the fastest and most massive cultural shifts in history. Almost overnight, women entered the workforce in huge numbers. Female ambition was fully unleashed for the first time ever, and flourished. However, women who wanted to get to the top in their field in business or the professions ran into a roadblock. 

They found that, in the business and professional worlds, they were expected to act just like the men in one respect. They could not use the needs of their children as a reason for refusing to put in the long hours necessary in today’s economy to climb the corporate ladder. The United States had during this same period of time grown to become the most workaholic country on earth, eventually surpassing even Japan.

         

Women who wanted to and who were told that they could “have it all” by the ambient culture found that doing so was not as easy as some famous women made it look. Since their husbands were only just beginning to share in child care, and were as much or more involved with their careers as they had ever been, who would be around to take care of the children? Horrific stories about bad things happening to children left to their own devices and locked in their homes without parental supervision after school (deemed latch-key children by the media), began to circulate widely.

Debates over working mothers became one of the most important theaters of operations in the culture wars that continue to rage on to this day. Reactionary forces that never believed in equality for women in the first place began to spout off about all the damage being done by working mothers to their offspring. The voices of people like Phyllis Schlafly, a career woman who made a career out of attacking career women, became louder and more shrill. Unfortunately, researchers in major academic centers began to give more ammunition to voices like hers.

Widely publicized studies showed that children in families in which at least one parent stayed home with them did, on the average, better in life on some dimensions than those children from families in which this was not the case. Of course, many children from two-career families do splendidly or even better than many of their more closely parented peers, while many children of stay-at-home mothers often fail spectacularly in life, but the press ignored the scatter and put most of its focus on the “average” end result.

Of course, many families were able to negotiate the cultural changes successfully and continued to calmly set limits with their children while encouraging them to have egalitarian attitudes towards gender roles. Many others, however, were just feeling overcome by too much guilt to do that.        

The most devastating source of guilt: Many career women found that they were faced with considerable criticism about their choices in life from within their own families. The baby boomers, who were the first large wave of career women, had themselves been raised by parents from the World War II “greatest” generation. This earlier generation of women had been, on the whole, raised to conform to the old female gender role stereotypes. 

They were taught that they supposed to be totally fulfilled by being nothing but wives and mothers, as their mothers had been before them. However, as I described in the post of 9/21/11, unlike their own mothers, some of these women had had a taste of career fulfillment during the war, but had to give it up at the end of the war. 

Since these women had been raised from birth to believe in the old roles, they accepted their fate, at least on the outside. Inside, many of them subconsciously resented having to give up the excitement of their careers. Some carried this covert resentment with them for the rest of their lives. As parents are wont to do, they tried to vicariously experience what they were missing through their children. 

When they had daughters, they often pushed the girls to go out and get what had been denied to them – a satisfying career. Perhaps it was no accident that the baby boom generation was at the forefront of the feminist movement of the1960’s. Feminism had been an undercurrent in society for decades before then, but “women’s lib” virtually exploded.

As the female boomers hobnobbed with one another and talked among themselves about how women could now do anything they wanted, many faced a rather disturbing negative reaction from both of their parents when they spoke about this at home. The parents would suddenly become hostile and/or withdrawn, sometimes for no apparent reason.

Many male boomers, on the other hand, were the objects of some strange reactions from their parents as well. They had started to realize that sharing the burdens of being the family breadwinner was not such a bad idea after all. However, their fathers seemed to think less of them if they were not dominant over their wives, especially if they earned less money than their wives. 

In the meantime, some of their mothers acted helpless and dependent around them at times, but because of the mothers’ covert resentment at males for keeping them from pursuing careers, emasculated the sons who tried to take care of them in any way. 

For example, one of my patients told of an incident in which his World War II generation grandmother fell in the bathroom and broke her hip. When my patient tried to come to her aid, she refused to unlock the bathroom door. She said that she "did not want to be a bother."

These parents were not being mean-spirited when they acted like this. The parents had grown up with certain gender role expectations and believed in them. They also worried, because of their own experiences, that successful women might have a difficult time finding a mate. They believed that men would find feminists too aggressive, and in any event would be threatened by any female who might be too able to manage her own life and finances without a husband. 

These fears were stoked to near hysteria among both the boomers and their parents by a story in Newsweek in 1986, since discredited, which purported to show that college-educated women who were still single at the age of 35 had only a 5 percent chance of ever getting married.

More important than the possible reactions of male chauvinist peers, the parents of the boomers, just like their children, worried about what might happen to their grandchildren if one of their parents were not in the home to raise them as much as in past generations. How would such children fare in life?

In addition to this concern, a covert but pernicious issue lurked in the back of the minds of a significant number of the former riveting Rosies. When their daughters became successful in business, the mothers were reminded of what they themselves had given up right after the war. They had pretended for many years that having given up their jobs was really no big deal to them. Some became quiet, some became depressed, and others became actively critical of their daughters’ ambitions, especially when grandchildren came into the picture.

Boomer females were extremely confused by their parents’ mixed message that seemed to say to them, “I’m so proud of you for your career success, but stop doing what you’re doing.” Many were left with a highly unsettling feeling caused by this strange lack of support. They wanted and planned to go on with their careers, but somehow they did not feel quite right about it. They became somewhat confused about exactly what their role in life should look like. 

Men found that they were criticized by their girl friends if they opened a car door for a woman - or if they did not. Accompanying the role confusion for both sexes was the nagging, unnamed sense of guilt about their children that was mentioned above, which was then further increased by the other cultural developments.

Paradoxically, the existence of parental guilt of this magnitude had effects on parenting behavior that may be the real reason why children of two career families do slightly worse on average than those with stay-at-home mothers. Changes in parenting styles driven by guilt are probably far more destructive to children than the fact that both parents are working per se.

All of this confusion and ambivalence created two different groups of women who, while superficially polar opposites from one another, shared the exact same conflict. One group had careers but covertly envied the stay-at-home mothers, while a second group stayed at home with their children but covertly envied the career women. The latter group also had quite secret - or so they thought – deep-seated urges to escape the drudgery of doing housework and shuttling children around all day long.

Many parents in two career families worried covertly but obsessively that they were short-changing their own children. Some stay-at-home mothers, on the other hand, subconsciously worried that their hidden resentment over their burdens and their choices in life might adversely affect their children. In response, both of these groups began to monitor their children carefully or any sign of distress that might indicate even the slightest parental failing. A good percentage of them became so obsessed with their children that they spent every spare moment with them, often at the expense of their marriages.

This popular Facebook meme advocates gross over-parenting, and following this advice often leads to disastrous results.

For the career women, the guiltier they felt, the more concerned they became with turning any time they did spend with their children into “quality time.” They tried to make up for their frequent absences to their children by catering to their every whim. The stay-at-home mothers began to do the exact same thing. They also became overcome with guilt as their resentment over the perceived drudgery of their life, as well as their hidden desires to escape from it, built up over time.

Everything that happened in the home began to center around the children. John Rosemond’s nightmare world of non-traditional parenting was born.

The Culture Wars, Parental Guilt, and Out-of-Control Children: Introduction

The popular parenting advice columnist John Rosemond writes about an epidemic of poor parenting practices that has been accompanied by an epidemic of out-of-control children. For instance, he notes that behavior such as children biting their parents has become increasingly common. 

In a recent column in the Memphis newspaper (8/31/14), he noted that in cases of parents whose children are disrespectful and refuse to do what they are told, the parents often are not actually telling their child what to do. Instead, they are “…pleading and bribing and bargaining and cajoling and encouraging and then, when all that fails, demanding and threatening and screaming.” 

He points out that there is a huge difference between saying “You could really help mommy out by picking up these toys” versus “I want you to pick up these toys right now.” If the child asks "Why?" he recommends the old standby, "Because I said so!" He correctly points out that children will usually, although of course not always, do what they are firmly and unambiguously told to do.

It seems that whenever anyone dares to point out that that maybe the problem in cases of out-of control, temper-tantrum-throwing children is not the child but the parents, they are often met with rage and accusations of “parent bashing.” This is accompanied by protestations that their child is in some way a problem child who was, I guess, just born that way. 

Such parents will react this way even when their children are running wild in a restaurant or in a store or even in church, and it is blatantly obvious to anyone who has eyes and actually looks that they are doing absolutely nothing to control the kids' behavior.

A good example of such an angry response was seen in a recent column by advice columnist Amy Dickinson. In an earlier column (6/30/14), Ms. Dickinson had responded to someone who asked about the best way to advise a parent with an out-of-control child with the following:

 “Talk to them about it and be supportive and uncritical. This is not a mutually exclusive concept. Tell them, "You can turn this around. Do you want to hear some of the things that have worked for us?" At the risk of providing yet another resource your sister-in-law will ignore, I highly recommend the work of Jo Frost, the ‘Supernanny.’ She enters households like your sister-in-law's, diagnoses the family dynamic and then offers sound and practical fixes.”

After she published that letter, another letter writer responded (7/15/14):

Dear Amy: "Perplexed" sounded like a sanctimonious parent with two "perfect" children, complaining about a family member with a typical tantrum-throwing 3-year-old. I can't believe you didn't call him on this. — Not Perplexed Parent

While toddlers of course do sometimes throw tantrums, parents routinely letting them run wild and doing absolutely nothing at all about it is something else entirely. Ms. Dickinson wisely responded that she “…felt sorry for the tantrum-throwing little boy whose parents let him rule the household and then worried about his behavior. Calm and confident parenting would benefit this child, and I hope the parents get a clue.”

When out-of-control children escalate their behavior, in some cases things can get really out of hand due to a variety of factors that differ somewhat with each particular family. Parents may in frustration start to become abusive verbally and/or physically, or they may just abdicate their role as parents completely – something known in the literature as biparental failure. Or do all of the above at different times.This latter pattern can be the beginning of a process by which a child starts to develop borderline personality disorder.

These problematic parental practices seem to be becoming more and more common. What is behind this? The explanation I have proposed, as I have discussed briefly in previous posts, is that there has been a relatively sudden - on the adapting to cultural changes time scale - and all-encompassing cultural shift that has led to a dramatic increase in the level of guilt among parents. The guilt has in turn led an increasing number of parents to become over-solicitous of and afraid to discipline their children. The kids act out in response, which then causes the parents to get angry with them.

What is this shift? Well, it’s the all of the elements of the cultural upheaval that happened during the infamous 1960's. In particular, it was the emancipation of women combined with economic changes that made surviving on only one income increasingly difficult for families. 

Now don’t get me wrong. The emancipation of women is of course one of the greatest things to have ever happened, as are most of the other changes that occurred during the sixties: civil rights for minorities, the revolt against mindless conformity, and the sexual revolution.

So it is not the new freedoms themselves that are the problem, but the reactions of people to the changes, and the difficulties some families have in adjusting to the new cultural contingencies. As many pundits have pointed out, we are still even now fighting over the sixties. Almost constantly. It is referred to as the “Culture Wars.” It’s part of the reason we have “red” states and “blue” states on the election maps of the United States.

For example, many people still have not got the message that the sexual revolution was won by the revolutionaries. Surveys show that around 90% of both men and women today are not virgins when they get married. And that’s just the people who will admit that. However, you would never know that from listening to the abstinence preachers. 

And of course we have those people who give lip service to encouraging abstinence while somehow still recommending that we should be more “realistic” about the fact that teenagers are going to have sex and therefore we should teach them birth control. They cannot bring themselves to say that having sex responsibly is really just an OK thing to do.

A lot of people continue to feel the need to lie about sex. Anyone really think the Jonas Brothers pop group kept those promises with the “promise rings” they wore, when they were constantly being besieged by legions of groupies? And some promise ring wearers admit that they do not consider oral sex to be “sex.” How bizarre is that?

In fact, there are still many casualties being generated from the sexual revolution of the sixties, even though it’s been over fifty years. One wonders if all the people having unprotected sex do so as a way of punishing themselves for having sex because they feel guilty about it. 

They like to make excuses for being careless, such as saying that condoms interfere with their “spontaneity.” Well perhaps, but so does an unplanned pregnancy or an STD. The real issue is that these people still cannot tell themselves and others that they believe deep inside that they are not doing anything wrong.

I recall a middle aged divorcee I saw for therapy, the son of a minister, who was trying to justify the fact that he had sexual relations with a woman he went out with. I asked him, “So are you saying you don’t really agree with the teachings of your church on this issue?” He replied that the teachings were absolutely correct, but then added, “It’s just that I have these needs…” (Therapists should definitely not face palm during sessions. I didn't but I sure felt like it).

I mentioned the time scale by which individuals and families adapt to cultural changes. The process moves a lot more slowly than most people realize (cultural lag). After all, people are raised by parents who grew up in a somewhat different time. The parents, in turn, were raised by grandparents who grew up in yet another different time. And so on and so forth. Old rules get passed down from one generation to the next, even when they have become obsolete and counterproductive due to cultural shifts.

The rapid cultural changes in gender roles during the last few decades is what I believe to be behind all the parental guilt that we are seeing today, and which have led to the problematic parenting patterns which seem to be increasing in prevalence.

It is hard to believe that just four or five generations ago, even in advanced industrial countries like the United States and England, women were treated in ways that are not all that much different from the way they are treated today in highly traditional Muslim societies like Saudi Arabia. Just the other night, on the Ancestry.com plugfest television show, Who Do You Think You Are (on TLC, formerly on NBC), actress Cynthia Nixon discovered that her 3X great grandmother, Martha Curnutt, killed her abusive husband, Noah Casto, with an ax in 1840s Missouri.

Actress Cynthia Nixon on Who Do You Think You Are?

The show’s narrator explained that she did not really have much choice. The law would not protect her, and her husband apparently told her in no uncertain terms that he was going to kill her. It was not just that women did not obtain the right to vote for another 80 years (in 1920 in the US – less than three generations ago). They were completely at the mercy of their husbands. The narrator explained that in United States until the late 1800's wives were ruled by a legal doctrine called coverture. 

Coverture stripped women of almost all civil rights upon marriage, and they were considered legally indistinct from their husbands. Women could not keep any money they earned, own property, sign legal documents, serve on juries, get educated without their husband's consent, or retain custody of their children in the event of divorce. Men were legally allowed to physically punish (although not kill) their wives, and wives had no legal right to refuse sexual relations.

Some aspects of coverture lasted until the 1960's in some states. In fact, it was not until 1973 that women could serve on juries in all 50 States.

Flash forward to the 1950’s - in my lifetime. When I was a child very few married middle-class women had careers. Children could play outside freely without fear of strangers coming into the neighborhoods because their mothers were almost all home, and were all looking out for all the kids behind the scenes. These mothers were the granddaughters of the women that were ruled by coverture! 

Despite the mothers mostly all being at home, kids were seldom actually actually spending a lot of time with their parents. They kept busy playing with each other. Since I grew up in sunny Southern California, it was almost always nice enough to play outside, and that is where we all were sent. And a lot of it was free play, not organized activities - although there was Little League if you liked that sort of thing.

These mothers, who came of age in the thirties and forties, had no idea what was about to hit them when their daughters became college aged and joined the "women's lib" movement en masse.

In my post about the family dynamics of borderline personality disorder from 9/21/11, I discussed the peculiar situation of these women, who as Rosie the Riveter types got a taste of what it was like to have a career, only to sent back to the kitchen with advice from the government to get barefoot and pregnant again at the end of World War II.  

As mentioned, their daughters came of age during the Women’s Lib movement, which set up a real “generation gap.” I discussed how those developments led to tensions which spilled over into the future parenting practices of the younger of the two generations. I would refer the reader to that post, as a prelude to part 2 of this one, which will discuss the details of the individual and family dynamics that have been creating today’s dysfunctional parenting styles.