I love children. They taste like pork.
[sub]Internet child-[del]cooking[/del]rearing expert.[/sub]
Oh, and Guin? Don’t look down / there.
Snake!
I don’t know this guy from Adam and one size obviously does not fit all re kids and behavior, but there is something to the notion that a lot of bad behaviors and acting out could be moderated or eliminated with parents applying consistent and meaningful discipline or simply modeling appropriate behavior themselves.
There is a substantial difference between handling discipline effectively and being a bully. Some kids respond to kinder gentler and some need a very firm hand.
I am not a parent and don’t claim to know much about this guy, but he still seems way off in crazy-land. Yes, there’s a difference between firmness, strictness, and willful abuse. All kids need the first, and all kids sometimes need the second (yeah, let’s admit it - we could all be pretty bratty as children sometimes).
Rosemund seems to me to shading awfully far into the third. His advise isn’t about correcting bad nehavior or instilling good siscipline and values. It’s about control, not about a loving bond. It uses fear and power instead of experience and wisdom. It’s not authority, but the illusion of authority by brute force. And I’d be willing to bet there’s a substantial subset of kids who will respond very negatively and increase their bad behavior because their parents suddenly took up bullying as a hobby. And the other kids arguably get it worse. They’re going to obey, but be hurt, humiliated, and ashamed because their parents decided to be complete assholes about everything.
In neither case does Rosemund’s advice seem helpful, and in neither case will it create or allow for trust. How could someone following Rosemund’s advice ever expect their kids to ask them for help, or come to them with problems? They would, and could, never know what might set dear mom & pop off, and if it sets them off they’ll immediately jump to extreme reactions.
And perhaps worst of all, it legitimizes and approves behavior that absolutely would not be tolerated otherwise. Society does not much approve of people who instantly fly into control-freak rages and crush their children.
Yeah, saying this guy promotes discipline is kind of like saying the kkk opposes affirmative action.
There’s a long distance between one and the other. There’s an acquaintance who is a banker, who 10 years ago got into a battle of wills with his 6 year old daughter over going to bed and sleeping through the night. She would range around her room playing with her toys until all hours then be exhausted in the morning. She refused any instructions to stay in bed. Both he and his wife were tired of dealing with it.
He did not beat her or yell at her, but he eventually took everything out of her room but the bed and took the door off the hinges. After about 2 weeks of this she began sleeping through the night and he replaced the doors and her toys. There have been no issues since and she is seemingly a bright, well adjusted child. She was as bullheaded as he is, but he had the upper hand as the adult. Was this abusive or instructive? How many people would have seen a specialist or therapist for this?
Not me. Just cook them thirteen minutes per pound, just like a turkey. They stop being a problem, and are delicious, besides.
Some of his suggested punishments sound downright abusive. How do you build trust and respect with your kids when you frame your role as parent as Dictator For Life?
Reading the preview for ‘Piling On’ he is incredibly condescending to any method of parenting that is not his. He seems to imply that a culture war in the 60s gave rise to all these discipline problems. Listen to our Elders? Really? Because being alive for 60 years automatically makes you an authority on everything :rolleyes:.
I daresay the book sounds like it appeals to “old school” people too stubborn to accept the world has changed, and so they turn to whatever abusive or dysfunctional social mores they had as children because it is so familiar to them.
Does he have any kids? Would they have even survived infancy with the way he says you’re ‘supposed’ to treat children?
He sounds like he’s gone crazy over the years. I had one of his books years ago and he wasn’t nearly so bullying, or maybe my attachment-parenting ways softened the Nazism of his advice. One thing that he said that stuck with me over the years is the importance of distinguishing between what children truly need and what they merely want. That helped me to more clearly evaluate situations and resist ridiculous nagging.
That said, I did recoil from his notion that a parent is a “benevolent dictator.” That was his exact term.
I don’t get how addressing a child’s infraction days after the fact is supposed to correct anything. I had always assumed punishment should be immediately after the infraction, so the child will build a correlation between an undesirable activity.
Being passive-agressive about it will just make the child assume they are always In Trouble by default, because until their parent tells them, how the hell would they know? They wouldn’t see the correlation between their activities; they might not even REMEMBER what they did wrong!
According to him, children are Bad (as opposed to dogs, which are…neutral? 
). How is a kid who is treated Bad by default supposed to build any self-confidence in life, be able to make mistakes and learn from them, self-correct their own behavior, and form bonds and relationships with other people?
Rosemond is an idiot. His approach to parenting is very lazy and narcissistic – do virtually nothing to train your kids, then fly off the handle when they piss you off. I get the impression that Rosemond cares more about enjoying his fleeting power trips than he does about the long-term serious business of raising good kids.
You know what works wonders with kids? Steady, constant discipline administered with kindness. It’s a hell of lot more work than Rosemond’s half-assed bullying approach, but it actually produces lasting results.
If you’re in a battle of wills with a 6-year-old, you need to take a step back and re-consider your approach to parenting.
One of the few things that would trigger a spanking in the Hamster household was insubordination. If you broke the rules then you would get a stern talking to and a time-out. But if you showed disrespect, or went against direct parental instructions, then the big guns came out.
The total number of times I spanked either my kids? About three times each. But those times loomed very large in their minds.
I never had a battle of wills with my kids. I don’t think it ever occurred to either of them that *arguing *with Mom and Dad was something you could do. They were always shocked when they’d see other kids talking back to their parents in public. However, they did know that we were always willing to take extenuating circumstances into account. We had strict rules, but we were always willing to bend them if you could make a good case for it. But digging in your heels and openly defying us? That was always going to turn out badly.
I believe I may have read his crap. I think this clown is syndicated to the local newspaper that i don’t subscribe to, and whenever i read him he goes on AND on about how sex should be saved for marriage. Which pisses me off, because not everybody really wants to get married, and I don’t
I might change my mind but honestly I’d rather take the cash that a reception would cost and do something like go to New Zealand.
That’s what he wants. He says “Surprises keep children on their toes, minding their p’s and q’s.” Living in fear, IOW. He approves of that, too. Not in the reasonable sense that your kids should be afraid of what you’ll do if they violate a known rule, but afraid of what you might do at any time.
And he does have two kids, both adults now. His stories about them are inconsistent, though.
Hamster King: See, what you call “steady, constant discipline” he calls “micromanaging”. And a waste of time, and an overabundance of attention. Children should be independent, he says. But parents should also be wary of a teenager who wants independence. And he predicts that somehow, your children will be fully functioning adults at age 18, even after you’ve spent those 18 years treating them as if they were 2.
Funny thing is, the scenarios he lays out do not require the parent/s to raise their voices or express anger. Not the way he envisions them, that is. What they involve is the hypothetical parent maintaining a serene inflexibility while the hypothetical child is the one who flies into a rage. I honestly think this is wish-fulfillment for him: probably a reimagining of his childhood, but now with him in the role of parent and victor.
I wonder how many people can really pull this off, though. There have to be some people who can’t keep their cool for that long. There have to be some who don’t want to. As you said, a battle of wills is not constructive. And as far as the kids remembering what they did wrong, I’m not sure I could remember what they’d done wrong three days on!
Fair enough. THere’s no way I’d really monologue that whole thing; rather, it’d be points I’d bring up in the conversation. Kids are smart enough to absorb three things.
I enjoyed reading Rosemond’s views on the goals of parenting, specifically whether we should want children to think for themselves:
He writes as though he sees only two alternatives: a parent can attempt to indoctrinate her children into her own specific complement of beliefs and values, seeking to construct carbon copies of herself; or else she places every tenet, every value, up for equal consideration. When someone says “I want my child to think for himself” she means “I want my child to become someone unique and interesting, capable of making the right decisions on his own”. She doesn’t mean “I want my child to make his own decisions about everything, and if he decides [say] that rape is fun and murdering orphans is honorable, so be it. Yay relativism!”
How bizarre. I’m not sure I’ve literally ever seen this point of view expressed before — that the “primary purpose” of being a parent is to breed vectors for spreading one’s opinions. I used to like my parents … but noqw I realize they must’ve been utter failures.
(He does admit at the end of the article that indoctrination is never entirely successful. Wistfully.)
Um, what’s the difference between “arguing with Mom and Dad” and “mak[ing] a good case” for what they wanted? It sounds like the only difference is whether or not you ultimately agreed to change your mind.
I’m not him, but there’s a distinct difference in my household. First is tone of voice. Second is content. If it’s all about “Pleeeeeeease” or what you want, then that’s an argument. If you can present me with *reasons *why I should reconsider, that’s a good case. If you can anticipate the reasons I’m likely to say no and have non-whiny solutions for them, so much the better.
“But MOOOOooommm! I really really really really really want to stay up late to watch Too Cute! It’s not fair!”
No.
“Mom, I’ve finished all my homework, and I made my lunch for tomorrow and put out my clothes so I can sleep in half an hour if I’m tired. Can I stay up late to watch the end of Too Cute?”
Sure.
I don’t generally require footnotes, but it doesn’t hurt. 
You let your kids watch Too Cute? But John Rosemond channeled the spirit of your great grandmother, whose folksy common sense proscribes such liberal silliness. Instead, the next time your kids argue with you about watching Too Cute, you should shrug and pretend to let them. But halfway through suddenly switch the channel to raw abattoir footage and force them to watch it for the remaining half hour. Such surprises keep children on their toes and teach them to fear you.
To be fair, though, tell them that you consulted with a doctor who advised this strategy.