John Rosemond now gets going on his thesis that American Parents have become too soft…

Quite so, and it is equally accurate to say that “one of the great problems of our age is that children are being raised and educated by people who care more about their feelings than they do their thoughts and ideas.”

The child’s feelings have been the paramount consideration in both spheres since the late 1960s, when parents became persuaded that they should no longer take their cues from their own upbringing, but from psychologists and other mental health professionals.  As a consequence, the focus of American parenting veered sharply away from training the child’s character and mind toward that of protecting his feelings from insult (i.e., Disappointment, failure, embarrassment, and other basic facts of life) and elevating his opinion of himself.

Proper parenting, the new experts said, was a matter of being sensitive to and acting in accord with the feelings that issued from one’s child.  Psychologist Thomas Gordon, author of “Parent Effectiveness Training,” the best-selling parenting book of the 1970s, said that because children do not like being told what to do, adults should not tell them what to do.  Children who submit to their parents’ authority, Gordon said, grow to be adults who “fill the offices of psychologists and psychiatrists.”

We now know, of course, that this isn’t true.  Gordon and other progressive parenting pundits were pulling this baloney out of thin air.  Research psychologist Diana Baumrind’s decades-long study of parenting outcomes finds that the most well-adjusted children come from households presided over by parents who are loving but unequivocally authoritative—parents who, in other words, adhere to a traditional (pre-1970s, non-psychological) parenting model.  It turns out that the very parenting model promoted by the mental health community compromises child mental health!

The reason I favor Dr. Rosemond above all other Developmental (Child) Psychologists is because he most closely resembles my mother’s theories…she was trained in the 1920s, and gone a long time from this Earth…but a wiser woman I have yet to meet…many just as wise, but none wiser about raising children.