A Family of Value by John Rosemond

Author:John Rosemond
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0-8362-0505-7
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
Published: 1995-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

The Responsible Child: Discipline That Works!

For these commands are a lamp,

this teaching a light,

and the corrections of discipline

are the way to life.

—Proverbs 6:23

When I ask teachers who’ve taught long enough to know, “What’s different about today’s kids when compared with the kids of the ’50s and early ’60s?” they always tell me today’s kids are generally disrespectful, irresponsible, and undisciplined. Of the hundreds of veteran teachers of whom I’ve asked this question over the last five years or so, not one has spoken in positive terms about the present generation of children. Unless these folks are suffering from some mass delusion brought on by inhaling too much chalk dust, we’d better face up to the fact that we baby boomers were a far more well-disciplined bunch than are our children. This is not a matter of acid rain having damaged the gene responsible for good parenting; it’s that postwar “parenting” professionals created and released into our culture a child-rearing “virus”—self-esteemus absurdicus—that’s been wreaking havoc ever since.

Nouveau “parenting” professionals would have us baby boomers believe we paid a “terrible price”—they use that term a lot—for our good behavior. In the course of kowtowing to rabidly tyrannical parents, they tell us, we never learned to make choices or think for ourselves. That’s a lie. This, however, is fact: The proper exercise of parental authority (and when properly exercised it is absolute) interferes with neither the emergence of decision-making skills nor intellectual maturity. I’m willing to bet my entire compact disc collection that Thomas Jefferson’s parents told him what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. They even told him what he should think! And if young Tom ever became possessed of enough cheek to ask them why they insisted upon this and that and prohibited thus and so, I’m sure they answered “because we say so” or its prerevolutionary equivalent. The same, I’m equally certain, was true of Ben Franklin’s parents, and Abraham Lincoln’s, and Martin Luther King’s, and Jonas Salk’s, and Thomas Locke’s, and the parents of all the other great thinkers, groundbreakers, and decision-makers of history. In short, parents who “dictate” (which The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language defines as “to prescribe with authority”) to their children do not—I repeat, do not—cripple their intellects.

Contemporary parenting professionals would also have us believe that my generation’s parents’ supposedly heavy-handed discipline caused our psyches to shrivel. Again, not so. All the evidence points to one inescapable conclusion: The 1950s were a better, healthier, more stable time to be an American child than any time since. Since the 1950s, every single indicator of positive childhood mental health has been in decline. As a general rule, we baby boomers were more secure, more respectful of adults, more willing to accept responsibility, more well disciplined, more resourceful, and for all these reasons, far healthier psychologically, morally, and spiritually than are the children of these “progressive” times. The question, then, becomes, How did previous generations of parents discipline children?

Answering

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