Menage à Trois Bingo

mousefeathers gave me this last month, as we are soon to be the parents of a teenager. She stipulated that she had bought it years ago and wasn’t even sure she ever read it. I read it a week or so ago. I started this post the next day but have not had time to work on it until now.

I am not impressed. Dr. Rosemond calls himself a psychologist heretic, and has little good to say about his fellow professionals. Nor does he have anything good to say about parents who disagree with his premises or conclusions. He repeatedly insults parents whose values for their children differ from his, calling them foolish or deluded or simply “bad parents”.

The book, while not presented as “Christian parenting,” is nonetheless full of Bible references and Christian assumptions and expects that readers will subscribe to them. He spends a lot of time going off on divorce: “Today the once-sacred sacrament of marriage is nothing more than a flimsy contract that any partner can walk away from at the slightest whim.” He insists that unhappy couples should just suck it up and stay married. “...agree between you that you’re going to hang in there no matter what...Staying married is the toughest thing you will ever do, which is precisely why it is the most rewarding thing you will ever do.” His opinion of feminism is even worse: the only mention of the word comes in the phrase “the feminist sport of having children out of wedlock”!!!. Even political correctness comes in for a casual slam: “...nothing the child in question can do but say ‘Uncle!’ (or to be politically correct about it, “Sibling of a parent!’)” What was that for?

He sums up his overall method of parenting with the old saw “Give them enough rope to hang themselves,” meaning allow teenagers a great deal of freedom and independence (which I tend to agree with in general) but he then seems to take a great deal of pleasure in coming up with the “hangings” when the teens overstep the freedoms allowed. The punishments or consequences need not have anything to do with the error, nor even be associated in time; indeed he makes a point of how he thinks it’s better if they are not, claiming that “eight out of ten times a child misbehaves, effective consequences are not immediately available.” Where this 80% number comes from is never stated, so I can only assume it comes out of his ass. In narrating a conversation about this idea with a parent (client) he analogizes to a workplace situation where someone “misbehaves on the job” (his words) and four months later finds out during the annual performance review that the “misbehavior” has caused the loss of a raise. Personally I would think that is bad management as well—why would you let someone go on for months thinking they were doing fine if they’re not?

An example: he tells a story about asking his daughter to wash dishes and clean house while he and his wife were out, in preparation for a dinner party that night. She refused, so he said, “If it’s not done when we get home we’ll do it.” It wasn’t, and they did. No consequences for the daughter, who continued in her original plans for the evening...until the following Friday when she wanted to go out with her friends and he announced (in front of her friend for maximum humiliation), “Oh, I forgot. Since you didn’t wash dishes last week you can’t go out now.”

He only once mentions gay teens, tossing out this remark on the very last page, in reference to the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which he disparaged for a page and a half: “Here’s another absolutely astonishing finding:[...] Teens who have repeated a grade in school or are attracted to members of the same gender are more likely to have problems than heterosexual teens who have done reasonably well in school. As today’s teenager might say, ‘Well, duh!!!’” Due to the complete lack of any other comments on gay teens it rather looks like he’s saying it’s their own fault for having problems. (Interestingly this page appears to be missing from Google Books. All the other quotes show up on the appropriate page, but searching by several words on page 265 does not find anything.)

After writing all this, I looked at the reviews from Google Books, which are invariably positive. I would probably have not been so irritated by this book if it did not have the preachy condescension and insults or the anti-divorce, anti-feminism slams.