John Rosemond preaches a return to good old-fashioned parenting

Lisa Davis

Nov. 7, 2009 (McClatchy-Tribune Regional News delivered by Newstex) -- John Rosemond has been teaching about biblically based parenting for more than 35 years.

He just didn't always know it.

From his beginnings as a child psychologist in North Carolina, Rosemond has grown into a national -- and polarizing -- presence, with 13 books, a column in more than 200 newspapers, and more than 150 speaking engagements around the country every year (including ones this weekend in Huntsville and Birmingham).

He's gotten into it with pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton on the issue of toilet-training. Brazelton says let children set the timetable. Rosemond says do it by age 2, that, yes, it will be messy, but you can always have the carpet cleaned when you're done.

He's hated -- and he means hated -- over his stand on ADHD, which he says is a myth invented to excuse kids who've never had the toddler trained out of them.

Two of his most requested topics are how to parent rebellious teens and strong-willed children.

He has become as popular in Christian circles as in secular circles. But he himself didn't become a Christian until about 10 years ago.

"It wasn't some blinding, road-to-Damascas experience," he said. "It was just this slow realization that I needed a Savior. Before that process occurred, ministers would come up to me at speaking engagements and tell me that everything I was saying was, whether I knew it or not, biblically based. It was fascinating to me, but also made me uncomfortable. I wasn't exactly an atheist, but I wasn't a Christian. I believed in God, but I thought Jesus was just a good teacher.

"When I began reading Scripture, I began to realize, all of what I've been saying, I don't have to change any of it. It caused me to believe that God had been preparing me. That this was really a ministry that I was doing.

"It's not exclusive by any means. It embraces people who are not people of faith. Whether they believe in the Bible or not, the way we used to raise children was based on Biblical principles, and it worked. It worked a whole lot better than parenting based on psychological theory," he said.

"Modernity has taken us in some very undesirable extremes and lifestyles," he said. "In parenting, it's been our reliance on the experts -- which is an ironic thing for me to say. We relied on our elders 50-plus years ago. Now we rely on people like me, which is unfortunate. The advice I try to give is stuff that our great-grandmothers would have given."

After writing 10 secular parenting books, Rosemond wrote his first faith-based parenting book in 2007, Parenting by The Book. That led to a three-book deal with Christian publishing house Thomas Nelson. The first of those, The Diseasing of America's Children; Exposing the ADHD Fiasco and Empowering Parents to Take Back Control, written with pediatrician Bose Revenel, was published in September.

"All of the symptoms of ADHD that are published by the American Psychological Association are behaviors that are typical of toddlers," said Rosemond. "What's happening is that we are failing to raise children reliably past toddlerhood. Emotionally and behaviorally, significant numbers of children come to first grade as toddlers. They demand instant gratification. They can't pay attention. They scream when they don't get their way. We've decided to whitewash what's really going on, to create this disease myth, which parents buy into because it says it's not your fault," he said.

"If parent commit themselves to a non-medical approach to the problem, I've never seen it fail. If it's approached as a behavior problem, it's fixed rather quickly. If it's approached as a genetic, medical issue, well then, it can't be cured, only controlled. For about eight hours, with a drug."

(Told you Rosemond had a polarizing position on ADHD.)

Next will come The Well-Behaved Child: Discipline That Really Works!. "The reason people need a book on how to discipline children is that children are bad," Rosemond said. "We thought children were fundamentally good. They're not. They WANT to do the wrong thing. It's thrilling, enticing, addictive to do the wrong thing. Even a child of 18 months, you tell him to pick up a toy from the floor, he looks at you and says no. We've embraced this whole utopian view of children as good, and it's blown up in our faces."

The next book will be a treatise on toilet-training with Diane Kottakis. Members of his Web site, www.rosemond.com, have posted more than 5,000 questions. About half of them are on toilet-training.

Rosemond insists that the string of letters following his name are not what give him legitimacy. Instead, it's the fact that he has been married for 40 years, with two grown children and seven grandchildren, all of whom are well-behaved.

Rosemond is 61, and is starting to get inquiries about possible retirement. After all, James Dobson just announced his retirement from Focus on the Family this week. But Rosemond says he's not the retirable sort.

He, has however, just started a program to train up a new generation of Certified Parent Coaches. In the past three months, the program has trained 15 coaches from across the country, who have gone to work in private practice, in churches, in schools. One trainer wants to coach fathers who don't live with their children. Two coaches are specializing in toilet-training.

Rosemond, who has a ready and hearty laugh, says if he could only give one piece of advice, it would be this:

"Bring a sense of humor to the raising of children. Nobody brings a sense of humor to it anymore. All the humor has drained out of child-rearing. People used to laugh about the things children did."

John Rosemond programs

Today: "Parenting the Strong-Willed Child" and "Parenting the Strong-Willed Teen," 10:30 a.m. at Huntsville High School, $15-$20, www.castingnewlives.com.

Sunday: 4-6 p.m. at St. Peter's Anglican Church, 3207 Montevallo Road, Birmingham, (205) 879-7173, www.stpetersbhm.org. FREE. Childcare provided through 6th grade.

Upcoming: Rosemond will hold a weekend parenting retreat in Atlanta Feb. 26-27. www.rosemond.com for info and registration.

Newstex ID: KRTB-0317-39521487