October 13, 1999
Family therapist: Grandma knew best parenting
By Carol South
Herald contributing writer
Despite what the experts have said for the past 35 year, Grandma knew best.
So asserted family therapist John Rosemond, who came to Traverse City Monday for two presentations on families and parenting. Rosemond's presentation on 'A Family of Value' drew more than 200 people to the City Opera House for a breakfast lecture. With knowing laughter and sometimes rueful acknowledgment, the majority of the audience was transfixed by Rosemond's observations about frenzied pace and tentative style of parenting in the 90s.
City resident Shelley Kester came to hear Rosemond speak Monday morning. She had left his first talk in Traverse City two years ago with her eyes opened about the new 'old' ways to parent. Applying the techniques he recommends has helped her raise her own two children, ages 8 and 3, while being a working mother.
"Rosemond reaffirms what we already know: that our grandparents knew what they were doing," said Shelley Kester, who is secretary of the Great Lakes Children's Museum. "This is a great program for our community because the community is very concerned about where we are going with our kids."
Rosemond's talk was sponsored by the Great Lakes Children's Museum, which will use the funds to help found the museum and to purchase a set of Rosemond videos to share with the community.
Rosemond, a trained family therapist with two grown children, did not come to his conclusions in a vacuum. Instead, he recalled his own family's parenting revolution 20 years ago when he and his wife totally changed the rules of their family and put themselves back in charge. The family went from a child-centered home, where he admits his children were rude, unmotivated, hostile and angry, to an autocratic style of parenting under which they flourished, in school and at home.
"I've been there and done that, as far as mistakes," Rosemond noted. "This is a personal testimonial."
He asked the audience during the course of his lecture:
"Are your children as well behaved as you were as a child? Are they as willing to do as they are told? As respectful of adult authority? As capable of independent achievement?"
He found, just as he does in cities across the country where he gives up to 250 lectures a year, no one raised their hand to say 'Yes' to any of these questions. Rosemond concluded from his own experiences as a parent and 30 years of working with families that the current parenting paradigm is fatally flawed.
"If you look at the numbers it is clear that grandma's child-rearing produced more well-adjusted children and adults that the child-rearing experiment we've been using over the past 30-40 years," Rosemond concludes, citing giant leaps in rates of teen suicide, depression and violence since 1965.
"Today's children are not as happy as in the 1950s and since 1965 every single indicator of positive mental health has been on a precipitous decline."
The family of Cara Colburn, which includes three children ages 9, 6, and 3, created their own success story by using Rosemond's principles of promoting old-fashioned parenting and goals of instilling respect, responsibility and resourcefulness in their children.
Colburn first read one of his books three and a half years ago. She loved it and excitedly told her mother, Jeanne Piche, that this was the only parenting book she ever read that talked about what her mother had done as a parent. Her mother went out and bought 15 copies of the book to distribute to family and friends, wanting to share his message. Piche has since brought John Rosemond to town two times, the last time two years ago.
"Our family has flourished under this structure," said Colburn, co-founder of the Great Lakes Children's Museum. "His views are simple and enduring and somewhat shocking to many of the parents nowadays. Although he is not without controversy, we wanted to have him speak to improve interaction between generations, which is one of the missions of our museum."