October 10, 2001

Parenting author stresses manners, morals

John Rosemond says today's parents are afraid to set limits on children

By Carol South
Herald contributing writer
       It began with the Cosby Show. At least in the mass media.
      The decline of children's manners can be directly linked with the rise of laugh-tracks cueing as kids smart-mouthed their parents on America's most popular show for most of the 1980s. That was when children and families all over the country began to see it was okay to 'dis' their parents.
      Author, speaker, child psychologist and columnist, John Rosemond did not mince words with his audience of 250 Monday evening at the Lars Hockstad Auditorium. Speaking on Manners, Morals and Media Messages, the celebrated author and promoter of old-fashioned parenting had many attendees shaking their heads in recognition or laughing at themselves throughout his lecture.
      Rosemond said the trials and tribulations of the Huxtables came after our culture already abandoned parenting to the experts. Tossing out grandma's advice with the bathwater 50 years ago, contemporary parents are now afraid of setting limits and shirk their duty at teaching their children manners.
      "Parenting experts have convinced you, with the help of TV, that a 35-year-old person married five years with a three-year old child knows more about children and how to raise them than a 78-year-old woman who grew up in Traverse City, raised 10 kids, all of whom turned out to be upstanding citizens," he said. "That 78-year-old woman has forgotten more about raising children properly than that 35-year-old will ever know."
      After first asking the audience whether manners were more important than after school activities, high IQ or high school grades, he said their affirmative answer was not reflected in their homes. He said American parents may pay lip service to manners but their actions belie their words.
      "I get the manners response all over the country yet I bet that the overwhelming majority of you with children living at home are spending a lot more time taking children to after school activities than teaching manners," he said, as heads nodded in agreement. "There are no bumper stickers out there celebrating manners."
      However, this lack of manners was unheard of 50 years ago, when parents took a 20-year view of parenting. They believed they were raising adults, not raising children, and that character education was the most important part of their task. Parents today do not realize that soccer trophies, piano lessons and even IQ do not remain in long run. They are not what will get a child a job in the future: character will.
      Rosemond asserted that a key to raising a moral child is good manners; something, he said, our parents and grandparents knew intuitively. The opposite character trait, immorality, is based on a lack of respect for other people.
      "Good manners is the way you show respect for people and acknowledge their dignity," he said. "Character education is more important than any other form of education and no other education is meaningful until your course in manners is complete. These people were trying to impart to their children essential lessons of character."
      There was a widespread effort to conscientiously instruct children in good behavior and manners when he was young, he said. But it ended soon thereafter when a psychological approach to parenting pushed out common sense. With parents constantly worried about permanently traumatizing their children psychologically, Rosemond said it is no wonder that teaching manners and appropriate behavior have fallen to the wayside.
      "Today we are trying to nag or reprimand our children into good manners but people say to me that there is not enough time, they are too busy to do it," he said. "Where are our parenting priorities in America?"
      Coaching parents to say 'no' to excessive activities, to reinstitute family dinners - every night - and turn off the television in favor of family time, Rosemond challenged parents to reclaim the classroom of the family.
      Rosemond said that in 1955, the family classroom was the dinner table with everyone present, six nights out of seven. He contrasted that to a 1995 study that showed families gather for dinner one or two nights a week.
      "This means the family classroom has shrunk in the last 50 years and therefore the effectiveness of it has shrunk," Rosemond said. "I don't think that is a family, it is a group of people all running around. Today we have a hurry-up, gotta-go family all over America."