Because I Said So!
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Because I Said So! is a podcast by John Rosemond. John is the nation’s leading parenting expert and provides common-sense advice for raising your children. John is a nationally syndicated columnist, author and public speaker. His audiences are left feeling empowered, educated and entertained.
A family psychologist by license, John points out to all his audiences that “psychology has caused more problems than it has solved for American parents.” John’s mission is to be a counter-weight to the psychological parenting paradigm that was sold to America in the late 1960s/early 1970s, restore commonsense to the raising of children, and give parents the guidance needed to raise happy, well-mannered children who will, as adults, contribute value to culture and society.
Because I Said So!
Women's Liberation Is a Flop
Women have traded being dominated by men for being dominated by heir children.
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Hello, out there in listener land, you're listening to your host, john Roseman, and this is a podcast called Because I Said so. I'm glad you've joined us and hope you continue to do so in upcoming weeks, months and hopefully years. So I've titled this podcast Women's Liberation Was a Complete Waste of Time. Yep, that's what I've titled Women's Liberation Was a Complete Waste of Time. Energy Yelling Signs, inc.
Speaker 1:I've come to the politically incorrect conclusion that women's liberation, the women's liberation, the liberation movement that unfolded in the streets and on college campuses in the late 1960s, as not only completely failed but it's backfired. In the 1960s I was there. I was, you know, in the late 60s I was a young adult, late adolescent. In the early 70s I was married, I had two children. I was there and I saw what was going on. I didn't understand what was going on. I thought I understood it, but I really didn't understand it.
Speaker 1:But in the 1960s, women took to the streets to protest. What they claimed was second class status. According to the Libbers, gloria Steinem, etc. Men enjoyed first class status. In the home, in the workplace, in politics, the military. Men enjoyed first class status pretty much everywhere. And they, the Libbers, were sick and tired being under the calloused thumbs of men. So today, women have achieved great things in the workplace, politics, the military and so on. But in the home, it should be perfectly clear that women have traded being dominated by men, supposedly dominated and controlled, or being dominated and controlled for real by their children.
Speaker 1:How did this conundrum come about? Well, it came about for two reasons primarily. First, in the late 1960s, the mental health professions in this country successfully positioned themselves. They sold themselves as the go-to experts when it came to raising children. They really got a hand into them because, without a shred of evidence, america's burgeoning mental health professions psychology, clinical social work, marriage and family therapy, blah, blah, blah. And that is what they do. They blah, blah, blah. They claimed that traditional child ring was psychologically toxic to children and that if the collective we were going to heal the damage done to children and get on the right path with children, we had to stop listening to our elders and begin listening to them. Mental health experts. Second, the mental health professions redefined both our collective understanding of children, their nature and their needs, that is, and our understanding of parental responsibilities, and so taken in by the capital letters after their names and their supposedly superior insight into how human beings tick. Human parents began taking their marching orders from people who spoke authoritatively but did not actually know what they were talking about. And remember, you're hearing this from a guy who holds a license to practice psychology, issued duly by the North Carolina Psychology Board, who in 1979 had no idea they were issuing a license to a certified rabble rouser who possesses better than average critical thinking skills and is therefore capable of seeing right through their pseudo-intellectual facade.
Speaker 1:The consequences to children, parents, marriages, family, schools and culture in general of having raised children, according to psychology, for going on six decades now, are in. Mental health of children is in the toilet. The typical parent, especially if the parent in question is a typical female parent, is an obsessive type AAA micromanager who is in near constant and exhausting child rearing motion. So back to how the mental health professions redefined our understanding of the nature of a child Once upon a not so long ago time, as recently as when I was a child. It was understood correctly so that a child is a potential sociopath in the making Because he was created in God's image. A child held within himself the potential of doing great good in the world. That potential had been corrupted in the Garden of Eden on the first day of our existence. Because of that corruption, children were inclined, in any given situation, to do what demonstrated love of self rather than love of God and love of neighbor. It was understood as recently as the 1950s and early 1960s. The children needed to be trained to do the right thing and that the training in question needed to be emphatic, forceful. I'm not talking about physically painful, though I have no problem, as long time listeners know, with spanking occasionally, occasionally being the operative word. But I'm not talking about spankings. I'm talking about simply emphatic, forceful authority, which has almost fallen completely by the wayside over the last 50 years.
Speaker 1:I was in graduate school when psychologists and other mental health types began claiming that a traditional understanding of the nature of a child and a traditional approach to discipline were wrong and harmful. Well, the truth is that a traditional approach to discipline is a masculine approach, which is why the Bible is clear that the primary disciplinarian in the home is the Father. Then the women's liberation movement came along after several thousands of years, reared its hysteria and everything masculine became objects of demonization. Prior to this demonization, nearly all children heard the phrase wait until your father gets home from their mothers. Now, in the late 1960s, women were being told, in effect, that a masculine approach to discipline was harmful to children. It was authoritarian, dictatorial, it lacked appreciation of a child's delicate psychological nature. It deprived a child of self-esteem, the right to always feel that he was special, an incarnate beam of holy light sent from heaven to grace us with his or her immaculate presence.
Speaker 1:The mental health expert community basically said that proper child-wring was all about love. Well, that appealed to women, but not to men. Men had great difficulty wrapping their heads around the new psychological parenting paradigm, and so, for the first time in history, in any culture, at any time, as far as I can tell, children were being raised by mothers and fathers who weren't on the same page. That is a new thing, folks. For those of you who are, you know, younger than 65, you may not understand. In the 1950s, when I was being raised, I mean, it was rare to find a mother and father who were not completely aligned when it came to the raising of their children. And today it is rare to find a father and mother who are completely aligned when it comes to the raising of their children.
Speaker 1:At the same time, masculinity was being demonized from all sides, was being demonized by the social sciences, psychology, sociology, was being demonized by the media, was being demonized by academia. And so, men, there's any men out there here to tell you this is going to be hard for you to hear Men took the easy way out, they capitulated, they collapsed Not all, but a whole lot of them my estimation, most of them. They began striving, in their roles as fathers, to be more caring and sensitive. And well, they began striving to be more like their wives, which is why a world famous sociologist said in the 1980s that many children in America and this was 40 years ago folks were being raised by two mothers, one of whom had male biological characteristics. That sociologist, his name, is David Blankenhorn and he was writing in his book that is still relevant Fatherless America. And just like that, women began ruling and running the child-earing process. And just like that, in the blink of an eye, in historical time, the American family became a matriarchy.
Speaker 1:Let's face it, folks, in today's all-too-typical family, mom runs the parenting show. She is the final word on all things related to the kids. Dad is the parenting aide. He's like teacher's aide he's there to help. When he helps, he's given specific instructions from which he must not deviate on penalty of no intimacy or intimacy, as a Brit might put it, for a month. Now it's important that I fill in some history here.
Speaker 1:In the late sixties, as this paradigm shift was beginning to unfold, the mental health professional community told parents that good parenting was all about letting children express their feelings freely, was all about properly understanding children's feelings and properly responding to them. This is not something men are well-suited to do. Let's face it. Men are emotional neanderthals. You're hearing that from a man. I prefer being emotional neanderthal. In fact, feelings are a nuisance to me. Men have feelings about things like the Super Bowl and fake wrestling matches and the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition, but they generally do not comprehend the concept of feelings. Women, on the other hand, are emotionally hyperactive. A man has eight emotional crayons, and some of them have never been used. A woman has sixty-four emotional crayons, many of which, by the time a woman is thirty, have been worn down to the nub.
Speaker 1:The new parenting paradigm appealed to women because it was all about the emotions of the child, something my parents weren't very concerned about at all. They were not very concerned about my emotions. Children are emotionally hyperbolic folks. They make emotional mountains out of molehills, and when they make an emotional mountain out of an emotional molehill, they need to be told. As my mother would tell me during her single parent years John Rosemond, you're making a mountain out of a molehill, you need to get a grip. Anyway, the new parenting paradigm appealed to women, and women began to believe that if the raising of a child was to turn out well, it would do so on the basis of the mother's devotion, the mother's dedication and the mother's doing. And so the mothers of America got to work and before long women were saying that raising a child was the hardest thing they had ever done, something their great-grandmothers, raising three times as many children, would never have said these women who were complaining about how raising a child was the hardest thing they'd ever done. They were bragging, really, because the unspoken understanding in the Good Mommy Club which rules parenting in America is that the mom who isn't exhausted must be sitting in front of the television in her pajamas all day long drinking margaritas.
Speaker 1:Today's mom talks to her child about his feelings. She helps him sort out his feelings. She helps him express his feelings, give words to his feelings. She helps him really feel his feelings. That's what the mental health industry says she should do and that's what all her peers in the Good Mommy Club are doing. Oh, and if her child's feelings become more than she knows how to handle, she sends her child with therapist who helps him give words to his feelings and feel them really bigly.
Speaker 1:Well, here's a simple fact. Folks Write this down the more you talk to a child about his feelings, the more feelings he's going to have. The more you talk to a child about his feelings, the more feelings he's going to have. And here's another simple fact the more you talk to a child about unpleasant feelings, the more unpleasant the child is going to feel. And those two simple facts pretty much explain why.
Speaker 1:Since mothers began taking their marching orders from mental health professionals the most dangerous people in America who aren't carrying AK-47s the mental health of America's kids has steadily deteriorated and is now in the toilet preparing to be flushed forever into the therapeutic wilderness. Here's another simple fact the more a parent talks to a child about his feelings, the more confused both parent and child are going to become. Confusion leads to anxiety, which is the state of motherhood in America these days, and anxiety leads to being afraid that any mistake you make, which you think you are constantly on the edge of making, is going to tip your child over the edge. That edge and he will a commit suicide, b flip out into the ether or complete insanity before he's emancipated and so forever live at home, or c grow up to become a mass murderer and so to prevent their kids from flipping out or killing themselves, the American mother who is afraid of her child, aren't ya? Takes orders from her child and takes them. Well, she's afraid of making her child unhappy with her, you see. And so in the mother-child relationship, the child clearly has the upper hand, and so women's liberation has utterly failed. It has failed everyone and it has failed miserably.
Speaker 1:And folks, that's a wrap. I'm glad you joined us. I hope you'll continue to do so. This is enjoyable for me. I hope it's enjoyable and provocative for you, worth listening to. If you have any suggestions for me, send them to johnatrosemondcom. Johnatrosemondcom. I'll get them. I may not respond to all of them, but I'll get all of them and I'll respond to some of them. Anyway, I have a joy of being with you today, as I will continue to do in the future. In the meantime, as I always say, the ENTIS program. Keep on rockin' in the free world, folks, because if we don't keep rockin' it, we're in grave danger of losing it. This has been John Roseman with Because I Said so Hope to see you next week. Bye-bye.