Pay Attention, Kids!

The old adage in this cartoon may not even make sense to folks today. When it originated, however, adults understood their jobs were to teach and children were to listen. Over time the roles morphed and reversed. Children became the center of attention. Parents became servants, listeners, cheer-leaders and reared an entitlement generation. Changing God's order carries a price.

Try to converse with a young mother and see how often her child is ALLOWED to interrupt, and do so without consequences. Many children today are seen and heard far more than their parents.

Special thanks to my brother, Ricky Tippett, for sharing this worldview article. I offer my soapbox to Chris Woodard and John Rosemond who state well my own view on this parenting issue facing every mom and dad.

Rosemond: Kids Need to Pay Attention, Respect Authority

Chris Woodward

It's not uncommon to hear older generations reminisce about the "good ol' days." But when it comes to child rearing, America's most widely-read parenting expert says those days saw better parents and better children.

"By the time a child is three years old, he ought to be paying more attention to his parents than his parents are paying to him. That's, today, a radical idea," says John Rosemond.

The well-known columnist says it would have not have been radical to someone who heard this 50 years ago because people up until the modern age understood this principle.

"The modern age is the age of 'psycho-babble' and parenting. Up until this age of 'psycho-babble,' people understood that you cannot effectively teach a child what you need to teach him, you cannot effectively disciple a child unless the child is in a position of being the student -- and that requires that the child be paying attention to you," the expert says.

Rosemond says the problem in most American families today is that most parents are paying so much attention to their children, that their children never get the message that it is their job to pay attention to their parents.

"So what you have by the time most children of three years old is children with a very pronounced attention deficit disorder that they take with them to school and simply never learn to pay attention to adult authority figures -- and as a consequence, have never learned to do what they're told," he adds.

The parenting authority adds that raising children should not be stressful, and if parents put their primary focus on their marriage, parenting will flow naturally and it will not be a stressful situation.

Rosemond made his comments earlier this week on American Family Radio's The Matt Friedeman Show.

Parenting:

What Kids Should Expect From a Working Mother

by John Rosemond

Today's moms are servants to children.

I was recently in Somewhere, USA, where I talked on the unfortunate consequences to families and children of the prevailing nouveau idea that the more one does for one's children, the better a parent one is. This message, I said, has been insidious, especially for women.

A woman approached me afterward.

"Things have changed," she said. "Like many of today's mothers, I work full time, which gives me only three hours a day to spend with my children, and I think they deserve my full attention during that time.”

"I'll just bet," I said, "that you're exhausted after you put the kids to bed.”

“You bet!" she affirmed.

"Are you married?" I asked.

“Yes," she answered.

"Why don't you spend that three hours - most of it, at least with your husband?"

She stared at me, speechless, for at least five seconds. Then she said, with a dreamy sort of tone, "That had never even occurred to me."

Unfortunately, it hasn’t occurred to a lot of today's female parents. The straitjacket we've built for this generation of American women all but compels them to stop being wives once they have children and become,. instead, "working mothers" or "stay-at-home moms." Their husbands then fall into line by becoming fathers, first and foremost; and that, kids, is the story of how parent - especially the female of the species - is now synonymous with servant and the marriage has become the American Family's Cheshire Cat - now you see it, now you don't.

In the first place, there is nothing new about mothers working outside of their homes. My mother did. So did her mother. So did a significant number of my childhood buddies' mothers. What's new is guilt over doing so and consequently - large numbers of women flogging themselves into frenzies of "I've got to make it up to my children" every evening and on weekends.

Take, for example, my mother. For the first seven years of my life, she was a single parent. Then she married. In neither situations did she come home from her job feeling she owed me something. Quite the contrary. She came home feeling - are you ready for this? - I owed her something! What a concept! Specifically, I owed her for putting a roof over my head, food in my stomach, clothes on my back, and shoes on my feet.

For her sacrifice, Mom felt she deserved respect, obedience, and peace and quiet. And she got it. She expected me to keep myself busy And I did. Funny. I don't recall ever thinking my mother wasn't giving me enough of her time and attention. Nor did my friends-whose-mothers-worked and I form a "rejected-children's support group."

Thus did I grow up with the feeling that I was obligated to my mother.

By contrast, overwhelming numbers of today's kids are growing up thinking their mothers are obligated to them. Because the mother-child relationship has turned upside-down, inside-out and backward in the course of 40 years, today's child is at great risk of becoming a petulant, demanding, ungrateful brat. Unfortunately, the more petulant and demanding he becomes, the more likely it is his mother will feel she's not doing enough for him. And around and around they go, this codependent union of mother and child.

What America needs is yet another women's liberation movement. this time, however, women should burn not their bras, but their mini-vans.

Note From the Editor of Christian Parent's Network:

John Rosemond is a Psychologist by training and family counselor by practice. However, he does not accept psychological theory as valid and provides Biblically based counseling. I enjoy his viewpoint on many subjects and read his column regularly. Visit his website at http://www.rosemond.com However, the references to his column should not be construed as an endorsement of psychological principles. I believe psychology and psychiatry to be pseudo-sciences. My readings of John Rosemond's material indicate to me that for the most part, he shares similar beliefs. MB