“What a bunch of baloney!” she exclaimed. “What a completely irresponsible thing to tell a child!”

I agree wholeheartedly. One cannot magically become whatever one desires to become any more than one can have anything one yearns to possess. Here, for example, is a short list of the things I could never have been, no matter how hard I tried: professional football player, fastest man on the planet, tightrope walker, nuclear physicist, brain surgeon, fighter pilot, concert pianist, and King of England.

My parents never told me I could be whatever I wanted to be. They told me what all parents should tell all children: I was blessed with a finite set of strengths. It was my responsibility to discover what they were, develop them, and use them for the benefit of my fellow citizens. (I’d rather do this parenting thing than be King of England anyway.)

Read more

First, spending three to five hours a week in the roles of husband and wife is NOWHERE NEAR SUFFICIENT to maintain a vibrant marriage. Five hours over approximately 112 hours of waking time per week is 4.46 percent. And let’s get real…the people in question usually leave their phones ON during these games of “Let’s Pretend,” and their children KNOW their phones are on, and so they call to report emergencies like, “Mommy! Danny isn’t playing fair!”

I often ask people who are married with children to estimate the percentage of overall waking time they spend in the roles of husband or wife (as opposed to the roles of mommy and daddy). The average answer is ten percent, which simply means that PARENTING RULES THE TYPICAL AMERICAN FAMILY. That further means that the typical American child rarely sees what a functional marriage looks like. For one thing, being truly married is not something a husband and wife do ten percent of the time. It’s eighty percent!

Parenting is a part-time job. When it’s full-time, it becomes EXHAUSTING, which is the word used by many parents when describing their parenting experience.

Read more

I do, by the way, believe that some people are simply not well-suited to the responsibilities of parenthood. Nonetheless, I do not believe that people who want children should have to go through whatever process to obtain a “parenting license.” That would represent government intrusion of the most egregious sort, and I’m not a fan of government intrusion in much of anything.

But on with the show: I don’t know how one would determine “biggest” in a list of common parenting mistakes, but the one that causes the most problems for all concerned is the present proclivity for two parents to occupy the roles of mom and dad such that the roles of husband and wife become akin to the Cheshire Cat in “Alice in Wonderland”: that is, mostly invisible. It is an unarguable fact that in a two-parent family, nothing puts a more solid foundation of security and well-being under the feet of a child than the knowledge that mom and dad are in an enduring relationship.

Along those lines, another bigly mistake is paying children entirely too much attention, effectively promoting them to center-stage in the family and making idols of them. Children don’t handle idolhood well at all. Let’s face it, adults don’t either. As does the citizen, a child thrives best under libertarian circumstances, meaning he is managed minimally (allowing lots of trial and error) while being held completely responsible for the mistakes he will invariably make.

Paying too much attention to children is another biggie. In my experience, which is vast at this stage, 10 out of 10 children who seem “starved” for attention are not starved at all; rather, they have been for quite some time the recipients of entirely too much. They are attention addicts, a synonym of which is “obnoxious.” It is entirely unfair to burden a child with obnoxiousness. If I were the Secretary of Parenting, I would only grant licenses to folks who pledged to love their children unconditionally but give them less than fifteen minutes of one-on-one attention a day (excluding during infancy and early toddlerhood, which are unavoidably labor-intensive).

Today’s parents tend to ascribe significance to their children’s emotional output. As a consequence of talking to their children about every emotion they experience, they risk causing their children to become emotionally driven individuals with little if any emotional resilience. My mother was fond of telling me that I was making mountains out of molehills; that there were children in the world who truly had problems … real problems like not having enough to eat. She wasn’t about to lend credence to a complaint about not being given a turn, called a name, or some such trivia. For that (among many other things), my mother receives my enduring gratitude.

Let’s see … I have room for two, maybe three more. Ah, yes! How about the habit today’s parents have of assuming a servile squat when they talk to young children? You know, that absolutely absurd “getting down to their level” thing, as if they are bowing to royalty. And then, to add the ludicrous to the absurd, finishing what they believe to be an instruction with “OK?” So what if it isn’t OK?

Last one: Trying to discipline a child who has misbehaved without causing the child emotional discomfort (guilt and remorse) and inconvenience. That attempt annuls the attempt to discipline, which goes a long way toward explaining why so many of today’s parents complain that nothing they do by way of “discipline” works.

That’s because they are doing nothing.

Share

Read more

Well, okay, I completely understand why someone who was once in danger of starving herself to death would not want to believe she was making choices, but what else should one call waking behavior for which there is no physiological correlate? A boondoggle? A squander? A humdrumness?

No hormone, neuro-chemical, gene, or any other biological characteristic or pathogen has been found to be associated with starving oneself. Therefore, anorexia is not a disease. All the evidence points to choice…a very, very bad choice. Anorexia is a way of committing suicide, and as is the case with some people who go on starvation diets and live to tell the tale, some people try to commit suicide by various other means and fail. Is trying to commit suicide not a choice?

When I burst the “My troubled mental state is not the result of choices I’ve made” balloon, it is inevitable that someone will ask, rhetorically, “Why, pray tell, would someone CHOOSE to kill themselves in the most agonizingly slow fashion imaginable?”

Same reason human beings do anything irrational, sociopathic, self-dramatic, narcissistic, and self-destructive: Because of what happened in the Garden—which is NOT, by a long shot, what academic theologians claim—human beings do irrational, sociopathic, self-dramatic, narcissistic, and self-destructive things. Some do these sorts of things more than others. Some actually LIVE in the state described…like, 24/7.

Any other rhetorical questions? No? Good. Let’s move on then.

The fairly common idea that certain dysfunctional behaviors are matters of biology and not, therefore, matters of choice is not new—think the idea, ubiquitously held in days gone by, that criminals and the insane could be identified on the basis of physiology…like, pointy heads. No kidding.

Read more

My wife, who would be a Professional Grandmother if there was such a thing, replied, “Oh! Give her a kiss for me!”

New Grandma replied, “I can’t.”

Huh?

Turns out, NG is not allowed to kiss the child until she is eight weeks of age. Until then, she is only allowed limited handling and must wear one of those completely useless facial cloths imposed on us during the Plague Years. According to the parents, those are the doctor’s orders. Oh, and by the way, the parents may kiss the child all they want, and they don’t have to wear masks. Everyone knows that makes perfect sense.

Having never heard of such a thing, I turned to my new friend, AI, and discovered (Notice the APOCALYPTIC language, certain to create anxiety in Generation Triggered), “Pediatricians and health organizations strongly advise against letting anyone other than parents or primary caregivers kiss a newborn on the face or hands. This strict ‘no kissing’ guideline is crucial for the first 2 to 3 months of life because newborns have highly immature immune systems and are highly vulnerable to severe, sometimes life-threatening infections.”

Yeah? Since when is NO KISSING THE BABY! crucial to life itself? Funny, I stay up on RESEARCH (if it conforms to the scientific method…that is, RESEARCH as opposed to “research”) and this is the first I’ve heard of it.

Read more

In this lecture recorded at Chautauqua Institution in July 2022, I make a simple argument: you cannot raise children in two entirely different ways and expect the same outcome. The generation raised before the parenting revolution of the late 1960s grew up under a very different set of assumptions—assumptions that, in my view, produced stronger families and more emotionally resilient children.

Drawing from my own experience as a psychologist, parent, and grandfather, I explore how American child-rearing changed, why it changed, and what we’ve lost along the way.

Recorded July 18, 2022, at Chautauqua Institution as part of the Advocates for Balance at Chautauqua lecture series.

Thomas Paine appealed to the sensus communis of the American people in his famous pamphlet, first published in 1776.

Throughout history and in every culture, Aristotle’s sixth sense has waxed and waned, but it has remained fairly intact in America since 1776…until recently, that is. It saddens a heart already burdened by the horrors of fossil fuel consumption to report that since the 1960s, sensus communis has diminished significantly per capita, especially when it comes to the raising of children, now called “parenting.”

Last week, I wrote of psychology’s dubious contribution to the destruction of the work ethic in Western Civilization, concisely expressed by Johnny Too Bad’s First Theorem of Cultural Decay: As a cultural group’s belief in and dependence on the fake science of psychology ascends, the work ethic and self-responsibility erode in direct proportion.

Johnny’s Second Theorem of Cultural Decay extends the First: As a cultural group becomes increasingly dependent upon the fake science of psychology—as has been true since the 1960s in the USA—said group’s grasp of common sense weakens in proportion.

Thus sayeth Johnny: Put psychology in its proper place—with astrology and palm-reading—and the restoration of common sense will follow rather naturally. (And remember, good and hopefully faithful reader, yours truly is a psychologist, semi-retired.)

Read more

I answered: “That many, if not most of them, even those growing up in two-parent homes, are not developing a functional sense of what is truly meant by ‘marriage’ and, therefore, ‘family.’”

How’s that? Today’s all-too-typical child is prevented from learning what marriage is all about by well-intentioned parents who rarely act from within the roles of husband and wife; rather, they act almost exclusively from within the roles of mother and father. This is, after all, the new American ideal, based in large part on the post-1960s notion that the more attention you pay to, the more involved you are with, and the more you do for your child, the better a parent you are.

Read more

In January of 1979, I began having serious misgivings concerning my profession. Long story, some of which I’ve shared in previous writings. Suffice to say, I began questioning the profession’s foundational theories and eventually came to the conclusion that psychology is a fraud, but also evil.

Allow me to clarify: Not all psychologists are evil, but ALL psychology is evil. Lots of otherwise decent people are participating in a demonic ideology because they need to believe the graduate school education they obtained was worth the time and money.

PSYCHOLOGY IS SLOWLY DESTROYING WESTERN CIVILIZATION.

If that sounds over the top, consider the following FACTS, which I’ve published on many prior occasions over the last forty years and concerning which no psychologist has ever agreed to publicly debate me despite numerous invitations:

• Psychology markets itself as a science, but it is actually a philosophy of human nature, whose theories have never stood up to the rigors of the scientific method.

• None of the three hundred psychological diagnoses published in the current edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual have scientific merit. They are entirely subjective concepts, impossible to prove or disprove.

• No psychological therapy has reliably outperformed placebo therapies in controlled clinical trials.

• According to consistent research-based findings, most people who receive psychological therapy report getting worse or experiencing no change. (How long would an auto mechanic with that record stay in business?)

• No mental health drug has reliably outperformed placebos in controlled clinical trials.

• The “profession” of psychology is entirely lacking in meaningful practice standards.

  Unlock the Full Essay.

Read more

The usual response read along the lines of “You don’t understand what it’s like to (a) live with a child who’s been diagnosed with ASD or (b) be an adult who’s been diagnosed with ASD.”

Well, I apologize for any induced trauma in advance, but au contraire to that. I most certainly do understand what it’s like to live with someone (including oneself) who has ASD because I HAVE ASD! AND SO DO YOU! AND SO DOES EVERYONE IN YOUR IMMEDIATE AND EXTENDED FAMILIES AND EVERYONE YOU’VE EVER MET!

Yes, folks, when it comes to Autism Spectrum Disorder, the operative word is “spectrum.” A spectrum is a range represented by a continuum of one sort or another, like “on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being ‘Oh yeah, that’s me all right, like totally!’ how would you rate yourself on [whatever attribute]?”

According to the current edition of the DSM, the following criteria define ASD. To receive an ASD diagnosis, an individual must meet all criteria in Category A and at least two criteria in Category B.

As you will see, because of the word “spectrum,” the definition can be manipulated to include all conscious human beings.

Read more

Misbehavior, by its nature, is addictive. It’s exciting, it positions the child at the center of adult attention, and it imparts an illusion of power. As such, it supplies the child with a rush that is just as intoxicating as the rush one obtains from an addictive drug. The enabling of misbehavior, then, is every bit as damaging as the enabling of alcoholism.

Read more

Getting straight to the point, I am the world’s greatest and most superlative parenting therapist. Yes, it’s true. I am the most amazingly superlative parenting therapist the world has ever known because I DON’T DO THERAPY. I don’t even know what therapy is, much less know how to do it.

But then, I’m convinced beyond a shadow of incertitude that ninety-nine-point-nine-nine-nine percent of folks who call themselves therapists don’t know what they’re doing. They’re making it up on the fly. When all is said and done, Billy Bob “Bubba” Buchowski, who calls himself a “post-existential self-actualization therapist,” is doing Billy Bob “Bubba” Buchowski therapy. If you ask Bubba what he’s doing, what the discerning ear hears is, “Blah, blah, blabbedy, blah, blah, and another blah for good measure.”

“Therapy” is a scam, so says the world’s most superlative therapist who doesn’t do therapy. The mostly PhDs (pronounced FUDDs) in question are kidding themselves and perpetrating deceptive business practices on the rest of us. That a person is required to obtain a license to commit fraud and charge money for it is absurd. Mind you, you newbies out there, I went to graduate school and obtained said license, and until I retired, was legally able to call myself a “psychologist,” which means, in aboriginal Latin, “one who others believe reads their minds, ha, ha, ha, the joke’s on them.”

I will now prove that my claim to being the world’s most fabulously superlative (a nod of thanks to Marty and the boys) non-therapist by relating the story of Ray-Ray Rabonewitzch (not his real name, but close), age 5, whose parents sought my advice because of his ability to stop a speeding locomotive with the force of one of his many—like, three to seven times a day—fantastical tantrums.

“Why is he throwing these tantrums?” his parents, gentle folks, asked.

Read more

I was in graduate school (1969 – 1972) when the mental health professional community cut from whole cloth that communicating to a child he had done something wrong, bad, disgusting, rude, anti-social, et cetera—all of which young children can be counted on to do at times (some more than others) in one way, shape, or form—was harmful to the psychological health of the child, even abusive, blah blah blah. Being told he had behaved badly lowered self-esteem and caused him to believe HE was BAD, like, to the bone, and didn’t deserve to live, blah blah blah.

The new expert parenting class reserved its most powerful broadsides for punishment, especially spanking. According to the FUDDS (PhDs, phonetically), punishment was coercive and caused children to obey out of fear rather than a genuine desire to do the right thing. As a further consequence, punishment taught children to be secretive and deceptive—to develop, in other words, a criminal mentality.

One researcher, who was later accused, and quite rightly, by his former research assistant, of manipulating data to produce results that supported his anti-punishment thesis, claimed to have discovered that almost all incarcerated violent criminals had been spanked as children.

Read more

Great question, especially given that the prevalence of autism in 1970 was generally considered to be 1 child in 10,000, whereas today, according to 2025 CDC data, 1 in 31 children is being identified with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In the last twenty years, the number of children identified with autism has risen by some 300 percent.

The mental health community attributes that dramatic rise to greatly improved diagnostic criteria and procedures. Let’s examine that claim by delving into the history of the diagnosis and how it is made:

1. In 1970, my first year in graduate school, the terms autism and autistic were associated with a diagnosis of either childhood schizophrenia or serious cognitive deficiency (then known as “retardation”). The children in question exhibited bizarre behaviors like hand-flapping, avoided eye contact, and were unable to participate in back-and-forth conversation. They were often described as being “completely out of it” and “living in their own world.” It was not until the 1980 publication of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-III) that Infantile Autism would appear as a distinct psychiatric diagnosis. Six diagnostic criteria were required, including appearance before 30 months of age, gross distortions or deficits in language development, and peculiar, sometimes rigid attachments to objects. The DSM-IIIR (1987) changed the title of the diagnosis to Autistic Disorder and described autism as “pervasive lack of responsiveness to other people.”

2. When DSM-IV was published in 1994, the number of diagnostic criteria for Autism Disorder had increased to sixteen and four subcategories were listed: Asperger’s Disorder, Pervasive Developmental Disorder, Rett’s Disorder, and Childhood Disintegrative Disorder. Asperger’s became synonymous with the term “high-functioning autism,” referring generally to intelligent children who lacked social awareness and interpersonal skills.

3. In 2013, when the DSM-V appeared, the APA had collapsed the four subcategories into Autism Spectrum Disorder or ASD. The diagnostic criteria for ASD allowed for autism with or without intellectual disability, with or without language impairment, and with severity levels ranging from “requiring support” to “requiring very substantial support.”

As is plain to see, from 1980 (DSM-III) to 2013 (DSM-V), the definition of autism expanded to include just about any child who persistently exhibits any behavior that’s even slightly odd. The diagnosis now captures children who are shy, obsessive, easily frustrated and lacking in emotional control (frequent tantrums), impulsive, and inattentive. In and of themselves, none of those behaviors is pathological. Furthermore, it has been my experience that they can be corrected by simply modifying the parents’ approach to discipline.

Read more

Folks who are more than superficially familiar with my writing know I’m anything but progressive. I believe, for example, that the Bible contains timeless truth and is as relevant today as ever. Truth is a constant. The idea that truth is a relative and ever-evolving concept is postmodern.

The truth concerning children and parent responsibilities is constant. Since the first humans, every child has brought into the world the same fundamental nature, and that nature has not evolved; therefore, the principles of proper child rearing described in The Bible, the Instruction Manual given us by our Creator, are the principles to which every human generation should conform.

Needless to say, that traditionalist view is not shared by the mainstream in my profession, psychology, but then my profession is occupied by a greater percentage of atheists and far-leftists than any other (so says recent research, confirming what yours truly has been saying for at least forty years). To say I’m an outlier is an understatement. I’m a retro-revolutionary.

A slight, but relevant, digression: In the early 90s, I was invited to be a guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show, which was in its heyday at the time. In the preliminary phone conversation, Oprah’s producer told me the Queen of Postmodernity would interview me for maybe ten minutes and then bring on a panel of three to five other psychologists who would provide “balance.”

“I am the balance,” I told her, and pointed out that when Oprah entertained a mainstream psychologist, I was not invited to provide another point of view.

She insisted on sticking with the format, and so I declined the summons. My editor was furious. She called and lit into me, telling me an appearance on Oprah’s show—number one in the ratings at the time—guaranteed at least half a million in sales. I countered that some of Oprah’s interviewees were one-hit wonders, never heard from again, and I intended to be around for a long time.

Thirty-plus years later, I’m still here, as anti-progressive as ever; meanwhile, dozens of progressive parenting pundits have come and gone. The current batch of OHWs includes Becky Kennedy, Janet Lansbury, and Reem Raouda, all of whom do nothing more than repackage the failed ideas that emerged from the mental health professional community in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. So, “democratic parenting” has become “gentle parenting” and “collaborative parenting” is now “building conscious relationships.”

A rose by any other name is still a rose, and blah blah blah is forever blah blah blah.

Let’s examine three of the most influential progressive parenting blah blah blahs.

Read more

A: First, a personal anecdote: My mother kept a scrapbook of my early years that contained photos, notes, and other such memorabilia. Browsing through it one day, I found a photograph she had taken with her Brownie camera of me washing the kitchen floor in our tiny apartment on Church Street in Charleston, South Carolina. On the reverse side of the photo, Mom had written a date indicating that I was 3 years and 6 months old at the time.

When I asked her about it, Mom told me I enjoyed doing housework and that teaching me to wash a floor had been straightforward and easily accomplished. She also emphasized that she had held me to a fairly high standard. If I did a sloppy job of floor-washing, she had me do it over again. Such was “parenting”—though it was known simply as “childrearing” back then—before it became necessary to clap and squeal over anything a child did to ensure the continuing inflation of self-esteem.

Read more

As my readers know or should know, in addition to having become somewhat of a curmudgeon, I am a psychologist. That qualifies me to determine and assign psychological diagnoses. As such, it seems obvious to me that these parents suffer from a now-commonplace parenting disorder known as just plain nuts (JPN). Throwing a lavish party for an infant is one sign of this neuro-psychological impairment. Other tell-tale symptoms include taking an infant or toddler to Disney World, incurring major debt to make sure young children have a “happy” (as in, over-the-top) Christmas, buying a brand-new high-dollar car for a 16-year-old, going to starregistry.com and having a star named after a child, and taking kids along on a second honeymoon.

Read more

A good number of us even heard, “You better stop the whining, or I’ll give you something to whine about.”

Like, extra chores. Like, extra chores that took LOTS of time. The summer before entering sixth grade, to cite a particularly therapeutic example, my parents decided to remedy my recurrent complaints of boredom by having me paint the entire exterior of our suburban Chicago home. This was before parents began mediating their kids’ peer relationships, so as I painted, other kids would ride by on their bicycles (without helmets!), yelling various snide remarks to remind me that they were free and I was not. I have PTSD to this day from that traumatic experience.

Just kidding.

One result of my parents’ refusal to cater to my whining—about ANYTHING, mind you—is I CANNOT TOLERATE PEOPLE WHO WHINE. That means I cannot tolerate around fifty percent of people under the age of thirty, people for whom whining must have succeeded when they were kids.

I especially have no tolerance for people who whine about their awful childhoods. I recognize that some people did, in fact, have awful childhoods. I don’t mean they were poor. There’s nothing inherently awful about being poor. I’ve been there, both as a child and a young adult. As a public service, everyone should have to be poor for at least two years. I mean, the people in question, as children, were mistreated. But you grow up, and either you get a grip, or you fund some psychologist’s country club membership.

I’m not going into the sordid details, but my childhood was 8 on the awful scale, and there were days when it was 10. Then, I grew up, got out, and got a grip. I didn’t grow up and get a grip because of some unique qualities I possess (albeit I possess MANY great qualities). I grew up and got a grip because I figured out that while my awful childhood was not of my choosing, having an awful adulthood was indeed completely and unequivocally of my choosing. So, I CHOSE to be a happy camper. Like, 24/7.

Here’s what I’m leading up to…

Read more

Happy and successful? Those were MY responsibilities. People are happiest, the research says, when there is meaning to their lives. Work gives meaning. And so, back in the day, parents taught children the value of an honest day’s work. Not the monetary value, mind you, but the inherent value. It’s called having a good work ethic, which lots of today’s young people lack, but that’s another topic for another Substack.

Read more