No Sense at All Parenting

I was the victim of a graduate school education in psychology. As a consequence, I was able to obtain a license to practice psychology, issued by the North Carolina Psychology Board in 1979. I’m a psychologist, but please don’t confuse me with the rest of them.

My graduate school education stripped me of common sense when it came to children. Therefore, I brought no common sense to my first ten years of parenthood. I made a thorough mess of it, in fact, but the mess was largely corrected. My children emancipated willingly and have done reasonably well, which is all one can expect.

I have made a successful career as a so-called “parenting expert” because I began coming to my senses around 1980. I set about to find the shards of my common sense and put it back together. The project took around fifteen years, during which time I discovered that my profession, psychology, was fake science founded on fake theories and populated by fake therapists. Psychology is a farce. Not experimental psychology, mind you, but psychology of the clinical sort.

Around the same time I was in grad school, American parents began listening to know-nothings…oops! I mean psychologists…tell them how to raise children. That is when common sense began to drain out of what psychologists called “parenting.” Today, no common sense is left. Oh, there are parents here and there who still seem in possession of it, but “here and there” is the operative qualifier.

“Parenting” is the word we now use to describe raising children without the benefit of common sense. Everything – and I mean EVERYTHING – that defines “parenting” is lacking in common sense. It makes no sense for adults to be telling children how to play, for example. How does being micromanaged benefit someone? Whether the person being micromanaged is an adult or a child, it does not.

When I was a child, I got together with other kids in my neighborhood and without any help from adults, we played baseball. Adults didn’t even attend our games. If they had, we’d have picked up our equipment and gone somewhere else. In the course of owning our games, we learned how to cooperate with one another, resolve conflict, play fair, and accommodate the rules to the circumstances. Today’s kids are learning none of that. What today’s kids are doing on a baseball field – to take but one sport – doesn’t even qualify as play. They are performing for adults who are yelling. The adults in question are yelling at the players, yelling at the coaches, yelling at the umpires, and yelling at one another.

How does this benefit children? It doesn’t. It makes no sense.

A father once told me, trying to justify his lack of common sense, that he wanted his seven-year-old son to “learn how to be a team player.” Huh? That’s the sort of nonsensical thing today’s parents say when they’re desperate to justify the madness. In the first place, the family is Team One. More important than learning how to play baseball is learning how to be a functional family member. Can anyone say “chores”? Second, none of the adult-micromanaged sports in question are going to produce any benefit at all in the adult lives of…I’d say…99 percent of the kids involved, and that is probably a conservative estimate.

As a youngster, I played organized baseball for one year. I led the league in home runs and threw two no-hitters. Despite my obvious skillset, I did not sign up for the following season. Why? I didn’t see any point in adults telling us how to play what we played better and had lots more fun doing when they weren’t directing. My parents never came to any of my games, by the way. I asked them not to.

Every child deserves that freedom. Every child deserves adults with common sense.

Copyright 2023, John K. Rosemond