The accuracy of our assumptions determines the effectiveness of our actions. If we assume, for example, that the power line to the lamppost is eighteen inches under ground then we can dig a fifteen-inch hole to plant flowers around the post. But if the line is oh, say, twelve inches deep, and we maintain our assumption of eighteen then we can still plant flowers, we’ll just have to do without the light at night. Visit my house one evening and I’ll show you.
Nowhere is this truer or more obvious than in the outcomes America is experiencing in child-rearing. Since 1965, about the time we traded in our traditional child-rearing assumptions for the new and improved psychological paradigm, “every single indicator of positive well-being in America’s children has been in a state of precipitous decline … The per-capita rate of child and teen depression … has increased at least five fold since 1965. In just one fifteen-year period, from 1980 to 1995, the suicide rate for boys ages ten to fourteen almost doubled!”[1]
Those stats come from John Rosemond’s Parenting by The Book, published in 2007. I’d been reading Rosemond’s syndicated newspaper columns for years, amenning all the way, but I’d never read one of his books. The intro to Parenting by The Book reveals how Rosemond came to his convictions and explains one of the reasons I enjoy his work so much. It’s another case of science catching up with Scripture.
John was not a born-again believer in Jesus when he began his career. He called himself a cultural-Christian up until his early fifties. But his work as a family psychologist kept exposing him to hard facts about human nature that did not fit the post-modern parenting paradigm he’d absorbed in graduate school. The more he wrote, spoke, and counseled based on his findings, the more he found himself in agreement with Christians and at odds with his profession.
Remember those assumptions? Psychology assumes that people are fundamentally good, that we are not responsible for our problems—it’s our parents’ fault—and that we can only be “saved” through therapy. Biblical Christianity assumes that we are created in the image of God with a free will and fully responsible for our choices. But we are also fallen, corrupted by rebelling against him. Our only salvation is in accepting responsibility for our sins, asking for forgiveness, and believing in Jesus Christ who died for our sins. Before he was born again, Rosemond discovered the difference in those assumptions by studying their outcomes.
“I have major problems with the direction my once noble profession has taken since the late 1960’s,” he writes, “when the American Psychological Association was hijacked by secular progressives who were focused more on advancing humanist ideology than advancing the human condition … I am absolutely convinced that modern psychology has done more harm than good to the American family.” These ideas were coalescing in his mind when Rosemond read Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ, and submitted his life to Jesus.
“The raising of a child, once a fairly straightforward, commonsense affair, has become the single most stressful thing a woman will do in her lifetime,” he writes. “That’s not the way God planned it, but then, God’s way is not modern psychology’s way either.” Parenting by The Book not only dismantles postmodern parenting assumptions, it also lays out a clear path based on the biblical worldview for parents to follow. Every parent should read it.
[1] John Rosemond, Parenting by The Book, p. 66.
dane skelton 