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John Rosemond Recent Columns

Beware of 'The Protocol'

Q: Our son is seven years old and in the second grade. His school went virtual this past Spring and we see no end to it, not in the near term at least. When he was going to a brick-and-mortar schoolhouse, he did very well. Close to the top of his class, in fact. Ever since last spring, however, he’s been in a slow decline. I have to stand over him to get him to do anything. His work is sloppy and his attitude is care-less. When I brought this up to his teacher, she got the school psychologist involved. She says he’s exhibiting signs of ADHD and needs to be tested. I don’t like where this is going. Should I let them test him or not?

A: I strongly advise against it.

You and your son are in grave danger of becoming ensnared in The Protocol, which consists of a sham process that almost invariably results in a sham diagnosis that almost invariably leads to a medication that has never reliably outperformed placebos in clinical trials. Test, diagnose, medicate – that’s The Protocol, and the diagnosis in question is ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder).

Although the mental health establishment claims that ADHD is a neurologically-based disorder involving such unproven things as biochemical imbalances and brain differences, the standard diagnostic test battery includes neither a neurological exam nor an analysis of the child’s nervous system chemistry. The diagnosis of ADHD is made strictly on the basis of behavior, which essentially means the tests are superfluous, given in order to create the false impression that the diagnostic process is scientific. The fact is that once a child has been identified, the diagnosis is all but a given.

No one has ever conclusively proven that ADHD is – as claimed by nearly every online medical narrative – a “disease.” The behaviors – short attention span, impulsivity, etc. – are certainly verifiable, but the connection between the behavior and a disease has never been established. The disease model is invoked so as to justify prescribing medications that, to repeat, have never reliably outperformed placebos in clinical trials. In effect, the medications in question are costly placebos with unpredictable side effects including appetite suppression, anxiety, and depression. In the long run, “treatment” often consists solely of changing and adjusting said medication on a regular basis.

Once a child is placed on the merry-go-round that defines The Protocol, there is likelihood that he may never get off. I personally know folks who were diagnosed in elementary school and are still taking meds in their thirties. Furthermore, once a child has been identified, the pressure to get on the merry-go-round can be relentless. I encourage you not to go there. Hire a tutor. If you’re able and feel up to it, pull him out of school and homeschool him. Enroll him in a private brick-and-mortar school. Move to the Fiji Islands.

Even if there was scientific validity to the diagnosis, the fact that your son had no problems in a three-dimensional classroom means he is suffering from nothing besides a combination of boredom and screen fatigue. He doesn’t need a diagnosis. He needs a classroom.

Today’s Kids Suffer a Lack of Common Sense in Their Lives

A journalist asks, “What is the biggest challenge facing today’s children?”

“The real world,” I said.

For the last fifty years or so, good parenting has been defined as protecting one’s children from frustration, defeat, difficulty, stress, loss, deprivation, negative consequences, mistake, and just about every other real-world experience. The result of this coddling has been a dramatic increase in child and teen mental health problems, chief among which have been anxiety and depression.

We know that the key to good mental health is something called emotional resilience, which is simply the ability to cope successfully with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. As Shakespeare inferred, those setbacks and bruises are inevitable. Coping with them is learned behavior, and the earlier it is learned, the better.

I am a member of the last generation of American children whose parents had no problem standing by and watching as we were pommeled with consequences we had brought upon ourselves.

“You made this bed,” went the popular parenting adage of the era, “so you have to lie in it.”

Paradoxically, kids who had to lie in beds they had made grew up and willingly lay in beds their children made. We boomers were told by mental health professionals that our old-fashioned upbringings had left us with psychological wounds, so we resolved to abstain from our parents’ supposed mistakes. Ironically, that very resolve has fueled an exponential increase in children whose parents pay large sums of money for mental health services their children require because their parents took mental health professional advice.

A fifteen-year-old girl recently told me she was experiencing lots of anxiety, even about little things.

“That’s perfectly normal,” I told her. “Adulthood is right around the corner and adulthood can be scary. Certain things about being an adult still scare me, in fact. Anxiety is not necessarily a bad thing. If you don’t let it take over it is a great motivator.”

She doesn’t need a therapist, a diagnosis, or medication. She just needs a pep talk every now and then, and the pep talker doesn’t need to possess a doctorate in psychology, just a modicum of common sense.

That may, in fact, sum it up: Today’s kids are suffering a lack of common sense in their lives. Common sense is acquired from people who have acquired it. When all is said and done, common sense is more valuable than academic achievement, athletic prowess, or artistic genius. The “common” in common sense refers to a proper perspective on life, which children have a right to gain. Helping them do so is what parenting is all about.

Parents should certainly filter the real world down somewhat, but they should take care lest they filter it completely out.

Leverage an End To Daughter's Defiance

Q: Our 14-year-old daughter desperately wants to begin wearing makeup, which all, and I mean all, of her classmates are allowed to do. We have held off not only because of our beliefs but also because of her immaturity. Up until recently, for example, she has continued to throw magnificent tantrums when she doesn’t get her way. We decided to use the makeup issue as a bribe of sorts and told her that if she didn’t throw a tantrum between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day that we would begin letting her wear makeup. She stopped throwing tantrums. Bam! Just like that, after fourteen years. Now, however, she has replaced tantrums with defiance. We will ask her to do something and she will tell us, flat out, “No.” What can we do now? We’ve already used makeup as an incentive. Furthermore, none of her friends are allowed to socialize for the duration of the pandemic, so taking away social privileges is a non-starter. We’re in a dilemma.

A: This is easy, so easy in fact that I am typing this answer with both hands tied behind my back.

Okay, so let me ask you a question: What makes you think that since you’ve already bribed her with makeup concerning her magnificent tantrums, that you can’t also bribe her with makeup concerning her equally magnificent defiance?

“How would we do that?” you ask?

Being able to answer that very question is why I am a parenting expert. In graduate school, I obtained the highest grade ever awarded for “Answering Really Tough Parenting Questions 501.” Besides, no parent has ever bested me in a shotgun round of “Stump the Expert.” In short, you came to the right guy.

First, however, let me point out that letting her begin wearing makeup if she doesn’t throw a magnificent tantrum for the rest of the year is not exactly a bribe. You were eventually going to let her wear makeup, right? Right. Strictly speaking, therefore, it’s not a bribe. I prefer to call it a lever. You have used her burning desire to wear makeup to leverage an end to her magnificent tantrums. Offering her one thousand dollars to stop throwing tantrums…that would have been a bribe.

So, the answer to the above question is you simply tell her that from this day forth, every act of defiance on her part moves the date she can begin wearing makeup one day forward. Right now, Makeup Day is January 1. Her next act of defiance moves it to January 2, and so on.

Furthermore, once she earns the privilege of wearing makeup, you can take it away for tantrums or acts of defiance. To wit, a misstep of either magnificent sort results in her makeup being taken away for a week during which time another misstep results in said week beginning anew.

See what I mean? Drum roll and cymbal crash, please!

Hand in Hand Parenting is Pure Psychobabble

“Hand in Hand” parenting is the latest iteration of progressive (nouveau, unverified) childrearing. I became aware of HIH several weeks ago, courtesy of a grandmother whose daughter and son-in-law are practitioners. She was both amused and appalled. Intrigued, I went to the HIH website (handinhandparenting.org) to see for myself.

The first tab I opened concerned toddler aggression. According to the folks at Hand in Hand, toddlers hit – initially at least – because they are experimenting with behavior just like they experiment on material things like magazines, which they tend to rip to shreds. They’re just trying to discover how the world works. They don’t mean to destroy things. Likewise, according to HIH, they don’t mean to hurt people and punishing them for something they did not mean to do is likely to make matters worse.

Really? A toddler sees another child playing with a certain toy. He wants the toy. He attempts to snatch the toy from the other child. The child hangs on to the toy, so our toddler clamps down on the child’s forearm with his teeth. Are we to believe that said toddler was only engaging in a “what if” experiment? He clearly bit because the toy’s possessor did not immediately surrender it.

It is up to HIH to prove their contention that said toddler did not mean to hurt the child. They cannot because it is impossible to prove a negative. Hand in Hand does not want to admit that human nature includes the potential of deliberately causing harm to others, so they propose that a child who deliberately causes harm to another is only engaging in an innocent experiment. It’s a lovely idea, but it ignores the evidence.

It is by cutting such lovely ideas out of whole cloth that parenting progressives subtly assert their moral superiority. To wit, only morally inferior individuals think young children are capable of malice aforethought. The fact is, young children would commit wholesale parricide if, like most other species, they grew to full size in a year or two. Imagine being attacked by a two-hundred-pound toddler in the throes of a maniacal tantrum.

The problem with the children-are-incapable-of-malevolence fantasy is that it generally comes back to bite the dreamer. When the dreamer’s child does something malevolent (e.g. bites another child), the dreamer becomes confused because his fantasy does not match reality. His bewilderment incapacitates his ability to seize the moment and act, with calm purpose, such that the child never bites again. A big deal is made, but nothing is done. So, the child bites again.

Hand in Hand maintains that children who are punished for aggressing toward others will aggress even more. Punishment makes them feel like they are bad people, and so they hit even more because they have come to associate hitting with self-loathing. Pure psychobabble, that.

Hand in Hand recommends that when a young child hits, the parent should hold the child tightly, preventing further aggression, and say things like, “No one is mad at you. You’re my special girl, and I will stay right here with you” and “You’re going to have a good morning with your friends. I’ll stay until things are just right with them.”

Which are examples of why the above grandmother was both amused and appalled.