JOHN ROSEMOND | Parenting When parents abdicate their power, kids rule

I never cease to be amazed at the lengths to which adults will go to protect children from the consequences of misbehavior. They ignore, threaten, bribe, equivocate, run interference, deny, defend, pass the buck and absorb consequences that rightly belong to children. In the world of 12-step programs, this is known as enabling, and it is well known in those circles that an enabler, despite his/her generally good intentions, furthers an addict's slide into depravity.
Misbehavior, by its nature, is addicting. It's exciting; it positions the child at the center of adult attention, and/or it imparts an illusion of power. As such, it supplies the child with a rush that is just as intoxicating as the rush from an addictive drug. The enabling of misbehavior, then, is every bit as damaging as the enabling of alcoholism.
That a far, far greater proportion of today's children are in thrall to this addiction than was the case just 40 years ago is self-evident to anyone who, like myself, was born before 1950. In the days of my youth, children were mischievous. They tried to get away with the forbidden when adults weren't looking, but it was the extremely rare child who belligerently refused to do what an adult had told him to do. Need I prove that such behavior is today ubiquitous? After all, we now have various diagnoses for what was once called just plain bad.
Complicity
The diagnosing of children protects adults from confronting their own complicity in such matters. It is comforting indeed to learn that your child's misbehavior is due to a gene, a gene that must have been seeded into this generation of children by evil aliens. Consider that in the 1950s it was not unusual to find one teacher teaching 50 first-grade children! As one such teacher -- a woman now in her 80s -- recently reported to me: "I had very few problems, John. Those children came to school ready to pay attention and learn. I didn't have to train. Their parents had already trained them. Therefore, I could teach."
No, the problem is not genes or mysterious "chemical imbalances." It is that adults are no longer comfortable with their own authority as regards children. There are a number of reasons why this has happened, but two are foremost: First, in the 1960s we became cynical toward all forms of traditional authority. Second, and again in the 1960s, we began listening to such "experts" as Dr. Thomas Gordon, the author of "Parent Effectiveness Training," the best selling parenting book of the 1970s, tell us that the traditional exercise of parental authority was -- Thomas actually said this -- "responsible for most of the world's ills" and certainly resulted in the psychological crippling of children. Interesting, then, that in the years since America first embraced what I call "postmodern psychological parenting," the mental health of our children has been in steady and precipitous decline. No, traditional parental authority does not cripple. Enabling cripples.
What to do?
A preschool teacher recently asked my advice concerning one of her pupils. He can't keep his hands to himself, she said, unless I threaten him with a misbehavior report. Apparently his parents, throwbacks obviously, actually punish him when he comes home with such a report. He cries piteously when he considers this possibility, so she makes him a deal. If after receiving a report, he will keep his hands to himself for 30 minutes, she will tear up the report. (Note: We now have proof that he can keep his hands to himself.)
The problem, however, is that as soon as she does so, his hands start roving and touching and poking again. She writes another report. He is then "good" for 30 minutes, so she tears up the report. And round and round they go. Exasperated, she asks me what to do.
I tell her to ask his parents the same question.
XJohn Rosemond is a family psychologist. Questions of general interest may be sent to him at Affirmative Parenting, 1020 East 86th Street, Suite 26B, Indianapolis, IN 46240 and at his Web site: www.rosemond.com/.