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Weekly Column
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HELP US FIND WHERE JOHN'S COLUMN IS APPEARING!!! John would like to know which newspapers are carrying his weekly parenting column. You can help us!!! If John's column appears in your local paper, or any other paper you may know of, CLICK HERE and give us the following information:
city, state, name of newspaper, day of the week it is published, and
how often John's column appears (weekly, bi-weekly, monthly,
occasionally). Thank you very much for your help! 12/9/08 Living with Children
John Rosemond
Copyright 2008, John K. Rosemond
Every so often, and usually just as I am about to resign myself to the
folly of postmodern parenting, I run across a story involving parents
who have not submitted to the madness, and I am rescued from my funk.
Such a story was recently passed along to me by Amy Glock of or
somewhere close to Omaha, Nebraska. As reported in the Scottsbluff (NE)
Star-Herald on November 13 of this year, two brothers, ages 12 and 15,
were standing in the cold outside a Dollar General Store in Gering, NE,
wearing loud orange placards that read “My name is (withheld to protect
the guilty). I was caught shoplifting at Dollar General. I will never
shoplift again. Stealing and lying is WRONG.” A photo of the boys
accompanied the story. Needless to say, they did not look like happy
campers.
Their punishment was not handed out by a
judge, mind you, but rather by their parents. In fact, on the day of
their public humiliation and loss of self-esteem, the older brother had
yet to appear in court on a shoplifting charge. In addition, the boys
had to write a letter of apology to the store and will spend a month
deprived of their coveted electronics.
“I don’t know
what the judge is going to do,” said the older boy, probably thinking
that nothing could be worse than what his parents had already done. The
younger brother had been the lookout in the Great Gering Hatchet Heist,
but he admitted that he deserved being punished as well because, he
said, “I was with him, and I didn’t try to stop him.”
The father is in the refrigeration business and happens to do business
with Dollar General, but it doesn’t sound like that had anything to do
with his and his wife’s decision to put the boys in the modern
equivalent of the stocks.
“I won't tolerate a thief, and
hopefully this will teach them that they need to make the right
choices," the father said. "When you steal, it takes money away from
everybody."
Now, there’s a stand-up guy. Quite obviously, he is
not interested in being his sons’ friend. That alone distinguishes him
among today’s dads, many of whom have developed a biochemical imbalance
that causes them to confuse “father” and “friend,” presumably because
they both begin with the same letter of the alphabet. I’ll bet this guy
doesn’t read parenting books either. He probably has never set eyes on
my newspaper column and would prefer to continue in that blissful state
of uncommon sense. In the eyes of many, if not most, of his
contemporaries, he is a throwback, an insensitive Neanderthal who is
incapable of understanding that his boys engaged in shoplifting in
order to try and compensate for the love they aren’t receiving in the
home. I mean, does taking a hatchet reek with Freudian symbolism or
what? And believe me when I say that somewhere over the rainbow there
are mental health professionals who would suggest things of that very
absurd sort.
The best ending to the story was provided by the 15-year-old who said, “We will not do this again. We got in big trouble.”
I
take him at his word. Little does he know, however, that his parents’
willingness to heap unhappiness on him in November, 2008, has greatly
increased his chances of having a productive, responsible (which is to
say, happy) adulthood.
I love happy endings.
Family psychologist John Rosemond answers parents' questions on his website at www.rosemond.com.
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www.rosemond.com...in touch with common sense.
All content Copyright 2007-2008, John K. Rosemond. Please seek permission before using any material contained on www.rosemond.com.
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