By Rebecca Rakoczy, Special To The Bulletin

ATLANTA—When it comes to advice about raising children, parents should look at themselves, not a trained professional, as their guide.

That’s the message John Rosemond, national columnist, author, family psychologist and parenting “authority,” gives to the thousands of adults he talks to each year. Rosemond, who is known for his practical and common sense approach to parenting, was the featured speaker at a special seminar held Sept. 29 at Blessed Trinity High School in Roswell.

Organizers estimated that about 400 people attended the ticketed half-day event, which included two of Rosemond’s standard talks, “Assuming the Power of Parenthood” and “Teen-Proofing: Understanding and Managing Your Teenager.”

Rosemond said that today’s American parenting mentality has been “derailed by the professional community in the 1960s and still hasn’t got the train back on the track.”

“Today’s parents want these hard and fast rules because they are so afraid of making a mistake that will psychologically scar a child,” Rosemond said in an interview with The Georgia Bulletin prior to his talk at the high school.

“They have been trained by psychologists to think psychologically about child-rearing issues instead of responding to what children are doing. It’s extremely dysfunctional and (parents) get tied around in a knot of psychological theory, when most of this stuff is ludicrous anyway. Parents should remember that parenting is a highly imperfect process . . . and everything we do as human beings is imperfect.”

Peppering his talks with scriptural references, Rosemond finds the roots of good parenting in the Bible. He has downloaded several versions of the Bible in his computer and frequently calls up scriptural passages in helping guide his own philosophy of child-rearing. He paraphrases a passage from Ecclesiastes in helping parents understand how to effectively discipline their teenager.

“There is a time for everything under the sun. Parenting a 9-year-old requires something different than parenting a teenager,” he said. “If you try to parent a 14-year-old the same way you did when the child was 9, that’s not going to work.”

His criticism of the profession is especially sharp because he was once imbued in self-examining psychology also. As a trained family psychologist licensed in North Carolina, he dispensed advice to hundreds of parents. It was there, and with his own family, that he saw bad patterns emerge.

“My philosophy developed because of the problems I was having with my own children. I began to realize I was approaching these problems psychologically, and by rights these problems should have been getting better, but they weren’t. I had a revelation,” he said.

Rosemond tossed out the child-psychology-speak, replacing it with what he calls, “commonsensical, scriptural child-rearing.”

Rosemond said he believes he has struck a chord with many parents who are becoming disenchanted with professional advice when it comes to rearing their children. At his talk, “people listen to a psychologist but hear no psychology.”

Yet he is worried that many of today’s parents want advice, he said, because many parents aren’t really parenting.

“One of my favorite sayings is ‘parenting is not a spectator sport.’ You are not parenting if you’re watching a soccer game or a dance recital. I am afraid that is taking over the life of many an American family.”