JAY BELSKY

Jay Belsky is an often quoted professor on family, marriage and day care. He is quoted by the Right as saying that his research backs up their argument that day care hurts children. The Left say he says no such thing, and he thinks day care is overall a good thing. The problem with Belsky is that he is just another secular writer who has knowledge but no wisdom. Without the Bible and religious values we cannot discern the truth.

Belsky has a book called The Transition to Parenthood: How a First Child Changes a Marriage. It is a depressing book, contrary to Brazelton's glowing review, about how secular young married couples go through so much turmoil because they have a child. Belsky's book has nothing to give. It is empty because it is godless. Secular psychologists and sociologists have no clue to how people can find happiness. He should be teaching that families like those of the shy Hutterites and the outgoing Beverly LaHayes of the Christian Right are the model to live by.

Belsky goes into how husbands and wives are a blend of eqalitarian, transitional and traditional. Belsky is divorced. Perhaps if he and his wife had embraced traditional family values then he would be still be married. His book is the epitome of sadness because he means well but has no idea what a true family is. He is a feminist like most people and tries to figure out how to make feminism work. He can't. He doesn't even have the most basic understanding, as well as all the hundreds of people he interviews, that women are supposed to have large families and not work in the marketplace.

Belsky lives off government funding. Socialism is so persuavise that most people simply cannot see beyond our culture. Irving Howe was one of the 20th centuries most prominent socialists. In his book Socialism and America he is saddened that Lenin and Mao and others evil men have used violence to create their socialist nightmares. He is peaceful. He is sad that "nowhere on the globe can one point to a free, developed socialist society. ... Its language and symbols have been appropriated by parodic totalitarianism." But he kept the faith his whole life and never gave up his idealist dream of "the vision of a time in which humanity might live in justice and peace." He says "that utopian-apocalyptic expectations are indispensable to a movement advocating major social change" and he is sad that he does not see enough socialists with that dream.

The truth is that the Clintons have that dream and they rule America. Unificationists need to guide secular and religious socialists to a capitalist society that lives in loving religious communites. We need to study the good of such writers as the Mormon Stephen Covey who teaches Biblical values in his Mormon books. We must fight against the Left like Skolnick who see the chaos we live in as the darkest before the new feminist dawn of harmonious feminist and socialist eqality. We must see that there is no gray between Betty Friedan and Beverly LaHaye. Getting those two to have lunch together is not enough. Friedan must give up her hatred of the Biblical family and LaHaye must give up her hatred of world government. Friedan and her crowd must honor the Bible. The President puts his hand on the Bible when he takes his oath of office. We do not need to have a woman President put her hand on Elizabeth Cady Stanton's version of the Bible.

Sun Myung Moon

Rev. Moon focuses on marriage and family in his volumes of speeches. The key to happiness and world peace is to have Godly families. In one speech he said,

America is in trouble

One writer said this about the disintegrating family in America: "The American family is getting steadily weaker. In 1960, about 15 percent of marriages ended in divorce. Today, more than half do. If current trends continue, about 60 percent of all marriages performed in 1998 will end in divorce.

"In 1960, about 5 percent of all childbirths occurred outside of marriage. Today, the figure is 33 percent: one of every three babies born. About ten percent of all babies born last year were born to never-married teenage mothers. Tonight, about 40 percent of our nation's children will go to sleep in homes in which their fathers do not live.

"With each passing year, childhood is becoming a harder and harsher experience for millions of our children. One bipartisan research panel concludes that this generation of young people is the first in American history to be worse off - educationally, socially, physically, psychologically, and morally - than their parents were at the same age.

"With each passing year, all our children are exposed to culture influences which frequently tells them: Grow up fast. Trust is for suckers. Cynicism is cool. 'Me first' is the basic rule. Sexual promiscuity is normal. Marriage is outdated. There are no universal truths. Religion has no place in public. Your parents don't know much. Your identity is closely tied to what you purchase.

"Part of a Larger Cultural Crisis

"Family fragmentation is thus one part of a larger and deepening cultural crisis that threatens the American experiment in self-government. The manifestations of this crisis include:

"declining child and adolescent well-being; unacceptably high levels of violence and disorder; deteriorating educational systems; an unraveling of many aspects of civic engagement and voluntary association; a growing sense that relations between races, economic classes, and generations are not guided by attempts at shared understanding; an increasing coarseness and harshness in popular culture, politics, and public discourse; a spreading abdication of adult responsibility and an increasing acceptance of the adult as perpetual adolescent; an increased tolerance for self-centered and selfish behavior in all spheres of life; a growing belief that success should be measured by how much money we have and how much we can buy; the forced marginalization of religion in public life. a dramatic undermining of the distinction between right and wrong; and the loss of confidence in the possibility of public moral truth.

IDEAS AND VALUES

"At bottom, today's social crisis is not about money or even politics. It's about ideas and values. It's about how we live together, what we think we owe to one another, and what we think it means to live a good life. The heart of the cultural crisis is that our society is losing the moral habits and ways of living that make democracy possible."

 THE ASSAULT ON PARENTHOOD

Dana Mack's The Assault on Parenthood: How Our Culture Undermines the Family is an example of the tepid response of many social critics to the dismal state of the family.  She has some good criticisms, but ultimately fails to see the root cause and therefore the solution to what she calls the "barbarism" of our culture.  She correctly criticizes the cultural elite who love government power.  She writes: "... some of the most compassionate scholarly work on the crisis of childhood as it relates to the deficits of contemporary family life -- Sylvia Hewlett's When the Bough Breaks, Arlie Hochschild and Anne Machung's The Second Shift, or Hillary Rodham Clinton's It Takes a Village -- .... enjoin government to relieve parents of their child-rearing obligations, rather than to support them in these obligations.  In advocating more nursery school, more comprehensive schooling, longer school days, broader school services, ... more institutional child care, more therapeutic intervention, and a broader social welfare net, they may be good-hearted attempts to combat serious deficiencies in contemporary family resources.  But they reinforce a predilection toward a child-rearing by professionals that parents viscerally resent. ... Parents are growing impatient with the bureaucratization of children's lives, from the foster care forced on welfare mothers to the proliferation of federal school breakfast programs."

Mack says "the overwhelmingly majority of women I've talked to" want to "stay home" and not work.  She says we live in a "a family-hostile, child-hostile culture" that has the "dangerously erroneous idea that parents are bad for children -- indeed, that the traditional family is an endemically pathological institution, a child abuse machine."

I agree with her blasting of the feminist hatred of the family.  There is an avalanche of books by feminists against the family.  "Perhaps the best-known example of this genre is Toxic Parents, the 1989 best-seller by Dr. Susan Forward.  Forward, one of the first psychotherapists to charge American parents with widespread child mishandling, has made a veritable science of ferreting out ways in which parents can oppress children."  Forward goes too far, as many other books do.

FREUD

She explains how Freud corrupted the 20th century.  His "theories subverted accepted methods of parenting, and called into question the age-old assumption that austerity and unequivocal demand for filial obedience were the keys to raising decent human beings."  The motif running through much of my books is that we need to restore some valid "age-old" teachings that feminism has disparaged.  Mack is blind to the depth of truth that we can learn from sacred texts such as the Bible and our Founding Fathers. Therefore, she has no real cures for the ills she sees.

SPOCK'S BOOK

She writes, ".. in 1945, the first edition of Dr. Benjamin Spock's Baby and Child Care" came out. It became one of the greatest best-sellers of all time for the next 50 years. She attacks Spock's bible of child care as a continuation of Freud's diabolical views: "... In his irresistibly folksy way, Spock rehearsed American mothers and fathers as players in the Freudian romance of love, guilt, and repression."  She says Spock has had a tremendous impact on America by teaching that parents should not be strong leaders.  This helped flame the fires of rebellion in the sexual revolution of the 60s. Spock used his celebrity to speak out against the Viet Nam War and further encouraged a lack of strength in America.  Mack does not know anything about patriarchy and misses the core truth that Satan's main goal is to emasculate and feminize men.  She gives a good example of Spock's deadly teaching: "In Baby and Child Care he suggest that parents might respond to school age stealing by 'thinking over' whether their child might 'need more ... approval at home,' and even a raise in allowance!"

She blasts many other books that teach this weak view of parents such as Haim Ginott's Between Parent and Child and Thomas Gordon's P.E.T. Parent Effectiveness Training. What Mack does not know is that the attack on family is primarily a male bashing tactic of Satan.  Men are supposed to be stern and authoritarian sometimes and Satan does not want men to be strong leaders.  In the name of sensitivity he introduces a touchy-feely ideology that turns men into mush.  As Rev. Moon would say in his often poetic, but effective way, is that Satan wants men to be flesh, not bones and for women to want to usurp men's position as center and subject.  Satan wants to throw mankind off balance of the natural polarity between men and women.  Satan hates leadership.  He wants power to be centralized to patriarchal tyrants in government.  God wants power to be decentralized to serving, god-centered patriarchs in the family.  God respects men's authority and parent's authority.  Satan does not.  Satan teaches that firm leadership in the traditional family is harsh and cruel.  Of course, his socialist and feminist leaders are the truly harsh authoritarians.  But sadly most people are blind to Satan's tactics.  In the end, Mack is digested by our culture's love of big government and sabotages everything she writes about by looking to government as the cure all.

ARLENE SKOLNICK

Mack goes on to correctly criticize Arlene Skolnick and writers like her who "have sought nothing less than the complete abolition of the nuclear family."

 

Alice Miller

She goes into great detail blasting the influential pschchotherapist, Alice Miller, who wrote sick books such as For Your Own Good; Hidden Cruelty in Children and the Roots of  Violence. Miller teaches parents to be supersensitive and never harsh.  She goes into detail how Miller's views have hurt families.

 

John Bradshaw

I liked her put down of the popular New Age therapy guru on the family, John Bradshaw, who she says, "deserves much of the credit for the widespread popularity of her [Miller's] theories.  Bradshaw brought forward Miller's ideas forward in the late 1980's and the early 1990's in crisp, upbeat formulas that entered the jargon of America pop psychology.  Five years after the publication of Miller's For Your Own Good in its English translation, Bradshaw produced a ten-week PBS series and book entitled Bradshaw on: The Family, in which he asked after, after Miller: 'How Could Hitler Happen?' And he presented an answer as succinct as anyone could derive from a thorough reading of For Your Own Good:  'Hitler and black Nazism are a cruel caricature of what can happen in modern Western society if we do not stop promoting and proliferating family rules that kill the souls of human beings.' What rules?  Rules of 'obedience,' he said, and of 'submission' to parental authority."

"'Soul murder,' Bradshaw continued (along Miller's line), is the most 'basic' problem in the world.  It is not simply Germany's problem.  Americans, he insisted, pointing to Jonestown and My Lai, are also victims to the 'poisonous pedagogy' of obedience.  Even the most enlightened of modern American parents always fall back on 'authoritarian' roles in times of 'stress' and 'crisis.' And it is these times that they crush the souls of their children.  Ninety-six percent of American families, according to Bradshaw, were 'dysfunctional.'  But this diagnosis was not terminal.  'Find out what species of flawed relating your family specialized in,' Bradshaw advised in his inimitable New Age syntax.  'Once you know what happened to you, you can do something about it.'"

Bradshaw against patriarchy

He is blind to the value of patriarchy and therefore misses the boat when he says this about the Promise Keepers: "I don't agree with the religious, patriarchal premise, but I think it's wonderful that a bunch of men are trying to be more responsible."

DAY CARE

Mack is good at attacking the Liberal love of day care. "In all but the most conservative sectors of American society there is a pervasive belief that a working woman is a liberated and happier woman, and that a woman without a salary is ultimately a slave to whoever supports her children, whether it be her man or her government. Even President Clinton's former policy advisor William A. Galston, a notable defender of the family, contended at a conference of the Council on Families in America in 1996 that 'few Americans' would want to return to the at-home mothering model of the 1950s. Any family policy appropriate to 1990s, he declared, must accommodate the 'right' of women to participate in the workforce. This odd Arbeit Macht Frei [(Work Brings Freedom) was the sign over the gates of Auschwitz. It was placed there by Major Rudolf Hoss, commandant of the camp.] mentality is nowhere more uncompromisingly articulated than by privileged feminist ideologues like Betty Friedan, who hold up the model of the working mother as the epitome of women's liberation, and insist -- as she is reported to have done at a conference on family issues in the early 1990s -- that the working mother 'does not need a husband; she needs a support team.'"

She writes that in her research she interviewed many working mothers all over America and "... many said they wished they could quit work. They found that their participation in the workforce has yielded more stress, more worries, and more domestic strife than they remember their nonworking mothers having faced." "Far from achieving the happy independence feminism promised, working mothers labor under tremendous emotional pressures. Arlie Hochschild [in Second Shift] describes how women under the work gun often become 'the target of children's aggression ... the family 'heavy,' the 'time and motion' person of the family and work speed-up ... hurrying children through their daily rounds.'"

SECOND SHIFT

"When Hochschild went out in the late 1980s to talk to women and men in two-income families, she was dismayed to note that even successful career women suffered unbearable tensions between their roles as mothers and their roles as wage-earners -- tensions that expressed themselves in chronic fatigue, illness, and depression. These tensions, she noted, might have been relieved were husbands more willing to pick up the slack, but men seemed reluctant to do their share, consigning women to a 'second shift' or household and child-rearing burdens that made their lives a never-ending cycle of pressures."

BATTLE OF THE BOOKS

The battle between God and Satan for this earth is an ideological one at its root. There are many books by the Right and many by the Left. We must reject the Left who writes garbage like glowing books extollilng day care and titles like Mother's Place, Juggling and She Works, He Works. Ellen Goodman, a leading Left wing columnest wrote of the latter book, " “A wonderful antidote to all the books peddling guilt to the two-worker family. It's good common sense for the 1990's—bound to make you feel better.” —! Ellen Goodman, BOSTON GLOBE.

SHE WORKS/HE WORKS

She critiques a book by "the intellectual elite" saying, "Typical of these is the work of psychotherapist and Radcliffe Affiliate Scholar Rosalind C. Barnett and Boston University journalism professor Caryl Rivers, who in their 1996 book, She Works/He Works: How Two-Income Families Are Happier, and Better Off, advise women to 'relax,' trust the child care industry, and go fulfill themselves in the workplace. Parents, they insist, worry unnecessarily about their children, harbor unrealistic expectations of 'perfection' as parents, and are unnecessarily 'concerned' about disaffection' in family life. Were they to think more about themselves and less about kids, everyone would be better off. Women who don't work, they remind us, have higher chances of suffering depression and low self-esteem."

"But parents no longer cotton to the argument that just because 'in other cultures where children have many caretakers they do just fine,' they will do just fine in any culture, or that staying home means surrendering to financial dependence, boredom, frustration, depression, and low self-esteem. Many mothers assert that if it is indeed true that at-home mothers are more susceptible to depression than working mothers, the solution may not be continued participation in the labor force but increased social supports that diminish the isolation of at-home parenting. Debbie Sawicki, an Illinois mother and national director of FEMALE, says her organization is particularly concerned with resurrecting the image of at-home mothering as socially productive work. 'What we are doing, what every at-home mother does is more important than running a Fortune 500 company,' Sawicki says. 'It is a tall order to raise children in this society.'"

Mack is weak and confused in the end. She has one daughter and her husband is a househusband. As the Andelin's teach this is out of order and will negatively affect Mack's daughter and may eventually cause strife in Mack's marriage because they are living the opposite of God's laws. Their example of their upside down marriage influences other men to be weak and women to be disorderly. Mack sabotages everything she says by living a perverted marriage. She is living the feminist model that is the root cause of all the problems she writes of.

She says, "the battle lines have been clearly drawn between conservatives and "a powerful contingent of political and professional advocacy organizations, ranging from the American Civil Liberties Union and People for the American Way to Planned Parenthood, ... the National Organization for Women, and the League of Women Voters, is determined to convince the public that parents don't need rights and would only abuse them." She says many oppose these Feminist organizations and their agenda: "American parents want relief from the pressures of the family-hating culture. They want more family time, and more parent-child interaction. They want less government intervention, lower taxes, and more parent empowerment."

POLITICAL COURAGE?

Mack ends with a ridiculous chapter called "Seven Pro-Family Proposals in Search of Political Courage." Right after she says that Americans "want less government intervention" she proposes seven interventions. The Liberals at ACLU and NOW smile ear to ear when they read her proposals. Mack shoots herself in the foot. She ends with an absurd praise of Hillary Clinton who "to be fair ... has always been interested in children and their welfare." No she hasn't. Clinton has only been interested in big government over families. Mack does not know that the Bible is the best guidebook on how to build wholesome families and decent communities. Rev. Moon's revelations and teachings clarify the Bible and give more insights for modern man on what is a true man,woman, and family.

Then Mack writes this nonsense: "While parents' conservative voting patterns in the last three elections are some indication of the direction parents want to take in reforming family policy, that does not mean parents have become a loyal cheering section for libertarian ideologues." Mack should be leading the cheering section. Her proposals are the same as the Liberals that she spent most of her book criticizing such as more "generous family leave policies" that "require our largest corporations" to bend over backwards for working mothers. Liberals always use the euphemism of "require" instead of "at the point of a gun." She also wants to "regulate" television, meaning they will have to do as she like or go to jail. Schools "must bolster character development by setting unambiguous normative standards of behavior." Oh? And what is "normative?" Is her feminist marriage with her househusband "normative?" Who determines what is "normative?" Only libertarians have the true answer to how we determine what is normative in a school. Schools should only be private and they decide what is proper. Mack has gone over to the dark side.

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