Friday, April 22, 2011

Relationship on their terms

Here is another paragraph from Judge Morse's decision:
As Dr. Perlmutter testified, this is a sad case where despite the difficulties, George's daughters have a resilient love for their father and still wish to have a relationship with him, but on their terms and not his. They hope he can change.
My kids were 12 and 10 at the time of Ken Perlmutter's $28k evaluation. He said that I was as good a parent as my ex-wife. But apparently I cannot see my kids because they want to dictate the terms of the relationship.

Perlmutter never found anything wrong with my child-rearing practices. His biggest complaint was that I do not always do what my kids want.

I have read a bunch of child-rearing books. None of them say that a parent should let an 12 or 10-year-old child control the terms of the relationship with the parent. Perlmutter is completely clueless about child-rearing.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

that's part of the so-called "children's rights movement". Sad stuff, see the Wikipedia entry to get a taste of the guiding principles and philosophy. One of my visitation supervisors was getting her master's in child psych and was a big advocate for that movement. I guess these people want to somehow keep children and everyone else infantalized for their entire lifetime. Not them of course, they're trained counselors, know best about these things, and well, someone has to be the parent, who better equipped than them?