RUSH: Look who’s been waiting: Jen from Roanoke, Virginia. She was with us yesterday, but Snerdley — the official program observer and call screener — said there wasn’t enough time by the time we got to her for her to properly articulate what she wanted to say. So we got her back on the phone. Hello, Jen. I’m glad you let us get back to you.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. Thanks for taking my call.
RUSH: You bet.
CALLER: I wanted to thank you for taking the issue of timeout head-on yesterday, because most parents know it’s a fraud, and the word “discipline” means to study or learn — and, honestly, most parents are just not committed enough to their kids to be the teacher in their lives.
RUSH: What she’s talking about, folks — if you missed this yesterday, it’s too bad, but — there was a story, a survey that most parents in America think that the discipline that they’re using on their kids is not working, it’s not effective.
?We?re using timeouts.?
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: And I, not being a parent, didn’t know what that actually was. I can imagine a timeout to me, ?Just stop it! Stop!? But it’s more than that. You get sent away; you have your gadgets and your toys taken away from you for every minute that you’ve been alive for every year. So if you’re 13, you get time-out for 13 minutes. Now, is this being done in school, or is this being done at home where you’re talking about?
CALLER: Well, I’m talking about even at home, it is a fraud, and I just cannot believe that intelligent people are saying, ?The best I have to offer you as a parent is a corner and a chair.? It just riled me. I was in the car driving.
RUSH: Come on, Jen! Don’t you understand? With the economy the way it is, we’ve got two-parent families out there; most of them can’t afford two nannies.
CALLER: Well, exactly.
RUSH: They both work and they need their private time to stay sane.
CALLER: Well, feminism has taught us that disciplining our children is not a worthy task.
RUSH: No, it’s predatory.
CALLER: Also it has taken away the hierarchy of our family. To think that I, as a parent, have something to say to my kids that could change him and give him vision and hope for the future is just ridiculous in the liberal way of thinking.
RUSH: Yeah, it is, because what right do you have to impose your vision of the future on the child?
CALLER: Well, we are definitely not a timeout family, and I want to thank you for exposing it as the fraud that it is. It’s just simply an easy way of dealing with children that get in your way.
You get together; you have the first meeting. You fall into whatever infatuation. You can’t take your hands off each other. You’re going nuts and crazy. A year of that, if that, they get engaged and crazy — and by the time they get married, ?Why am I doing this?”
“Oh, we need a kid!?
It’s just the next thing that happens. No, no, really. I may be going over the top here in synthesizing the various stages of relationship, but I think most of you people listening will agree that I know what I’m talking about. It?s how they happen. There are exceptions to this, the good ones. But that’s basically how it happens. At some point the next thing to do is have a kid, and what determines it? Well, work, biological time bomb in the wife, any number of factors. The, “Gee, I think we should” syndrome or “Gee, you know, mom really wants to be a grandmom.
Grandpa doesn’t care about being a grandpa, but grandma really wants to be,? or, ?I have got to maintain this family bloodline,? or what have you. Don’t misunderstand. There are people out there who genuinely love kids and want to have them. That’s the reason they got married. That’s fine, but I’m saying there’s some people that they just do it because it’s — hell, how many of them were accidents? There’s no school you can go to to learn how to be a parent. That’s why you learn it from your own parents, which is why they’re so much of a mess now, because baby boomers are not the best.