The Complete Marriage and Family Home Reference Guide

Rating:
Summary: Dobson advocates spying on teenage girls' periods
Review: Dobson is asked the question: "Q. My child has just entered the adolescent years. What does that mean for me as a parent?"

This is his advice for parents of girls:

"I strongly recommend that parents of strong-willed and rebellious females, especially, quietly keep track of the particulars of their daughters' menstrual cycles. Not only should you record when their periods begin and end each month, but also make a comment or two each day about moods."

Dobson then goes on to say: "I think you will see that the emotional blowups that tear the family apart are cyclical in nature. Premenstrual tension at that age can produce a flurry of skirmishes every 28 days. If you know they are coming, you can retreat to the storm cellar when the wind begins to blow. You can also use this record to teach your girls about premenstrual syndrome and how to cope with it."

Uh-hunh. And how are parents going to find out this information? By rooting through the trash cans in their home to find the evidence? By backing the teenage girl up against the wall and forcing her to tell when she's having a period? And I'm sure that it occurred to Dobson, although he's not mentioned it here, that if you're monitoring your teenage daughter's periods, you might be able to tell when the little hussy gets pregnant and then stop her from getting an abortion on the sly.

Not only is this advice overly invasive, it's stupid. When women begin to menstruate, our cycles are not regular as clockwork as this man apparently believes. Some women never have regular cycles. Oddly enough, if a teenage girl is having regular cycles, that's a pretty strong hint that she's probably taking some form of birth control pill. Dobson apparently got his degrees back in the 1960s, because it's abundantly obvious that he's inadvertently or deliberately clueless about a girl's menstrual cycles.

If, as I suspect, this is the level of advice given in this "Marriage and Family Home Reference Guide," families would do well to stay far away from it. Far from solving problems, this little piece of so-called "advice" seems more likely to cause problems and I'm sure the book is full of little disasters like this.