on defending yourself

There is a book called BabyWise on the shelf of the parenting section in our library. It looked innocent enough, but actualy it is a secularised version of the Growing Kids God's Way (GKGW) parenting approach, espoused by Gary Ezzo and his ministry, Growing Families Inyernational. They encourage Bible-based approach to child rearing, or rather what they understand it to be, since Bible is pretty nebulous regarding the actual methods of raising children -- after all, this isn't its main focus.

There is a great deal of critic of this method here , which pretty much sums it all up. Moreover, doubts are raised over the integrity of Mr. Ezzo himself. The pattern of lying and plagiarizing is especially alarming.

Yet at the same time, Mr. Ezzo and his organization have many supporters, who love his child-rearing curriculum and staunchily defend his character, basing largely on their overwhelmingly positive impressions from personal interactions. However, in light of what we know about ponerology and psychopaths, personal impression would be something that we should trust least of all in such controversy.

It all comes down to the question: who is lying and who is telling the truth? I think that the websites I quoted above are suffient to carefully examine all available evidence. But to make a conclusion, one must also correlate both theory AND practice of Ezzo's GKWG with one's own deep-seated convictions about how we should parent our children.

If you find yourself in a deadlock, here is the featherweight that should move the scale.

The most notable thing to me is that, despite the seriousness of all the allegations, nowhere do Mr. Ezzo and his team publicly defend themselves. Their way of dealing with problems is to move to a different locations and affiliations, dismiss critics as evil and malicious individuals, and/or subtly change the tone of their materials, to create ambiguity allowing for difference in interpretation. But the task of defence itself, appears to be relegated to their supporters, who have put up a dedicated site -- and even this is a recent development.

My experience has been exactly the opposite. Truly honest people DO defend themselves personally, making available to the public all related information and communications. Such defence is all the more urgent if you uphold an important principle, and if your life's work is being threatened.

Here is an example of just such insidious COINTELPRO attack. Notice transparency, timely response and detailed account of all that happened, with factual evidence attached -- all personally put together by the affected party.

All of this is notably absent in Ezzo's case.

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