Did Somebody Say Parenting With Love And Logic?

answers:

I love the Love and Logic program. While I haven’t actually read “Parenting with Love and Logic”, I do use it’s principles on my toddler. I took an education class where we learned about the sister branch “Teaching with Love and Logic”. While the examples are different, the principles are the same.

It does take a bit for people to catch on to, though, because it seems to go against traditional parenting. Parents seem to think that it isn’t their job to help their kids, and that their kids should just obey because they should. The principles of Love and Logic really do work beautifully with kids if you do them correctly and remember to have empathy.

The four principles of Love and Logic make so much sense when you think about kids, but as parents we often don’t want to see it that way. Really, it’s pretty simple. Share the control, share the thinking, balance consequences with empathy, and maintain self concept. With a toddler you know that if you don’t give her some choice and control on your terms, she’s gonna take it on hers. By involving her as much as you can in fixing a problem you’re going to be teaching her how to think on her own. My favorite part about Love and Logic is the “provide choices inside of the limits” part. I’ve been able to avoid some major melt downs and to lessen the severity of the rest by giving my toddler tons of choices about everything. Bedtime isn’t nearly as difficult if he gets to pick out which pjs he wears, which book to read, which stuffed toys to take, and which sippy cup he wants.

I don’t understand where Shayann got the idea that Love and Logic uses sarcasm and hate because it doesn’t, but I do agree with her that Alfie Kohn’s “Unconditional Parenting” as well as “Punished by Rewards” are also full of great knowledge. My suggestion is to study some of Alfie Kohn a bit to see his perspective, then re-look at Love and Logic to see how the two concur.

It’s nice to see you back, by the way.

answers:

Though a bit more money, Jim Fay’s CDs are much, much better than the books. I’ve listened to them 20 times over the past four years. Trust me, they work. I have the best-behaved kid on the block.

answers:

If my child is comfortable being cold, then I’m fine with that. I’m not living inside their skin, they are. I think that catching colds is a combination of lowered defenses -and- increased exposure to bacteria & viruses. In the case of my children, their defenses are lowered both when their bodies are busy staying warm -and- when they are exposed to a roomful of people carrying a virus while their bodies are nice, overheated breeding grounds, too. Both being too cold and being too warm are excellent ways to invite a virus in to stay.

If my child catches a cold – that is a consequence of poor health choices that s/he made or ones that I made, that they trusted me to make. Being ill *is* the ‘punishment’ for those poor choices – it’s not fun being sick! While helping my child through the illness, we would talk about what we thought caused it & what could be done differently to avoid it in the future. Handwashing, constantly, is really the best defense – coat or no coat, inside or outside.

L&L parenting *is not* free range parenting and it is not neglectful parenting. It is very hands on parenting. L&L parents (and this is clear in the book) simply do not create or impose punishments that are not the logical outcome of the child’s behavior. They let the lessons come naturally & logically as a result of the child’s choices & actions. They help their child to see the cause & effect in their own actions & words. They help the child learn how to learn from their own mistakes.

L&L parents help their children to think “When I do this, it causes this. I don’t like when that happens, so how will I do things differently” And, while this technically works with non-logical punishments – timed timeouts, groundings, corporal punishment, random chores (that are not related to fixing their mistake), etc – it does not help the child to then make the step of thinking ahead to other decisions in their future, ones that have not yet been assigned arbitrary punishments. When faced with a new decision that does not yet have a rule or punishment assigned by a parent or authority figure, the child has not been taught the skills to think through the possible outcomes of their choices to make and take responsibility for a decision of their own.

So, there is no ‘how many times do you let them fail before you step in and parent’. The parenting is happening all of the time. L&L parents simply use the natural consequences of the actions to help their child learn how to make better decisions for themselves, rather than using arbitrary punishments to get their child to simply do as their told.

Take the ‘breaking things’ scenario. If a child breaks something that does not belong to them, then they should face the logical conseqence of doing that. They need to make amends. This *is not* a punishment – it is a logical consequence that happens when you damage something that does not belong to you. The child must repair or replace the item. They must apologize. If they do it again, the logical consequence would be a loss of freedom to be unsupervised when around that type of thing until they begin to show more responsible behavior.

If a parent is simply letting their child break things and go without accepting consequences for those actions, then they are *not* following the precepts of L&L parenting. They are simply being neglectful.