Parenting with Love and Logic: Teaching Children Responsibility

by Foster W. Cline

The problem is, rescuing parents often rescue out of their own needs. They like to heal hurts. They are parents who need to be needed, not parents who want to be wanted.

To help our children gain responsibility, we must offer them opportunities to be responsible.

Strong, effective parents say in both their covert and overt messages, “There’s a lot of love here for you regardless of the way you act or do your work at school or anyplace else.” When this love is combined with pats on the back, hugs, a smile, and eye contact, a tight bond is created between parent and child.

Parents who routinely focus on the end result rather than on the learning taking place wind up with kids who have a negative self-concept about their skills. Then parents wonder why their kids never want to help around the house.

Responsible behavior has a direct correlation to the number of decisions children are expected to make. The more they make, the more responsible they become.

But anytime we explode at children for something they do to themselves, we only make the problem worse. We give kids the message that the actual, logical consequence of messing up is making adults mad. The children get swept away in the power of their anger rather than learn a lesson from the consequences of their mistake.

Adults must set firm, loving limits using enforceable statements without showing anger, lecturing, or using threats. The statements are enforceable because they deal with how we will respond.

When a child causes a problem, the adult shows empathy through sadness and sorrow and then lovingly hands the problem and its consequences back to the child.

Adults must set firm, loving limits using enforceable statements without showing anger, lecturing, or using threats.

When a child causes a problem, the adult shows empathy through sadness and sorrow and then lovingly hands the problem and its consequences back to the child.

The best solution to any problem lies within the skin of the person who rightfully owns the problem.

He would have been using punishment, and the real world by and large doesn’t operate on punishment.

As we give our kids control, we remember that control can corrupt, and absolute control can corrupt absolutely.

Learning how to handle power and control is essential if our children are to grow to be good leaders.

So control and power are handled like money. We rejoice when the child handles them correctly, and we show empathy without rescue when unwise choices result in consternation, pain, and regret.

Parents who give a lot of warnings raise kids who don’t behave until they’ve had a lot of warnings.

As Love and Logic parents, we want our kids to hurt from the inside out. This happens when we allow the consequences to do the teaching. Consequences leave kids thinking very hard about their behavior and their responsibilities. Consequences lead to self-examination and thought.

Naturally falling consequences allow the cause and effect of our children’s actions to register in their brains. When they ask themselves, Who is making me hurt like this? their only answer is, Me.