Parenting with Love and Logic: Teaching Children Responsibility

by Foster W. Cline

Love is important, for loving parents generally raise great kids. But to children, everyday, plain old love can be a little boring. It’s not the movies about love that they love to see! Which movie do most kids want to see: Jurassic Park (about dinosaurs dining on humans) or a sweet little love story like Sleepless in Seattle? Most kids would rather see a dinosaur eat a lawyer in an outhouse any old day! But by far the most effective emotion for modifying children’s behavior is the showing of frustration. From a kid’s point of view, frustration is an irresistible mix of wonderful emotions. Adult anger and adult loss of control — no kid could ask for anything more exciting! As a matter of fact, we all love frustration and loss of control by others. Most of today’s sitcoms and many comic strips are based on frustrated authority figures. The toddlerhood game of peekaboo and the subsequent, “Oh, no! You see me!” is often based on mock frustration. Kids love mock frustration. “Oh, no, you beat me to the car!” Whenever adults show real frustration, they give off vibrations of strong emotion, usually anger, and then delightfully declare they have no control in the situation. Frustration almost always indicates a loss of control. This is the irresistible combination frustration shows: The parent turns red, lights up, gets noisy, and hands control to the child. Now what kid wouldn’t want that?!