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books were first published in 1990
no matter the generation, good parenting boils down to loving and effective parent-child relationships and communication that engender respect and self-discipline.
Why the terms love and logic? Effective parenting centers around love: love that is not permissive, love that doesn’t tolerate disrespect, but also love that is powerful enough to allow kids to make mistakes and permit them to live with the consequences of those mistakes. Most mistakes do have logical consequences. And those consequences, when accompanied by empathy — our compassionate understanding of the child’s disappointment, frustration, and pain — hit home with mind-changing power.
centering on building self-concept, separating problems, neutralizing anger and arguments, using thinking words and enforceable statements, offering choices, and locking in our empathy before our kids face the consequences of their mistakes. These are the building blocks of effective parenting.
Once the attitude is mastered, handling most problems becomes second nature, even when a particular problem has not been explored. Our approach is more of an attitude that will allow our children to grow in maturity as they grow in years. It will teach them to think, to decide, and to live with their decisions. In short, it will teach them responsibility, and that’s what parenting is all about.
She finally complies, but only after her parents agree to buy her a soda on the way home. If they have to use a soda to buy her off at three, what will they be facing when she reaches sixteen?
mother gives at least eighty different demands to her three-year-old boy over the course of an hour without ever enforcing one of them: “Come back here, Logan!” “Don’t go over there, Logan!” “You better listen to me, Logan, or else!” “I mean it, Logan!”
Jim smiles down at Logan and asks, “Hey, Logan, what is your mom going to do if you don’t get over there?” He looks up and grins. “She not goin’ to do nothin’.” And then his eyes twinkle and his grin becomes wider.
after she threatens murder and the pawning of their Nintendo game system, the boys are gathered. But the battle’s not over. Tactic C follows: the “fill the cart when Mom’s not looking” game.
Then come boyish smirks and another round of threats from Mom: “Don’t do that!” “I’m going to slap your hands!” And in a cry of desperation: “You’re never going to leave the house again for the rest of your lives!” Frazzled, harried, and broken, Mom finally surrenders and buys off her precious flesh and blood with candy bars — a cease-fire that guarantees enough peace to finish her rounds.
Where was that gratifying, loving, personal relationship between parent and child? The sublime joys of parenting were obliterated by a more immediate concern: survival.
When we think of the enormous love we pump into our children’s lives and then the sassy, disobedient, unappreciative behavior we receive in return, we can get pretty burned out on the whole process. Besides riddling our lives with day-to-day hassles, kids present us with perhaps the greatest challenge of our adulthood: raising our children to be responsible adults.
If I can’t handle a five-year-old in a grocery store, what am I going to do with a fifteen-year-old who seems to have an enormous understanding of sex and is counting the days until he gets a driver’s license?
Parenting doesn’t have to be drudgery. Children can grow to be thinking, responsible adults. We can help them do it without living through an eighteen-year horror movie.
It’s a win-win philosophy. Parents win because they love in a healthy way and establish control over their kids without resorting to the anger and threats that encourage rebellious teenage behavior. Kids win because they learn responsibility and the logic of life by solving their own problems. Thus, they acquire the tools for coping with the real world.
Why do young people sometimes seem so stupidly self-destructive? The tragic truth is that many of these foolish choices are the first real decisions they have ever made. In childhood, decisions were always made for them by well-meaning parents. We must understand that making good choices is like any other activity: It has to be learned. The teenagers who make the wrong choice on alcohol are probably the same children who never learned how to keep their hands out of the cookie jar.
They’re always pulling their children out of jams. Not a day goes by when they’re not protecting little junior from something — usually from a growing experience — he needs or deserves. As soon as their children send up an SOS flare, helicopter parents, who are ready hovering nearby, swoop in and shield the children
The irony is that helicopter parents are often viewed by others as model parents. They feel uncomfortable imposing consequences. When they see their children hurting, they hurt too, so they bail them out. But the real world does not run on the bail-out principle.
Declaring their child a victim is a favorite tactical maneuver, designed to send school personnel or social workers diving into the trenches for protection. Teachers and school administrators become worn down by these parents’ constant barrage. It is horribly disappointing to watch kids learn to blame others for their lack of success instead of becoming people who reach goals through effort and determination.
When drill sergeant parents talk to children, their words are often filled with put-downs and I-told-you-so’s. These parents are into power! If children don’t do what they’re told, drill sergeant parents are going to — doggone it all — make them do it.
when the children of drill sergeant parents reach their teen years, they are even more susceptible to peer pressure than most other teens. Why? Because, as children, when the costs of mistakes were low, they were never allowed to make their own decisions but were trained to listen to a voice outside of their heads
Drill sergeant parents tend to create kids who are followers because they have never learned how to make decisions for themselves.
The message the helicopter parent sends is, “You are fragile and can’t make it without me.” The drill sergeant’s message is, “You can’t think for yourself, so I’ll do it for you.”
the laissez-faire parent. These are parents who for one reason or another — whether it is because they are unsure of how to handle their child or have become confused by the variety of parenting opinions and advice out there — decide to let their children raise themselves. Some
“If children were meant to run the home, they would have been born larger.” While children should be able to decide between safe and responsible options (as we will explain in the next section), we do not advocate letting them decide everything for themselves or even learning from natural consequences that may have damaging effects.
Love and Logic parents, which works well throughout life. While especially effective with teenagers, it also reflects the attitude parents should have from the time their children are toddlers. We call it the consultant parenting style.
As children grow, they move from being concrete thinkers to being abstract thinkers when they are teens. Children need thoughtful guidance and firm, enforceable limits.
while the parents are drawing and holding these limits, it is important for them to continue encouraging their children to think about their behavior and help them feel in control of their actions by giving choices within those limits.
adjust the way they parent to meet the needs of the new thought processes taking place in their adolescents. They step back a bit from being the enforcer of limits and let reasonable, real-world consequences do the teaching. They become advisors and counselors more than police officers,
using a consultant style of parenting as early as possible in the child’s life. They ask their children questions and offer choices. Instead of telling their children what to do, they put the burden of decision making on their kids’ shoulders. They establish options within limits.
Nothing in parenting is sure. However, we increase the odds of raising responsible kids when we take thoughtful risks. We do that when we allow our children — get this — to fail. In fact, unless we allow them to fail, sometimes grandiosely, we cannot allow our children to choose success.
God gave all humans — His supreme creation — considerable freedom, and that includes the opportunity to goof up. Failure and success are two sides of the same coin. If there had been no forbidden tree in the Garden of Eden, humanity would have had no opportunity to make responsible or irresponsible choices. When Adam and Eve made the wrong choice, God allowed them to suffer the consequences. Although He did not approve of their disobedience, He loved them enough to let them make a decision and live with the results. God’s love in the garden sets the example for all parents to follow: He
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Just as God gave us a good mind and the ability to excel, He has given us the capability to blow up the planet. However, a race capable of blowing up the planet is also capable of flying to Saturn. High success and high achievement carry with them the risks of abysmal losses. On a different scale, the “forbidden fruit” may be drugs, a particular friend, Internet pornography sites,
we must allow for failures and help our kids make the most of them during their elementary school days, when the price tags are still reasonable.
it’s painful to watch our kids learn through natural consequences or, as we like to call them, significant learning opportunities (SLOs). But that pain is part of the price we must pay to raise responsible kids. We have a choice though: We can hurt a little as we watch them learn life’s lessons now, or we can hurt a lot as we watch them grow up to be individuals unable to care for themselves.
Too many parents confuse love, protection, and caring. These concepts are not synonymous. Parents may refuse to allow their children to fail because they see such a response as uncaring. Thus, they overcompensate with worry and hyper-concern. What these parents are doing, in reality, is meeting their own selfish needs.
By the time children are eleven or twelve years old, they should be able to make most decisions without parental input.
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.
Parents of middle or high school children who must concern themselves with clothing, television habits, homework, teeth brushing, haircuts, and the like have “at-risk” children on their hands. At the very least, these children are not going to be much fun for their future spouse.
One thing for sure we can’t tell kids is “Be responsible.” It doesn’t work.
Responsibility cannot be taught; it must be caught. To help our children gain responsibility, we must offer them opportunities to be responsible. That’s the key.
