Parenting with Love and Logic Quotes

“Child says something loud and unkind to the parents. FIGHTING WORDS: “Don’t you talk to me in that tone of voice!” THINKING WORDS: “You sound upset. I’ll be glad to listen when your voice is as soft as mine is.” Child is dawdling with her homework. FIGHTING WORDS: “You get to work on your studying!” THINKING WORDS: “Feel free to join us for some television when your studying is done.” Two kids are fighting. FIGHTING WORDS: “Be nice to each other. Quit fighting.” THINKING WORDS: “You guys are welcome to come back as soon as you work that out.” Child won’t do his chores. FIGHTING WORDS: “I want that lawn cut now!” THINKING WORDS: “I’ll take you to your soccer game as soon as the lawn is cut.” Love and Logic parents insist on respect and obedience, just as command-oriented parents do. But when Love and Logic parents talk to their children, they take a different approach. Instead of the fighting words of command-oriented parents, they use thinking words.”
― Jim Fay, Parenting with Love and Logic: Teaching Children Responsibility

“The problem is, rescuing parents often rescue out of their own needs. They like to heal hurts.”
― Jim Fay, Parenting with Love and Logic: Teaching Children Responsibility

“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.”
― Jim Fay, Parenting with Love and Logic: Teaching Children Responsibility

“The best solution to any problem lies within the skin of the person who rightfully owns the problem.”
― Jim Fay, Parenting with Love and Logic: Teaching Children Responsibility

“we surrender and grudgingly fork over the cookie. The message the child gets is that whining works.”
― Jim Fay, Parenting with Love and Logic: Teaching Children Responsibility

“No wonder Nolan whines like a pro: He has a good teacher. The fact is, parents who spend a lot of time pleading with their children develop kids who are experts at pleading”
― Jim Fay, Parenting with Love and Logic: Teaching Children Responsibility

“Kids have minds of their own. They want to exert their independence and do their own thinking. They blow off the things that are forced onto them and embrace the things they want to believe. If we want to pass our values down to them, we must present those values in a way our kids can accept: in our actions and words. Kids’ values come from what they see and hear. They don’t accept what we try to drive into their heads through lecturing.”
― Jim Fay, Parenting with Love and Logic: Teaching Children Responsibility

“Handling temper tantrums requires parents with soft voices who don’t even try to reason with their misbehaving child.”
― Jim Fay, Parenting with Love and Logic: Teaching Children Responsibility

“kids will throw tantrums only as long as they work. Kids never seem to scream and pound the floor when they’re alone in their room, but the show goes on when they have a captive audience.”
― Jim Fay, Parenting with Love and Logic: Teaching Children Responsibility

“The parent should keep their response empathetic yet vague: “I want you to have that, and you can—as soon as you have a plan for how this isn’t going to be a problem.” Wise parents keep their response fairly open ended in order to keep the child thinking about the situation and how to move forward.”
― Jim Fay, Parenting with Love and Logic: Teaching Children Responsibility

“The risk of relying too much on trying to control children from the outside in, is that this often causes rebellion from the inside out.”
― Jim Fay, Parenting with Love and Logic: Teaching Children Responsibility

“When children do blow it, they need to know that they can come to their parents and that their parents are still going to love them and do their best to remain calm.”
― Jim Fay, Parenting with Love and Logic: Teaching Children Responsibility

“We are giving our children emotion. And kids thrive on parental emotion; they lean back and enjoy the show. It’s part of human nature.”
― Jim Fay, Parenting with Love and Logic: Teaching Children Responsibility

“I want you to go to your room, and I want you to go now”—spoken firmly and with index finger pointing toward the room will usually get results. If the child toddles back out, we should offer, “Would you like to stay in your room with the door open or shut?” If this fails, we can follow with, “Would you like to stay in your room with the door unlocked or locked?” Then, if we are forced to lock the door to keep him in, we need to stay right by it and, once the child has calmed down, open it to again offer him a chance to stay in the room with the door unlocked for five more minutes to practice the appropriate behavior.”
― Jim Fay, Parenting with Love and Logic: Teaching Children Responsibility

“The state of our kids’ room is a control battle we can win. But making an issue of it doesn’t mean yelling at them. It means offering choices”
― Jim Fay, Parenting with Love and Logic: Teaching Children Responsibility

“The blue coat or the red coat? Put the mittens in the pocket or wear them? They have to decide; the little voice inside their head does the talking. The more decisions kids make, the more times we ask them questions instead of telling them what to do, and the more we discuss issues using thinking words, the less likely they’ll be negatively influenced by peers later on.”
― Jim Fay, Parenting with Love and Logic: Teaching Children Responsibility

“We might say, “My kids used to listen to me, but now they won’t. Boy, have they ever changed.” Wrong again. They haven’t changed one iota. They’re still listening to a voice outside their heads—it’s just not ours anymore.”
― Jim Fay, Parenting with Love and Logic: Teaching Children Responsibility

“It is often effective to say, “Well, it looks like things are not going well for you right now. When you get yourself to the point of putting your thoughts into words, come and talk to me. I’ll be glad to listen.” Then break eye contact and move on.”
― Jim Fay, Parenting with Love and Logic: Teaching Children Responsibility

“these things may be little, but they have more impact on our kids than all the lectures about honesty we could ever deliver.”
― Jim Fay, Parenting with Love and Logic: Teaching Children Responsibility

“Generally, honesty is conveyed to our kids through our actions, not our commands. We need to step back and analyze the model we are presenting to our kids.”
― Jim Fay, Parenting with Love and Logic: Teaching Children Responsibility

“all of our investigative questioning, done when our kids might be telling the truth, may breed a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s been said that if we wrongly accuse our kids twice for the same thing, they’ll set out to prove us right. You can almost hear them say with a sigh, “You think I do it anyway, so I might as well do it.”
― Jim Fay, Parenting with Love and Logic: Teaching Children Responsibility

“When children say they are bored, it usually means “I want you to spend more time with me.” Playing with our kids is one of the great joys of parenting.”
― Jim Fay, Parenting with Love and Logic: Teaching Children Responsibility

“we should be there with the needed hint or explanation—but only if our kids ask for it, and only as long as it’s profitable. When we start to become irritated, we’ve helped enough.”
― Jim Fay, Parenting with Love and Logic: Teaching Children Responsibility

“This is the cardinal rule for grades and report cards: Parents don’t get report cards—kids do.”
― Jim Fay, Parenting with Love and Logic: Teaching Children Responsibility

“Kids with parents who are less concerned about their flunking and more concerned about giving their kids an opportunity to think about flunking develop kids who think and rarely flunk. Their parents aren’t going to worry about it, so they’d better.”
― Jim Fay, Parenting with Love and Logic: Teaching Children Responsibility

“Trying to reason with kids who are emotionally upset is a waste of good air.”
― Jim Fay, Parenting with Love and Logic: Teaching Children Responsibility

“The thing to remember about dealing with our kids’ fights is to butt out of them. Expect them to handle their squabbles themselves. This may be the toughest parenting principle to follow because kids desperately want our intervention. In fact, our intervention makes it safe for them to fight. They know we’ll step in before anyone gets hurt,”
― Jim Fay, Parenting with Love and Logic: Teaching Children Responsibility

“many parents don’t do a good job of helping their kids distinguish between a want and a need. Young children don’t naturally place limits on themselves; that is the parents’ job.”
― Jim Fay, Parenting with Love and Logic: Teaching Children Responsibility

“A one-year-old who spits beets is given a choice: “Eat beets nicely in your chair, or play on the floor.” Remember, we are not about punishment or making children feel bad. We are about letting the child know, with love, that when his behavior reaches a certain point (and that will differ with differing parental expectations), the meal is over. If the child feels upset about ending the meal, that’s perfectly okay. If the toddler thinks, Thank goodness—I couldn’t stand another minute in that high chair, that’s perfectly okay too!”
― Jim Fay, Parenting with Love and Logic: Teaching Children Responsibility

“He said what he meant, and he meant what he said. Most important, he backed his wife to the hilt. He didn’t allow Blake to drive a wedge between Lisa and him.”
― Jim Fay, Parenting with Love and Logic: Teaching Children Responsibility