Love and Logic

Awhile back, my son's co-op preschool offered a seminar on Love and Logic. The speaker was Winfield Kline, the son of Foster Kline--one of the co-authors of the book, which I guess has morphed into a whole movement of sorts. I had read the book a few years ago and really liked the idea of having logical consequences and giving children the freedom to make choices and mistakes. The book talks about how the price of a mistake is much lower when your children are young, and how you don't want to wait until they are sixteen to give them their first experience with making decisions. The love part comes in by adding empathy to all your dealings with your children, even when enforcing a consequence. For example, you might say, "I'm really sad for you that you can't have your friend over because you didn't get your chores finished in time."

The seminar was a good refresher for me because it reminded me of the things I did like about the book and has gotten me thinking about how to use them more in my parenting. I feel like too often I slip into just yelling because that is the easiest thing to do. It makes me feel bad though and really doesn't set a very good example of how to act when you are frustrated. In the seminar, Winfield Kline said that when you show your frustration and anger, you are letting your children push your buttons and control the situation. So, I am trying to take a step back and instead of getting upset over things, giving my son a choice between doing what he is asked to do or receiving a consequence. The problems with this is that 1) I'm not giving him real choices--choosing between doing what you were told and being punished is not much of a choice at all, and 2) I'm having difficulty coming up with logical consequences. I usually end up threatening to take away his tv time, which works pretty well, but is not giving him a feel for what making poor decisions is like in the real world. So I decided to to check out the Love and Logic website for some tips. I found two articles there:

Love and Logic Generic Consequence

What To Do When an Appropriate Consequence is Hard to Find

Both of them basically said that you should use household chores in place of a more logical consequence. As much as I like the premise of this method of discipline, I don't think it will work for me all of the time or in every situation. But, I guess it is like that with most parenting books and techniques. There is no one magical solution that will work for everyone all of the time or else everyone would be using it. You have to take what works for you and create your own recipe for raising your kids.

I recently finished reading Practically Perfect In Every Way , and the author, Jennifer Neisslein, talks about how self-help books (she includes parenting books in that genre) don't really work for most people, but I think that is only true to a certain extent. They may not work if you try to follow the book, which amount to someone else's philosophy, to a T. However, I think that you can take bits and pieces of them and improve your life in a way that is meaningful to you. For me, approaching parenting like I would any other challenge in life, means educating myself as much as possible. I will continue to do that, not because I think I will find the parenting bible, but because I think the more I know, the better able I'll be to find my own style.

In related news:

1) I did find one really great article on the Love and Logic website (it is really more of a poster or reminder sheet): Self Concept Builder and Stealers.

2) Check out my book review of Practically Perfect on Meg and Mag's Bookshelf.