DadTalk

Love

A few months ago I blogged about the best parenting book I’ve ever read - Love and Logic by Foster W. Cline and Jim Fay .

You can catch up with those posts here, here and here. We’re still parenting using love and logic and it’s still having tremendous results with us and our kids. I thought I’d take a minute to reflect on the benefits we’ve seen in the last six months both for us and our kids…

• We are calmer - Caroline and I are far calmer as people. So much of the tension around parenting and ‘trying to get the kids to just do what they’re told’ has gone. We shout less often, are more reasonable as parents and are generally happier!
• We rarely nag - nagging hasn’t completely gone and we still catch ourselves doing it. But it’s decreased dramatically. Instead of nagging we spend our energy thinking of creative choices for our children. Kline is right when he says that thinking children aren’t fighting children! They’re too busy choosing between two options.
• The choices come more naturally - one of the hardest things about love and logic is that you have to think of choices for your kids - both of which you’re happy with. Come here or have a smack doesn’t cut it! It’s hard work at times and especially initially. In the early days Caroline and I would often have to retreat to think of a valid choice. But with 6 months of practice it’s now so much easier. We think around the most natural consequence and apply that. Instead of ‘no you can’t have a sweet you’ve just brushed your teeth - it becomes ‘sure - you can have a sweet but you’ll have to brush your teeth again’. Our kids, particularly the older two, often help us come up with the choices!
• We say ‘no’ less often. One of the things we were battling with a year ago was feeling like we were saying ‘no’ so much of the time. I hated that feeling but didn’t want the opposite - being the parent who always says yes and creates kids who are spoiled brats. Love and logic is the solution - we say yes far more of the time now because we offer two positive choices.

We ‘blow up’ less often and have to apologise less often. Because we’re generally calmer, we also explode less often. Our kids see the benefit of parents who aren’t living with pent up frustration.

Love and Logic works - there’s no question in our minds. We’ve become parents with a far healthier relationship with our kids, one that is not dogged with some of the baggage and bad parenting we were carrying around a year ago. Interestingly other people have noticed as well. There’s hardly a week that goes by without one of us saying ‘we learned it from Love & Logic!’

Next time I’ll let you know the impact it’s had on our kids.