How to Apply Parenting With Love and Logic
A practical system for raising responsible kids without threats, nagging, or rescue.
About This Book
A three-year-old refuses to get in the car on a rainy night, and her parents end up begging in a puddle. A mother in an airport gives her toddler eighty warnings and enforces none of them. Foster Cline, a child psychiatrist, and Jim Fay, a longtime teacher and school administrator, use scenes like these to show why so much well-intentioned parenting backfires. Inside, you'll find out why ordering a child to obey often guarantees they won't, why letting a child fail on an ordinary Tuesday can be a gift, and why a simple model of control predicts whether your teenager feels trusted or trapped.About the Author
Foster Cline is a child psychiatrist, and Jim Fay spent decades as a teacher and school administrator before the two of them co-founded the Love and Logic Institute. Drawing on Cline's clinical work with families and Fay's years watching thousands of children in classrooms and hallways, they built Love and Logic as a practical alternative to both permissive and authoritarian parenting. Fay's own family, including his son Charlie, who went on to earn a PhD and later teach Love and Logic techniques himself, appears throughout their work as a real test of the methods they describe.
Biggest Takeaway
Expect fewer shouting matches and far less nagging. You'll catch yourself before rescuing your child from problems that are actually theirs to solve, and you'll have specific phrases ready for the moments that used to end in a power struggle, at the dinner table, in the car, at bedtime. Your children will get more practice making real decisions while the stakes are still small, so that by the time the decisions get serious, like a ride home from a party, they already know how to think one through. You'll also stop mistaking anger for firmness, and empty praise for encouragement.
Key Insights from This Book
Explore the most important ideas and learn how to apply them in your life.
Why the most devoted parents raise the least prepared kids
The ride to a party that one teenager chose to skip
A toddler's tantrum contains its own off switch
Give away control now to gain more of it later
What happened when a father stopped ordering his kids to sleep
A compliment that made a boy respect his father less
The morning a mother let her daughter miss the bus
Her credit cards revealed everything her parents never taught her
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