Posts Tagged “love and logic”

Giving Kids the Opportunity to Succeed

One of the topics that often surface in the parenting classes that I teach is the parent’s fears of their kids failing in school.  This is especially true for parents of kids with ADD or ADHD, because of their child’s difficulty staying focused on a school task to completion. Parents want their kids to succeed.  So when their child starts

The Difference Between Helping and Enabling

When does “helping” a child become “enabling” a child? It is hard to know where that line is sometimes. As parents, we love our kids and are willing to make sacrifices for them, but can our sacrifices ever send the wrong message to our kids? The answer is yes! We can certainly send unhealthy and unrealistic messages to our kids

8 Ways to Break Through Teenage Walls

As a child and family therapist, I have met with many teenagers who have shut down. It looks like they have put up 2-foot thick concrete walls around themselves to keep their parents and other concerned adults at a distance. By the time parents contact me, months or even years of damage has already happened in the family and the

What We Can Learn From the Post Office About Parenting

Has this ever happened to you or someone you know? Child: “Mom we need to go to the store tonight! My project is due tomorrow and I need a poster board and some construction paper!” Parent: “How long have you known about this project?” Child: “They told us two weeks ago, but I don’t see what that has to do

Conflict, Then Resolution

Recently, there seems to be a pattern among the families that I have been working with as a therapist.  The pattern starts by the child acting rude and disrespectful.  The parent then gets offended and upset and eventually sends the child to their room.  Afterwards, nothing is really talked about or resolved between the parent and the child related to

What is Parental Debt?

I know of parents that are deep in debt.  Not financial debt, but parental debt.  What is parental debt?  Parental debt, like credit card debt or any other debt, is when you want the reward or benefit of having something right now but (rather than paying for it right now) you put off paying until sometime in the future. How

Loving Relationships Give Consequences Their Power

In the updated Love and Logic Parenting Class – Parenting the Love and Logic Way, Jim and Charles Fay share the following observation, “Our heart breaks every time we see someone falling into the ‘consequence trap.’  Well-meaning parents become ensnared in this trap when they believe that the solution to all of their problems involves finding bigger or better consequences.” 

Is That Consequence Logical?

I hear of parents whose knee-jerk reaction to almost anything that their child does wrong is to take away their child’s cell-phone.  “It’s the only thing they care about”, parents will tell me. “It’s the only thing that makes them do the thing I ask them to do!” Whether the misbehavior is talking back, refusing to do chores, allowing grades

Letting kids fail in the short term can be great to teach kids responsibility

There we were, at WalMart on a Saturday afternoon.  Eliza and her brother Ezra each had two weeks of allowance and they were trying to stretch it as far as possible (which isn’t easy since they only had four dollars each).  I was working on my skill of patience as each of them pointed out the things that they wanted

How am I supposed to have empathy for my child when he does that?

Empathy is at the heart of Love and Logic.  Jim Fay and Foster W. Cline studied parents to find out why some parents got good results when disciplining, while others, who used the same methods of disciplining, got the opposite.  They found that it had everything to do with showing empathy, or sadness, for the kid’s mistakes before applying the

Bonding With Your Child

As a therapist who works with children and families, I often get questions about how to get a child to stop a bad behavior. Parents will say, “He constantly throws tantrums.” Or “If I tell him ‘no’, he just does it anyway. “ They ask, “How can I get my child to do what I tell him to do?” Before

Parenting Toddlers with the “Uh-oh” Song

Effective discipline depends on the age of the child.  For children who are small enough to be carried and placed in a location that they can’t get out of themselves, you can try singing the “Uh oh” song. I remember when I first started using the “Uh oh” song.  My little girl had just learned to walk.  This stage was