Foster W. Cline

As many other reviewers have said, you should take from this book what's useful to you and leave the rest. A few useful things for me:

1. Parenting should not be a power struggle. My job as a parent is not to control my child. (This is not in the book, but I really like partnering/collaborating with my 5yo to find solutions to conflicts. As the book says, kids should have opportunities to exercise power over their lives.)

2. Keep in mind your ultimate goal as a parent. For most of us, it's for our kids to become independent and trustworthy. This can't happen if we never trust them. We have to give them opportunities to make choices and suffer consequences within reason.

3. Be consistent with boundaries. This is especially important for very young children who don't understand how context guides behavior. For example, if you let your child make a big mess and laugh about it one day (because, say, it's a lazy Sunday) but then the next day you get super upset when they make a big mess (because, say, it's Monday morning and you have to get to work) it's confusing for little kids. Consistency (to the point of even saying "uh-oh" in the same sing-song way every time you want to discourage a behavior) will really help guide behavior.

A few things the book advocates that don't work for me:

1. Don't lecture. --okay, this sounds good. But the authors recommend parents keep mum and let experience be their child's teacher. This doesn't always work for me because I'm a verbal person raising a verbal kid. Some things are better learned first by talking together. For example, if we're having a conflict over toothbrushing, I'm not going to quietly let my kids get cavities so they can learn from experience why toothbrushing matters. I'm going to describe in detail how much it sucks to get a cavity and explain that a trip to the dentist is expensive. (This has worked pretty well for us, btw.)

2. Never lose your cool. --again this sounds good. But it basically encourages parents to trick kids into thinking the kids have no power to upset their parents. I think this will inevitably come across as hollow as your kids get older. I'd rather be authentic with my kid about my feelings. Honestly, I don't think I could pull off unflappable anyway.

3. Lock your kid in their room when they misbehave because you can't control their behavior but you can control their location. --yeah, this is bad advice. Please don't routinely lock your child in their room, even if you're standing just outside the door. Google "love withdrawal" as a parenting/discipline technique and you'll find research that shows this doesn't work well.… (altro)

When my daughter was younger, I enjoyed reading Love and Logic for parents of young children. I found it helpful for establishing a good relationship with my daughter. And she has become a healthy preteen now. She is socially conscious, in an academic magnet school, and mostly interested in mature things. Importantly, she has become friends with my wife and me. Some of the credit for that goes to the framework the Love and Logic book set in place. With such good past experiences, I approached the teen version of Love and Logic with anticipation. However, after having completed it, I am not as enthusiastic as I was after completing the first book. Let me explain…

First, the good stuff. This book tries to develop teens and preteens into responsible adults by enhancing personal responsibility. As with children, it tries to use natural consequences as the ultimate teacher of life lessons. It encourages parents to stop being benevolent dictators or hover parents that rescue their children incessantly. Instead, it encourages parents to let their children make their own mistakes while forming their own identities, albeit with some guardrails in place to enhance growth.

However, this book falls into the trap of enhancing fear-based thinking too much. It seems like every suggested conversation ends with the fear of drugs, sex, and alcohol. Not enough discussion exists about how to enhance good passions and foster good curiosities in your child’s life. Perhaps this is because the authors counsel troubled teens and families so much. Granted, they explicitly say that all their advice is not for every parent-teen relationship. I’d also like to have seen an appendix of suggested resources, perhaps with varying opinions, for deeper dives into the subject matter.

I’m not sure parenting by fear is the best strategy even if the locus of control is shifted onto the adolescent. Indeed, this religion-friendly strategy unmasks fears beneath common parental admonitions. But because it is fear-based, I am concerned that it does not provide lasting solutions that will easily port into adulthood. While it does a good job at molding a parental role into a consultant, it does not deliberately educate and empower children to make their own decisions about their futures. Perhaps only self-controlled children will benefit from that – i.e., ones that have benefited from making their own decisions. Still, I simply did not learn as much from this book as I did from the earlier Love and Logic version.

Finally, I note that a newer edition came out in 2020. I hope and anticipate that version contains advice about modern smartphones and social media. These are necessary and hot topics.… (altro)