Foster W. Cline

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 show more 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. show less

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 show more 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. show less

this is astoundingly bad parenting advice. dangerously bad, actually. i was looking forward to reading this and was immediately put off by the super christian bent to it (i just looked and realized it was published by a christian press) but thought i'd just ignore that part. ("Responsible parents want to bring their children up with established spiritual values. They want their kids to have faith, understand the Christian message, and know God intimately.") even as i was reading and show more disagreeing with much of the message, and a lot of the way it was being told, i figured there was some good foundational stuff that i could take from this book for my own parenting. and there is. but i can't get past all of the really terrible things they tell you to do, and how they tell you that if you don't you will be doing "irreparable harm" to your children "by the time they reach high school." example, i agree - you have to take care of yourself if you intend to take care of other people. you have to do some things for yourself, etc. but: "For many unhappy parents and their entitled, demanding children, life becomes a one-way street....Wise parents who find themselves in such a predicament set the model by taking good care of themselves. A Love and Logic parent might say, 'Honey, I know you want me to (help you with your homework; take you to your practice; drive you to the movie). However, I'm sorry to say that taking you places (doing things for you) has put a darkening cloud over my haze of happiness lately. That's sad but true. So I think I'll pass on doing it this time.' This parent will raise respectful, thoughtful children who grow to take good care of themselves, too." really? you want me to help me with your homework but i don't want to, so screw you, kid. i could pull something like this from almost every page that i got through, contradicting something they wrote before. this isn't about "natural consequences" and "raising responsible kids." it's about giving a pass to lazy parents, and generally telling you ways to royally fuck up your kids. show less

This parenting book resonated with me more than any other I’ve read. Its main goal is to help you raise kids who are able to make decisions for themselves in a safe environment at home that will translate well when they’re out of your house. They talk about how helicopter or drill sergeant parents limit kids’ maturity, while consultant parents help their kids learn through natural consequences. The key is empathy while still allowing them to fail.