What is Love and Logic? Love and Logic offers adults an alternative way to communicate with children. No yelling, lecturing, shame, or fingerpointing. L&L starts with empathy. When the child's behavior doesn't match the adult's expectation, the adult doesn't take it personally--she finds a consequence that matches the behavior.
The Love and Logic techniques produce immediate results because the techniques are simple, practical, and easy to learn. The concepts behind Love and Logic place a heavy emphasis on respect and dignity for children and at the same time allows parents to grasp simple approaches instead of learning difficult counseling procedures.
It is a discipline system, a philosophy, or a way of being in the world. It takes some examples to get it. Here's one from a mid-West father.
I returned home from 48 hours on-duty through a picture postcard perfect image of the Rockies with fresh fallen snow to find my playful 11- year-old had taken a pack of snappers (popping firecracker type gizmos) and trashed the garage I had spent four days cleaning.OLD DAD: Race indoors past Christmas tree and loving wife without saying hi to anyone, grab kid, yell a lot, make the boy clean up the mess and stay pissed off all-day. Piss family off at me rest of day.
CHANGING DAD: Say hello to wife, tell her I had a little disappointment and need a bit of quiet alone time, go clean up mess, noting time spent. Look ahead to next Saturday when the child will receive his allowance--minus $5, the time I charge for housekeeping (15 minutes at my $20/hr premium clean-up). The boy comes out to say hello, I say hello. He and friend walk around garage not noticing anything I'm doing, I'm congenial to friend. We all have a good day.
I can also see where this little 1) Observation 2) reaction 3) consequence for DAD is changing for the better when I don't choose to nuke the whole day, the whole mood, the relationships that mean the most to me.
I notice that the old dad response is a longtime multi-generational pattern I can only see now for the first time. I see where EVERYTHING was martyrdom for one of my own parents and EVERYTHING was DONE TO HER--as opposed to just being a kid and forgetting or not placing much priority in the things that meant something to her.
It's hard work making changes at age 50.
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