099 - Book | Parenting with Love and Logic
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Welcome to the Nancy Ray Book Club, where once a month I share a summary of a book worth reading and my top three takeaways from that book. Many of you have joined by 2021 Book Club and are already reading along with me this year. But if you haven't or if you just want to see my list of books I'm reading—I read 12 books a year, one a month—or if you want to join, you can always visit nancyray.com/bookclub, and I would love to have you. It's no pressure. It's come as you are read what you want, but I'm grateful to have you reading alongside me either way.
Today's episode is a recap of the very last book in our 2020 Book Club: Parenting with Love and Logic. We read it in December. It was highly recommended to me by so many friends, and it's already proven to be such a gift in our own family and my own parenting, as I am home a lot with my five-year-old and three-year-old and two-year-old. I hope today's podcast will be super practical and helpful for any moms and dads listening.
For the full episode, hit play above or read through it below!
The first thing I want to do is explain the layout of the book because it was just really unique: there's part one and part two.
Part one is the first 118 pages, and it's an overview of the love and logic philosophy of parenting. It describes what kind of parent you want to be, the three types of parents, what the goal is here, the important use of our words, the right kind of control and consequences and setting boundaries, the right kind of limits we put on our kids, and how to have empathy while enforcing consequences and a lot of little tips and tricks along the way—a really comprehensive, overview of love and logic parenting.
The second part of the book is pages 119 through the end of the book—there are 254 pages in the book—and this goes over the “love and logic pearls” as they call it, which are basically tools or topics that address 48 very specific topics or challenges that we face in parenting, and each Pearl is only about two pages long. So, each of those mini chapters cover these different topics that are kind of pain points for us as moms and dads. And they give very specific examples on how to handle them.
Some of those pearls or topics include getting ready for school homework, when your kid says “I'm bored,” discipline chores, money, when your kid gets too bossy, bedtimes, the internet, stealing, telephone interruptions, whining, and so on—you get the point. These are all the little things that we deal with every single day, again and again, that drive us crazy. We don't always know the tool to use or what to say or how to not totally lose our mind or our temper when dealing with our kids about the same issue for the hundredth time.
I just want to say, I really appreciated this. I appreciated the layout of this book. I've never seen a book laid out quite like this before. I appreciate how practical the examples were. I can't even tell you how many of them I have personally walked through. I think there's even a little pearl on toothbrushing. I mean, there's little things that are a struggle for us parents, and they just explain how to use love and logic parenting to make it work.
Now after explaining kind of the overview of the book, I just want to get into my three big takeaways from parenting, with love and logic.
My first big takeaway is that the whole point of this is that you want to raise good decision-makers.
You want to raise responsible kids, which means they're kids that will eventually turn into teenagers that will eventually turn into adults that can make good decisions and make them on their own. The book opens up with this story about Phil—he is one of the author's sons—and it was such a powerful, heartbreaking story. Honestly, he was a teenager and he really wanted to go to this party that was going to just be the party of parties. You know, so much fun. Everybody who's anybody is going to be there. And he was like, mom, dad, can I take one of your cars?
And his dad said, “I'm sorry, I have a work appointment this evening, my car is unavailable and I'm pretty sure your mom has plans, so you're going to have to find a way to get to this party without using one of our cars,”
and the son replied, “Okay. It's okay. I'm just not going to go.”
And the dad was like, “Well, I mean, why don't you ask your friend to take you because he'll probably go, right? And he has this car.”
and the son responded, “you know, dad, he, he drinks at these parties. He kinda drinks a lot. And I would just probably rather not ride with him. I think I'm just gonna miss out on this one.”
And he was bummed. I mean, this kid was sad and his dad just kind of let him make that decision and said, okay, okay. He didn't try to fix it. He didn't try to do anything. He didn't try to provide a way. He just said, okay, if that's your decision, he let his kid kind of be heartbroken about it. And long story short—so devastating—the young boy who was known to drink at these parties ended up getting drunk and driving himself and several of his friends off a cliff, and they all passed away. I mean, just devastating. I can't imagine the trauma and the feeling and the heaviness that this young man who missed the party went through after that.
But also, gosh, what a good lesson to remember that our kids that are kids at a young age, they're going to face these decisions that are a big deal. It talks a little bit about this in the book that you know, our kids are facing things at a younger age, really heavy, difficult decisions at younger and younger ages, just because more and more is accessible to them.
And so of course, that story leaves an impact on you as a parent, as you're reading this book, but it just illustrates the point that you want to raise good decision-makers. And their point is: when does that start? It starts when your kids are little.
You need to start presenting your child with decisions all the time. Even when they're like two years old, do you want to wear your coat or do you want to carry it? Always keeping in mind that there are decisions that we can present to our kids, and it’s better to do that. A lot of times I think we just want to jump and make the best decision for them and just tell them which way to go, what to do.
But the point is not to think for them.
The point is to help them think for themselves.
So starting at an early age, raising good decision makers, presenting them with a lot of different choices and opportunities, and then giving them the freedom to make them, and then let them experience the consequences of them, whatever they may be.
My second takeaway is that my goal is to be a consultant parent.
We should aim to be consultant parents, and I'll explain what that means. They overview three types of parents.
The first is the helicopter parent.
You've probably heard that term helicopter parents hover over their children. They rescue them from the hostile work world in which they live, you know, not meaning to. I mean, I think I have tendencies to be a helicopter parent. I think we want to protect them. We want to help them. We don't want them to experience pain, but ultimately we're sending our kids messages of weakness, low, personal worth. Like I don't trust you. You can't make this decision on your own. We make excuses for the child. Helicopter parents take on the responsibility of the child, protecting the child, making all their decisions for them and ultimately robbing their child of learning responsibility and learning to make decisions for themselves.
The second type of parent is a drill Sergeant parent.
The drill sergeant parent says, you know: I'm the adult, you're the child. I'm going to command and direct your life because you're the child, you know, without meaning to. I think there again, these parents are loving, but without meaning to they're providing messages of weakness low personal worth, resistance, makes many demands, has lots of expectations, tells the child how he or she should handle things, tells the child how they should feel, issues a lot of orders and takes ownership over all of the problems, never allowing the child again, to think for themselves or learn responsibility themselves.
But the third way of parenting, which is the goal is to be consultant parent.
Consultant parents provides guidance and consultant services for their children, messages of personal worth and strength. And they very seldom mentioned responsibility. I thought it was really interesting. They don't talk about personal responsibility, they model it, they demonstrate it.
They demonstrate how to take care of themselves. They demonstrate their responsibilities. They make them feel fulfilling and model that they're fun. And consultant parents also share their feelings about their own responsibilities. They share their feelings about their feelings. They provide help. They're available to their kids to explore alternatives, but then they allow the child to make his or her own decision.
They release and allow the kid to make the decision. They also teach time boundaries. They provide timeframes in which the child may complete their responsibilities. Ultimately though, the consultant parent wants to model a beautiful, really well-balanced, healthy life and lifestyle and allow the child to kind of catch on to that. That's the goal.
You want to be someone that your kid will turn to when it's time to make a tough decision, not someone who rescues your child all the time by being a helicopter parent or bosses their kid around by being the drill sergeant parent. I just thought it was really good verbiage and good analogies to explain just a healthy kind of parent—that you want to be a consultant parent.
Okay, My third takeaway is that more is caught than taught.
And this kind of goes back to what I was just saying about a consultant parent, being a model of healthy whole person and lifestyle. You know this point, more is caught than taught, you've heard that before: more is caught than taught. We hear it all the time, but truly then just kind of drove that home in this book. And honestly it was so encouraging and empowering for me, just to be confident in my parenting and to be confident in the importance of taking care of myself.
Now, I think a lot of times we deal with mom guilt or feeling bad about taking time to work out or set boundaries for ourselves. We just want to serve our kids over and over, but taking care of myself as the kind of example that I want to give to my daughters and my son. I want them to see that. I want to model good behavior and wise choices and not losing my temper and a good attitude and taking responsibility.
They give a few examples. One of them in the book was like, when you're teaching your kid to clean a room: What does your room look like? And I just thought, Oh man, that is, that is killer. Cause right now my room was a total wreck, you know, but they just said, just think about that. Like if you're trying to teach your kids to eat healthy or not consume a lot of media or have a clean room, are you eating healthy? Are you sitting in front of the TV all the time? Or, you know, looking at your phone all the time, are you keeping your room tidy and then talking about how good it feels to be responsible for your things and your space?
I just thought, you know, it was convicting, but it was good. More is caught than taught. Focus on living the life you want to live and know that your kids are going to see that.
So instead of trying to teach them or control them or tell them how to live, model the behavior, give them choices and let life do the rest of the teaching because that's going to stick with them faster and help them make better decisions.
All in all, I love this book. There's a lot of other things I could tell you about or talk about, but I'm just trying to keep it concise to these three points. But I told, Will: this is on your must read list for 2021. You’ve got to read it so we can be on the same page because that's super important.
It has helped me gain confidence as a mom, it's given me answers to some very specific situations I've not known how to handle or deal with, and it reminded me that the most important thing I can do as a mama is to focus on being the best mama I can be, because ultimately they're just looking at me and they're looking at Will to model their little lives after, and that was such a good one.
I'm going to close with words from Foster Cline, one of the co-authors of love and logic who said:
“Effective parenting centers around love, love that is not permissive, love that doesn't tolerate disrespect, but also, love that is powerful enough to allow kids to make mistakes and permit them to live with the consequences for those mistakes.”
Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time.
