Parenting with love and logic.

‘If you want to raise children who are self-confident, motivated and ready for the real world, take advantage of the win-win approach to parenting. Your children will win because they’ll learn responsibility and the logic of life by solving their own problems. And you’ll win because you’ll establish healthy control-without resorting to anger, threats, nagging or exhausting powerstruggles. Parenting with love and logic puts the fun back into parenting.’

Where does the term love and logic come from? 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 children to make mistakes and permit them to live with the consequenses of those mistakes. Most mistakes do have logical consequenses. And those consequenses, when accompanied by empathy-our compassionate understanding of the child’s disappointment, frustration and pain-hit home with mind-changing power.

Parenting with love and logic is not a foolproof system that works every time. No system can promise that. But it is a system that has a strong chance of working in most situations. Parents will find succes using the love and logic attitude. Once the attitude is mastered, handling most problems becomes second nature, even when a particular problem has not been explored. The approach is more of an attitude that will allow our children to grow in maturity as they grow in years. It will teach them to think, to decide, and to live with their decisions. In short, it will teach them responsibility. If we can teach our children responsibility, we’ve accomplished a great portion of our parental task.

The Bible provides insight on many parenting issues. Much of what it teaches is summarized beautifully in a familiar Old Testament proverb:
‘Train children in the right way, and when old, they will not stray.’ (Proverbs 22:6)
What greater gift can parents give their children than the opportunity for a joyful, productive, and responsible adult life? We believe the principles of Parenting with love and logic will help achieve that result. (From the introduction of Parenting with love and logic.)