Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Book Review: Love and Logic

With Baby Comfort on the way, I have started reading some books to get prepared (as much as I can). I just finished reading Love and Logic - Practical Parenting from Birth to Six Years and I thought it was outstanding. The father and son team of Jim Fay and Charles Fay do a fantastic job of laying out the fundamentals of this parenting style they have deemed "Love and Logic".
The offer simple steps that are easy to remember and lots of examples of these methods.

Basically there are 2 rules that they unpack:
#1 Take care of yourself by setting limits in a loving way
- Act without frustration or anger
- Stop using threats and repeated warnings
- Set a limit once
- Make statements you can enforce
- Give kids a healthy sense of control
#2 Turn every mistake or misbehavior into a learning opportunity
- Always provide a strong dose of empathy before delivering a consequence
- Replace punishment with logical consequences
- When possible, show your child how to solve his/her own problems
The rest of the book provides explanation of these two principals, lots of information and plenty of examples. They also give experiments for parents to try, sort of easing parents into these concepts.
All in all, I thought this is a great book and I already planning on how to use these strategies in my own parenting style. I would highly recommend this book to any parent, grandparent, aunt or uncle, or anyone who is around kids.

1 comment:

Candice said...

Thanks for the reminder of this amazing book. I am ready to pull my copy off the of the bookshelf for a refresher course. We all need an energy boost and reminder once in awhile. This will do just the trick!

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