Using effective limits – 2 parenting book reviews

“If children were meant to run the home, they would have been born larger.”

When most parents think of discipline, I’m guessing that they think in terms of control and dominance and not so much of partnership, empathy, and choices.  I have always been an advocate of attachment/connection parenting.  Until very recently, I thought that meant lots of listening and time with their child and (subsequently, in our case,) not much child adherence to rules or respectful behavior.  It turns out that there’s an excellent way to be firm and set expectations for behavior and still be loving and calm.  Special thanks to our daughter’s play therapist for her guidance.

I’ve read two excellent parenting books this month.  The quotation above comes from Jim Fay from Parenting With Love And Logic by Foster Cline and Jim Fay.  The Love and Logic method in a nutshell: “Adults must set firm, loving limits using enforceable statements without showing anger, lecturing, or using threats. The statements are enforceable because they deal with how we will respond. When a child causes a problem, the adult shows empathy through sadness and sorrow and then lovingly hands the problem and its consequences back to the child.”   They offer 48 “pearls” that are “guides to building self-concept, separating problems, neutralizing anger and arguments, using thinking words and enforceable statements, offering choices, and locking in our empathy before our kids face the consequences of their mistakes.”

The second book I read is Out of Control: Why Disciplining Your Child Doesn’t Work and What Will by Dr. Shefali Tsabary.  Just as with the Love and Logic approach, Tsabary says that “research has verified that punitive techniques carry long-lasting detrimental consequences.” Punishment and teaching are opposites.  In addition, Tsabary has some important lessons to share about our own unconscious emotional and reactive patterns.

Firm, enforceable limits

Both approaches suggest avoiding being a helicopter parent or a drill sergeant.  Instead, they try to help parents set firm, enforceable limits by behaving sort of like a consultant, asking questions, offering choices, establishing options within limits.  With Love and Logic,“We set those limits based on the safety of the child and how the child’s behavior affects others. Then we must maintain those limits to help children understand that they are responsible for their actions and will suffer reasonable consequences for actions that are inappropriate. However, while the parents are drawing and holding these limits, it is important for them to continue encouraging their children to think about their behavior and help them feel in control of their actions by giving choices within those limits.”

“Love and Logic parents insist on respect and obedience, just as command-oriented parents do. But when Love and Logic parents talk to their children, they take a different approach. Instead of the fighting words of command-oriented parents, they use thinking words. Thinking words — used in question form and expressed in enforceable statements — are one of the keys to parenting with Love and Logic. They place the responsibility for thinking and decision making on the children. They help kids do exactly what we want them to do — think — as much as possible.”

Here’s why it works: kids believe themselves.  If they are the one who gets to decide something and if they know that they have made a choice themselves, there is no other option but to carry on.  No external authority figure is making the choice for them, so resistance disappears.

Here are some examples of “thinking questions” I have used lately (and their opposite “fighting words”):

• “Do you prefer me to check on you in 8 minutes or 10 minutes?” At bedtime, it can be hard for my daughter to lay quietly in bed and fall asleep.  Knowing that I am coming to check on her helps, but offering this choice and her making the decision makes it seem that she has decided to stay in bed all by herself.  We have quickly moved from me laying with her until she falls asleep to her falling asleep on her own. (I do not say, “Stay in your room! It’s bedtime!”)
• “Would you like to put on your socks and shoes first or use the restroom first?” We have a sentence that gets said multiple times each weekday morning with varying degrees of emotion, “I don’t want to go to school!” Somehow, offering this choice stops the resistance and my daughter runs off to take care of whatever she decided to do first, followed immediately by the other option, without me asking her to do that too. (Fighting words: “It’s time to go! Hurry up! Get your shoes on now!”)
• “I need you to be a little quieter.  Would you prefer to play here quietly or go play in your room?” (As opposed to, “Be quiet! I’m trying to work here!”)
• “I would be happy to wash whatever laundry is in your hamper.” (Fighting words: “Your clothes are all over the house! Why can’t you pick up after yourself?”) You’d be surprised how everything gets put in the right place with this method.  Dishes are in the sink or she can’t have a new one.  Toys are put away or they go in “toy time out.” And dirty clothes are in the hamper.

You can even imagine what your own reactions would be to the two different ways of asking for compliance.  I am setting the exact same limit, but my daughter’s reaction is usually different depending on which kind of words I use. “Kids fight against commands. They see an implied threat in them. When we tell them to do something, they see our words as an attempt to take control of the situation. Anytime we usurp more control, it means that they have less control. They exert themselves to regain the control they see slipping away.”

There are a few caveats the authors give.  Give only two choices, both of which are fine with you, but make sure the child knows that if they don’t decide, you will decide for them.  (And so my daughter had a peanut butter sandwich for dinner that she made herself!) Next time, they can have the opportunity to make a choice again.  Also, and very important, you must use a calm delivery.  Showing frustration, anger, or any weakness/emotion at all takes away the effectiveness.  If the child is upset, show true empathy.  “I know it’s hard… but the choice is…”

Another reason giving choices works is that they provide opportunities for children to make their own mistakes and learn from the consequences. “With every wrong choice the children make, the punishment comes not from us but from the world around them. Then children don’t get angry at us; they get angry at themselves.”  Choices also “help us avoid getting into control battles with our children. Finally, choices provide our children with opportunities to hear that we trust their thinking abilities, thus building their self-confidence and the relationship between us and them.”

Natural consequences

“The best solution to any problem lies within the skin of the person who rightfully owns the problem.”  Parents need not worry about kids completing their homework; your job is to give them the opportunity to do it.  The rest is on them.  The same goes for forgetting their school lunch, leaving a toy behind on a play date, or many other things.  Empathize with their situation and then ask, “What are you going to do about it?” Chances are, their bad grade, empty stomach, or lost toy will only happen once.

I especially love Tsabary’s section in Out of Control on allowing consequences to do their job.  Rather than a made-up and unrelated consequence, like no tv if the child doesn’t clean his room, she advocates for natural consequences.  “A consequence is something that’s automatically built into a situation without us having to “do” anything at all. The moment we imagine we have to “give” our child a consequence, which requires us to think of one, we have moved into the realm of punishment. Consequences are natural, which means they are directly connected to the situation at hand. You might say they are inbuilt. All that’s required of the parent is to allow the consequence to take effect.”

For example, last week my daughter was tardy for school for the first time because she was whining (that same repeating refrain again) and taking forever to get out the door.  She was embarrassed by being tardy and I’m fairly certain she won’t ever let that happen again.  For my part in the situation… all I had to do was empathize with her after school that being tardy is indeed embarrassing and then brainstorm ways she can streamline her morning routine.  I am being helpful, not punitive.  I didn’t have to say “I told you to hurry” or punish her in any way.  “Our focus is always on helping our children respond to the consequences of their actions by developing better life skills out of their own resourcefulness, aided by our encouragement and guidance.”

“Natural consequences are always consistent: touch a hot stove and you get burned. Whenever something is imposed instead of organic, it will never work in the long run. Artificial “consequences” don’t teach the child about real life since the consequences aren’t those of real life but are instead idiosyncratically determined by the parent.” Honestly, I am using this all the time now and it has been wonderful.  Wake mommy up in the middle of the night? She’s too tired to play with you tomorrow.  Ask for something with a whiney voice? You won’t get what you want.  Leave laundry around the house and not in the hamper? It doesn’t get washed.  I barely have to say a word!

With Love and Logic, “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 of those mistakes. Most mistakes do have logical consequences. And those consequences, when accompanied by empathy — our compassionate understanding of the child’s disappointment, frustration, and pain — hit home with mind-changing power.”

Let’s say your child messed up somehow.  Using the Love and Logic method, we don’t get angry and we don’t punish.  We show empathy for them and let the situation’s consequences teach by themselves.  “Parents should let their kids know how much they love them and how badly they feel about their decision and their problem as the result of it as soon as it happens.” We are on their side! “Kids need to know we will be with them through it all but that we will not take away any of their responsibility in the process.”

“In this way they become self-regulating. In contrast, when we manipulate, we end up with children who can’t self-regulate and who therefore in turn manipulate us by lying, cheating, sabotaging their potential with drugs or excessive alcohol use, or becoming utterly apathetic, not caring about anything.” Nobody wants that!

On Emotions – ours and theirs

Just as with Tsabary’s other book, The Conscious Parent: Transforming Ourselves, Empowering Our Children, she points out that children have a way of bringing up our own unresolved childhood emotions. “Our subconscious patterns hold tremendous energy. This energy causes us to create an atmosphere our children react to.”  Tsabary believes that “all conflict with our children originates with our own internal subconscious conflicts.”

Sometimes a child’s negative behavior can trigger anger or embarrassment in a parent.  The process of allowing any kind of emotion to come up, pausing to recognize it, and then responding calmly is what Tsabary describes in The Conscious Parent. “If a parent puts out the kind of vibes that welcome feelings, even when the feelings are difficult to tolerate, the child picks up on this, eventually learning how to manage their feelings in a healthy manner.”

“A child’s behavior is just the expression of their needs, which fall into two categories: connection and learning… Instead of reacting emotionally, the parent needs to calmly decipher the meaning behind the behavior and shift from the content of the child’s eruption. The key is that the parent remain centered, not thrown off balance by the remark, so they can gently probe for the real issue.”

This is the crux of what was happening in my house. In our case, our daughter was asking for limits through her behavior and anxiety.  “If a child’s behavior toward us is inappropriate, it’s the child’s way of expressing the need for one of two things: connect with me, or contain me. Unfortunately, what tends to happen is the opposite: when our boundaries are crossed, we then invade our child’s boundaries.  When our children are rude, disrespectful, hit us, or bite, the issue is always one of inadequate limits. Either the child is starving for connection and angry about it, or the parent has failed to establish adequate boundaries and the child feels free to violate the parent’s personhood.” 

“The important thing to realize is that boundaries aren’t established by mere words but are formed at an energetic level. How we carry ourselves, how we treat ourselves, who we surround ourselves with, and what we allow speak far more loudly than our insistence that our children “respect” us.”

Her main point: allow a child to feel his emotions.  Period.  Maybe your child is similar to mine in that sometimes she is afraid of things that make no sense, like worrying there’s going to be a flood or an attack of killer spiders while she’s asleep.  When we say to her, “No silly, that won’t happen.  You have nothing to worry about,” we are discrediting her fear.  “When our children express their fears, we need to align with them, not resist them. When we resist them, their fears get blown out of proportion because now our children feel alone in their anxiety… our children are trying to show us they feel unsafe and ill-equipped to handle a scary world. They are asking us to help them make sense of how they fit into a frightening scenario and to give them tools to do so. When we tell them there are no monsters, we contradict what they are feeling.”

So I try to listen, reiterate what it is she fears to make sure I understand it, and then tell her it does sound scary when she thinks of it that way.  Then we look at the evidence together of something like that happening, both coming to the conclusion that we are perfectly safe.

Many of us don’t know how to tolerate feelings, our own or our children’s.  It is difficult to see your child experience sadness, but when we insert ourselves into the situation to make it better (with ice cream/by calling someone’s parent or a teacher) we are interfering with the natural development of their abilities and resourcefulness.  Tsabary states that “by focusing on the unearthing of a child’s potential within a safe and nurturing environment, we honor the fact that every child holds within them the wisdom required for their own growth.”

Also in Love and Logic do emotions cause trouble.  A parent cannot change the child without first focusing on themselves.  Parents need to take care of their own needs or Love and Logic will not work for them. “Unless parents who have continually dealt with their kids in anger in the past deal with defusing that anger first, they are still likely to fall back into that pattern every time they consequence their kids. In Love and Logic, parents lead. If we want our kids to have self-control, then we must model it in front of them. If we want our kids to be responsible, then we must model that responsibility in dealing with them. If we want our kids to treat us and speak to us with respect, in addition to demanding it by our actions, we must treat and speak to them with respect. That is the parenting with Love and Logic two-step — first the parent, then the child.”

“Honoring feelings is about being aligned with our child’s holistic development, not necessarily with their whims at a particular moment. To discern whether you are honoring feelings, ask yourself: What does my child need from me at this moment to thrive? Does my child need me to say “yes” or to say “no?” What will allow my child to develop self-awareness and self-regulation?  The only way parents can honor their children’s feelings is by first honoring their own. Only when we are out of touch with our own feelings, divorced from our spirit, are we unable to enter the feeling world of our children.”

“To honor our child’s feelings is bedrock to effective parenting because it’s where connection is established. If a child doesn’t feel connected to us, our presence in their space immediately generates tension in them. They don’t see us as a partner and don’t sense we’ve come into their room in the spirit of an alliance. To them it feels like the two of us are worlds apart. Because they experience no meaningful connection with us, when we ask them to do a chore, it’s as if they are being ordered to do something by a drill sergeant—or worse, an enemy. This is why they either ignore our instructions or, if pressed enough, retaliate. When we react by punishing them, it reinforces their perception of us as their adversary, which results in increased hostility toward us.”

Conclusion

Both of these excellent books were transformative for me and I highly recommend them.  They guide parents toward what we already want for their kids: a sense of responsibility, of right and wrong, and a path toward multiple kinds of self-fulfillment and success.

“Parenting with Love and Logic is all about raising responsible kids. It’s a win-win philosophy. Parents win because they love in a healthy way and establish control over their kids without resorting to the anger and threats that encourage rebellious teenage behavior. Kids win because they learn responsibility and the logic of life by solving their own problems. Thus, they acquire the tools for coping with the real world.”

If you’d like to read an article with similar advice, try this one by Janet Lansbury from Elevating Child Care.  In May, my friend Amy is leading a month-long discussion on Goodreads about Tsabary’s book The Conscious Parent and on mindful parenting. Find out all about it here.

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I sincerely hope this post was helpful in some way.  These are my own experiences and opinions and I do not intend to tell anyone how to parent their own children.  I think these two books have lessons that apply to everyone and I encourage you to read them cover to cover!