Help! My 9 yr old Quits Every Sport

  Question:  I have a nine year old who wants to quit every sport we try.  In 5 years we have tried 6 sports.  When they get hard or he isn’t great at it, he wants to quit.  He is now trying gymnastics, with the potential to be very good at it.  He is ready [...]

My Child Doesn’t Care About the Consequence

Question: Is it better to have the same consequence for a certain bad choice, or to switch things up?  I always hear “consistency, consistency, consistency”.  For example, if my 5 year old does not help during “tidy time” before bed, he gets no books read to him.  There are some nights where he doesn’t care [...]

How Enforceable Statements Work for Picking Up Toys!

Thank you Megan for sharing this success story about using “I will”  enforceable statements…… I needed my 2.5 yr old daughter to pick up her toys.  She ignored me so I said “I only read stories to girls who pick up their toys.”  She still didn’t do it and got distracted putting on dress up gloves. [...]

How to Stay Calm When Your Kid Says, “I Hate You!”

Amy shares how using her new parenting skills were effective in dealing with her son…. My 12 year old son, Matthew, had been treating his younger sister poorly by ignoring her and talking down to her.  After setting a limit on his behavior, I had to send him to his room.   I used my empathy [...]

Off to School on Time

  Young teens, Maggie and Marcy, were on mom’s last nerve. They couldn’t seem to get themselves going in the morning. Getting them out of bed was like pulling teeth. Since mom drove them to school on her way to work, waiting for them caused her to be late for work several times. Mom finally [...]

What’s Worthwhile is Rarely Easy

Did your parents have pet phrases that drove you nuts as a kid? My pop had many. “For crying-out loud!” was his second most favorite. “When I was a kid …” came in a close third.   Believe it or not, neither of these had a profound impact on my life, although I do use [...]

Let Kids Learn From Little Mistakes

I love this success story because it shows how staying calm and allowing your daughter to learn from little mistakes leads to self esteem. “I did it by myself!”….  My 2.5 year old daughter took off her shoes in a restaurant before we noticed. I asked her to put them back on and my husband warned her to put [...]

Dad Withdraws From the Son’s Choice Account

Choices work with kids because you’re sharing power.  Every “effective” choice you give puts deposits in kids power accounts.  An often overlooked “Guideline for Giving Effective Choices” taught in the Love and Logic parenting courses is the “withdrawal from the account.”  Here is a great story of a dad who used this skill with his 9 [...]

Empathy Before Consequences

I love this story of  a dad in my class who didn’t miss a beat using his new empathetic statement “Oh man!” before delivering the consequence. Noticed how he stayed calm by reinforcing it with his brain dead statement,  “I know.” ____________________________________________________ My wife, 4 year old son, and I went to the beach.  When [...]

I’m Not Going To Kiss You Anymore

We always discuss in class about kids who will escalate to test the new skills mom and dad are using.  It’s the old “short term pain for long term gain” adage.  This mom thought it would be something only older kids would do, but preschoolers know how to escalate with hurtful words too.  Luckily, this [...]

Brain Dead Works With 3 Year Olds

This mom shares her success story using the  brain dead statement “I know” over and over again….. My 3 year old didn’t want any of the two choices I gave him for breakfast, so I picked one for him.  He was not happy and kept throwing a fit.   I empathetically used “I know” about six or [...]

What’s Your Plan?

I was so tickled today when my 13 yr old son yelled up from the basement after he got home from school, “Mom, do you want to hear my plan?” Yes, I did, in fact.  I have been asking him this same question for over a year, everyday, when he gets home from school “What’s [...]

Great Step-parents are Consultants

I’m often asked the following question by step-parents:   “When can I begin to start disciplining my step-children when they misbehave?”   Here’s my response:   It’s more a matter of how we discipline than when we ought to begin.   Successful step-parents understand that the Love and Logic Consultant style of parenting allows them [...]

When Preschoolers Get Frustrated

Have you ever noticed how frustrated many small children get when they try to do something “big” and it doesn’t work out?   One parent commented to me, “Every time my three-year-old has trouble putting on her socks, reaching the soap in the bathroom, getting her zipper zipped, or anything else, she throws a huge [...]

Potty Training Using Joyful Modeling

(reprinted from Janada Clark, Clear Path Coaching) Many parents seem to struggle with the issue of potty training. Feeling the pressure from family members and friends that their child should be trained “by now.” These well meaning but misguided judgements can undermine your confidence as a parent and leave you feeling you are somehow lacking [...]

Sibling Rivalry with Twins

(reprinted from Janada Clark, Clear Path Coaching) Here is a story of a Dad that showed great creativity in the use of the Energy Drain tool. Who would of thought of sending a picture through email of the good time his daughter was MISSING because of her misbehavior? He did and more. Also notice how [...]

Threats

I last wrote about a mother whose primary parenting technique with her daughter was the use of warnings and threats about pushing her child-sized shopping cart into her sister. Her daughter didn’t respond, but continued her behavior. It’s easy and convenient to threaten in the hopes that it will work. And occasionally it actually does. [...]

Make Them Part Of The Family

I last wrote about the importance of kids contributing to the workload of the family. One of our basic human needs is to be needed and to be a part of a family. When children live their lives as guests in a four star hotel instead of as a contributing member of a family, this [...]

Four Tips for Soothing Sibling Rivalry

Why is sibling rivalry such a perplexing issue for so many parents? Simply because we can’t make our kids love each other. That’s completely out of our control.   Listed below are just a few of the many things we can control: 1. Whether we do extra things for kids who are battling with each other.  [...]

When You Have No Control

  There are three areas of our kids’ lives over which we wished we had total control. These include: • Input…what goes into their body and when. • Output…what goes out of their body and when. • Between the ears…what they think, believe and learn. When it comes to what a child eats, when and where they poop, [...]

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