When my daughter was younger, I enjoyed reading Love and Logic for parents of young children. I found it helpful for establishing a good relationship with my daughter. And she has become a healthy preteen now. She is socially conscious, in an academic magnet school, and mostly interested in mature things. Importantly, she has become friends with my wife and me. Some of the credit for that goes to the framework the Love and Logic book set in place. With such good past experiences, I approached the teen version of Love and Logic with anticipation. However, after having completed it, I am not as enthusiastic as I was after completing the first book. Let me explain…
First, the good stuff. This book tries to develop teens and preteens into responsible adults by enhancing personal responsibility. As with children, it tries to use natural consequences as the ultimate teacher of life lessons. It encourages parents to stop being benevolent dictators or hover parents that rescue their children incessantly. Instead, it encourages parents to let their children make their own mistakes while forming their own identities, albeit with some guardrails in place to enhance growth.
However, this book falls into the trap of enhancing fear-based thinking too much. It seems like every suggested conversation ends with the fear of drugs, sex, and alcohol. Not enough discussion exists about how to enhance good passions and foster good curiosities in your child’s life. Perhaps this is because the authors counsel troubled teens and families so much. Granted, they explicitly say that all their advice is not for every parent-teen relationship. I’d also like to have seen an appendix of suggested resources, perhaps with varying opinions, for deeper dives into the subject matter.
I’m not sure parenting by fear is the best strategy even if the locus of control is shifted onto the adolescent. Indeed, this religion-friendly strategy unmasks fears beneath common parental admonitions. But because it is fear-based, I am concerned that it does not provide lasting solutions that will easily port into adulthood. While it does a good job at molding a parental role into a consultant, it does not deliberately educate and empower children to make their own decisions about their futures. Perhaps only self-controlled children will benefit from that – i.e., ones that have benefited from making their own decisions. Still, I simply did not learn as much from this book as I did from the earlier Love and Logic version.
Finally, I note that a newer edition came out in 2020. I hope and anticipate that version contains advice about modern smartphones and social media. These are necessary and hot topics.
Parenting Teens with Love and Logic: Preparing Adolescents for Responsible Adulthood
By Foster Cline and Jim Fay
2nd Edition
Copyright (c) 1992, 2006
NavPress
ISBN13 9781576839300
Page Count: 318
Genre: Psychology, Family
www.amazon.com