The Voice In Their Head - AKA: My Parent Is So Smart

When we got together Natalie mentioned how important it was for our kids to develop the ability to tell themselves no. If you remember we went on to talk about how our kids need to hear their own voice in their head telling that some things are a bad idea. This was all excellent thinking on our parts as parents. We don't want our kids to only stop doing things because they hear us say no, they need to experience the consequences of bad decisions enough that they stop themselves from bad decisions themselves, rather than waiting for us to do it. We wont always be around.

I found an excellent Love and Logic handout on the Love and Logic page that addresses this specifically. It is called, "My Parent is so Smart." Here is the link to the whole article, but I will summarize it here.

You begin by stopping yourself from saying, "Don't do that." Instead say in a very calm, almost sing-song voice something like, "Oh, I don't think I would do that." Then go on to say what you think might happen. An example that I had today was I said, "I don't think I would switch to that sprayer (on the faucet when rinsing dishes), it could end up making a much bigger mess to clean up because of the splatter it creates."

The next part is hard, you don't remind (or threaten) about what is going to happen. Let them go ahead and do it. Hope that they do and that it turns out poorly. Then when what you predicted would happen, does in fact happen, you have just set yourself up as a genius. What comes last is key, though. Greet the child with empathy rather than rubbing it in their face. It might feel good to say, "I told you so." But if you do, then they are mad at you, and the learning experience is gone.

If you enjoyed the article I linked to, there are many more available at the Love and Logic website under the parent handouts.

Friends

     When we met we discussed our different strategies involving friends. We all agreed that who are kids are friends with is one of the most important things to us. Our discussion centered around the feeling that bad friend choices were just too important that we couldn't give that control over to our kids. The Love and Logic literature does advocate releasing that control, and instead trying to help our kids navigate their choices. Jim Faye says, "One of the biggest mistakes we parents make is getting into a control battle with our kids over who their friends are. We'll lose that one every time. Because we can't win that battle, we should keep our mouths shut and take a different tack. We should concentrate on the areas we can control." 

      We have always told our kids that they are welcome to bring anyone over to our house as long as they teach their friends how to treat their siblings well. We won't have friends over that aren't nice to younger siblings. I'm still going to stick with that. We don't let our kids go over to kids houses that we don't know, or aren't sure of what type of influence they will be. I'm not going to change that because there are just too many things out there I don't want them exposes to.  Love and Logic suggests that you tell your kids that you can pick friends we approve of and then play with those friends at our house, or pick friends we don't approve of and then not be allowed to bring them over. 

       Another important thought that Jim Faye has is that if we communicate that we don't like our kids friend choices, we are saying that we are afraid that the attitudes, beliefs, or habits of their friends will rub off on them. It tells them that they can't do their own thinking. I can see how this could be a pretty damaging message. He says that ultimately can make the friends more exciting and desirable. I can see how this could be true. He instead advocates having a dialogue with your child where you express a desire that some of your child rubs off on the other kids. Explaining that you hope they will be a good influence on them. 

     I think a great solution is if all our kids are just friends with each other! I can't wait to hear more about what you all think about this topic. 

Money

Money and how our kids handle it isn't something that we discussed, but it has such great opportunities for us as parents I think it would be great to share what Love and Logic has to say about kids and money. I'm going to share six thoughts that the Parenting Teens with Love and Logic book shares, then what I'm thinking about them. This is from page 252 if you want to read more about it yourself.

1. Children do not earn their allowances.  (...being paid for chores robs them of the dignity of holding up their fair share of the family workload...) 
2. Provide the allowance at the same time every week.
3. Never insist that children save the allowance.
4. Allow children to spend, save, give, or waste the money any way they see fit.
5. A teen's allowance should be enough to cover most regular activities, but not much more than that. 
6. When it's gone, it's gone. 

I think managing money is a great thing for our kids to learn how to do. I haven't at all done it the way Love and Logic suggests, and I don't see myself changing right now. But if you don't have a money system already, this would be a great way to start. In our house we don't do allowances. Our kids do chores because that is the expectation, and we don't pay for just being a member of the house. A couple of times my husband has tried out giving allowances, but we are terrible about remembering and having cash. So we totally fail at the same time every week thing, and we forget why we were even doing it. Our two older kids do have opportunities to earn money, and it has been a great experience for them to work on managing it. Our family rule is whatever they earn they can keep 50% to do with whatever they want. 10% goes to tithing and 40% goes to saving. They do complain about this,  but we have just always done it and they go along with it. When our second oldest got a job mowing lawns this summer he suddenly had much more money than he had ever had before. He has been spending it pretty liberally. Soon he is going to run out and the lawn mowing will be over for the season and I think a "significant learning opportunity" will arise. 

Homework

Christine's story about the epic homework battle they had at their house the first week of school was a great spring board for all of us when we started talking about one of our greatest frustrations with our kids. Maybe we should get together and start a school where there is no homework, like we discussed. Since that isn't an option. I thought I would review some of the ideas of Love and Logic for for us regarding homework.

Starting off, remember the basic rules of Love and Logic.

1. Adults must set firm, loving limits using enforceable statements without showing anger, lecturing, or using threats.
2. 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.

The way I see it, the biggest thing to remember is that our kid's homework is their problem. We can't make them do it, we can just let them experience the consequences of not doing it. Our job is to provide them with the opportunity to do their homework. 

I appreciate that Foster Cline says that there is nothing wrong with parents helping their kids with their homework. We should only do that if they ask for it, and as long as it is profitable. He says when we start to become irritated, we have helped enough.  

I think applying the rule of not working any harder than your child is works well for homework. We need to make sure that our kids homework is their problem. Love and Logic teaches that if we worry about something, our kids won't need to. We need to let the worry for homework rest where it belongs, on the student. 

Food Fights

My very first ever battle with a child was my first day of being a parent and it was trying to get my brand new little baby to nurse. So it shouldn't surprise me that 13 years and 4 kids into parenting, food is still sometimes an issue. One night Andrew got up from the table and grabbed his ipad. I was irritated until he flipped it around and started playing the music video Eat It. Our kids did lots of eye rolling, but as parents it was a great moment. We get so tired of food drama. Here is the link to Eat It if you want to play it for your kids. It is pretty fun!

We can apply Love and Logic techniques easily to our dinner time drama. Love and Logic offers the following responses to common problems at dinner.

Problem 1: Child doesn't like what is served? No problem, the next meal will be served.

Problem 2: Child didn't eat, so then they raid the pantry and eat snacks. No problem, the food served at the meal is free. The snacks you just ate cost you money. Feel free to pay in money or toys.

Problem 3: Child is fussing at the table, or has bad table manners. No problem, child is removed from the table and can finish their dinner alone somewhere.


I have come up with a plan for our family to deal with a problem we are having. My kids are messy eaters. I get tired of asking kids to lean over, not spill, and generally not be pigs. So the plan now is whoever has the messiest space at the end of the meal, cleans up the whole table. This doesn't replace the job for the person who clears the table, it is just wiping down the table, chairs and sweeping the floor. I'll let you know how it goes.

Mistakes = Opportunities

           When we all got together, we talked about how we have plenty of problems ourselves, we don't need to take on our kids problems. I wanted to address this further. Love and Logic has two basic rules. These two rules are gold. They are:

1. Adults must set firm, loving limits using enforceable statements without showing anger, lecturing, or using threats. 
2. 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. 

       I talked in the first blog post about anger. I've been reading more on the Orange Rhino site and I love it. There are so many great strategies to help through when you get angry so you don't yell. The next step after not getting angry, is to figure out how to let your child own their own problem. That is how to move something from a problem to, as Love and Logic calls it, a "significant learning opportunity." (a SLO)

       Sometimes it is easy to come up with how to make a learning opportunity happen. A child forgets their homework, instead of getting mad at them and then rescuing them by taking it to school for them, they deal with the consequences of not having their homework at school. Other times it is a little harder to come up with the logical consequence of something your child did. If a child doesn't clean up something we ask, we are faced with a choice. Get mad at them or find a way to make it the kids problem. I love the idea of doing the job for them, or having another child do the job and then they have to reimburse me or the other child for our labor.

       As some of us are entering the age where our kids will be out at night doing things with friends, I like that now thanks to Love and Logic I have a plan to deal with curfew. We discussed this on Saturday, but I thought I would write it down for us to refer to later and refresh ourselves.

       The plan for our family will be that there is not a curfew. We will have a quick discussion with our kid about what time to expect them home based on the activity for the night. If there is a change in the activity or location we expect communication. A text is fine, but they need to expect a response text verifying that what they have proposed as a new location and/or time is acceptable. If our child will be home after we go to bed, we will be setting an alarm on our phone, which will be on our dresser. When the child comes home, before the alarm, they will quietly come in and turn it off. If the alarm wakes us we of course have to deal with a broken agreement. The child will soon find out that the next time they make evening plans, we can't let them go. We need our sleep, and because we can't trust them to be home in time to turn off the alarm, they just won't be able to go out this evening.

It is going to be fun to watch how we all navigate this. It sure feels good to be doing it proactively, and in a way that is less stressful. There is something very freeing about hoping your kid makes a mistake so that they can learn from it! Thanks for going along this journey with me ladies!

Anger

Good morning moms! Thanks again so much for joining me on Saturday. What a fun time. It is going to be great for all of us to focus together on proactively parenting. One of the suggestions in Love and Logic is if you don't have a good consequence for something your kid does, to tell them you will get back to them later. Then you talk with other people to get some suggestions. We can be those people for each other. You are welcome to comment here, or we all might see if faster if we ask each other on Facebook. I'd be happy to create a Facebook group for us. We could make it a private one since a few of us have kids old enough to have Facebook accounts.

One thing that seemed to be very common for all of us was dealing with anger and when our kids, "push our buttons." Jenne mentioned the Orange Rhino" website. Here is a link to it if you haven't seen it before.

Here is an excerpt from Parenting Teens With Love and Logic. It applies easily to any age of kids:

"The nice thing about teenagers is that if we don't properly apply a Love and Logic principle today, they're certain to give us another opportunity tomorrow. Sometimes it helps to say to yourself over and over just before you fall asleep at night, When I get angry, I'm going to whisper. When I get angry, I'm going to whisper." 

I thought that this went perfectly with the "Orange Rhino" concept. We just have to take charge of our own emotions. We will be much better models for our kids, and their behavior will be better. It is the ultimate win-win.

The Love and Logic teen book lists three principals pertaining to dealing with our anger. They are:

• Principal 1: If it's not an emergency, it doesn't have to be handled right then. So we can say to our teens, "Unlucky for you, I"m angry. Lucky for you, I'm not going to talk to you about it until tomorrow."
• Principal 2: Generally speaking, the angrier you are, the more important it is to lower your voice.
• Principal 3: Talk it over with other people before you decide what to do. The consequence is usually better if it comes after both you and the teen have entered the "thinking state" after leaving the "emotional state."

Although this material comes from the teen book, the principals are the same in the original Parenting with Love and Logic book. I know for me, this applies to my little kids (specifically the 7 year old) far more than my actual teen. It seems as if we all have one that pushes us a little more than the others. 

The next topic we talked about that I will write about is how to help kid's mistakes be their opportunities.