Explore essential traits for parenting with love and logic. Guide your child towards happiness and success with simplicity and care.
Do you relate to this? Your 13-year-old, who chattered endlessly just about a year ago, now spends hours locked in their room, emerging only for meals? Their laughter and constant storytelling is now replaced with eye rolls and sighs.
You already know you’re going through trying to parent your teen, who seems perpetually angry with you and the world. Not to mention increasingly secretive. But have you ever stopped to think about what your child is going through?
Here’s an overview:
- Hormonal changes and bodies they don’t quite recognise, and therefore feel confused and frustrated.
- Increasingly complex interpersonal relationships with friends and family, and feelings they’re not used to.
- A developing sense of independence that your child is not exactly ready for, but is nonetheless part of their journey towards adulthood.
Obviously, this phase is going to be challenging for both the teens and the grown-ups responsible for their well-being. Parenting with Love and Logic can bring some ease to the process. Love and Logic is a parenting approach that can help you bridge the communication gap between you and your child, develop a better understanding, and ensure that the bond remains strong even in challenging times.
What Is The Love and Logic Parenting Approach?
The Love and Logic approach to parenting turns popular parenting approaches like helicopter (suffocating and overprotective) parenting and drill sergeant (militant and dominating) parenting techniques on their heads.
It focuses on teaching teens to deal with, understand and consider the consequences of their actions within safe limits. At its core, the Love and Logic parenting approach is all about balance.
- The “Love” component focuses on parenting with love and limits. This is what drives you to set and enforce limits. However, do this with empathy and compassion. Make sure they feel valued and heard.
- The “Logic” component involves empowering your teen. It allows teens to make decisions and (safe, affordable) mistakes, so they experience the consequences of their actions. This helps them understand responsibility and be accountable for their decisions.
This method helps teens see how their actions directly affect the quality of their lives. It also teaches them to navigate challenging situations, and even if they make mistakes, they learn to derive learnings from their missteps.
Addressing Real-Life Issues Of Teens
Your child’s teenage years put them under a fair bit of stress and pressure. Some of the real-life issues that teens and parents of teens face revolve around:
- ‘But my friends are doing it!’
How many times has your child come to you with this argument? But did you realise they crave the freedom to do and experience what their peers do? Teens often feel a sense of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). This may clash with your natural instinct to protect your child.
- Social media acceptance
For teens, social media isn't just a platform; it's their window to the world, and an extension of their identity. If you’re active on social media, you probably get it. Teens are under pressure to maintain social media profiles that are engaging, exciting, and make them look like celebrity kids. It isn’t easy and the social pressure they feel is tremendous.
- Increasingly complex relationships
As your child becomes older, their relationships evolve too! They are not just going to the park to play with friends, they might have social pressures that cause them anxiety. These include but aren’t limited to relationships, attending parties and being liked by friends. When things don’t work out in their favour, it impacts their self-worth. And makes them grumpy.
Why And How To Use The Love and Logic Approach
Teens are already having a hard time with bodily changes and all the awkwardness and self-consciousness that go along with these. Alongside that, the quest for independence might result in them distancing from their parents even as they become closer to their peers.
As a result, peer acceptance and approval become very important to the teen, which might result in more disagreements with their parents. Additionally, older teens also start to experience their own sexuality and might start to make or receive sexual advances.
All of this is natural, and although parents need to make their teens aware of the consequences of irresponsible behaviour – sexual or otherwise – you might want to steer clear of the morality argument and focus on the consequences of their actions instead.
When you use the love and logic approach to parenting, you will:
- Give your child advice and guide them on the consequences of various choices
- Allow them to make their own decisions, rather than making choices for them or punishing them for making a choice that you don’t like (or that isn’t good for them)
- Allow them to experience the consequences of their decisions
- Treat them with empathy and compassion as the consequences sink in. (Resist the temptation to say “I told you so”, or to smirk, or ridicule them or to say things like, “that’s what happens when you…”)
- Ask them what they think the solution might be and what learnings they have picked up from the experience
Conclusion
The Love and Logic approach to parenting involves lots of self-control, poker faces, and holding yourself back when you want to dive in and protect your teen from themselves and their poor decisions. However, it is invaluable in teaching teens how the quality of their decisions impacts the quality of their lives.
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