We had the great pleasure of interviewing Dr. Charles Fay from the Love and Logic Institute this past weekend. The full interview was longer than what we were able to air on Sunday so we’ve included the full interview above for your listening (and hopefully learning) pleasure.
What is the Love and Logic approach to raising and educating children?
Good question, here’s how they describe it on their website:
Children learn the best lessons when they’re given a task and allowed to make their own choices (and fail) when the cost of failure is still small. Children’s failures must be coupled with love and empathy from their parents and teachers.
Essentially it comes down to teaching your child how to be a responsible adult by letting your child take age appropriate responsibility every step of the way as they’re growing up.
It’s an outcome’s based philosophy that teaches responsibility not only for the outcome but also the behaviors, actions, thoughts and decisions that led up to that outcome ….. good or bad. By teaching your child healthy, appropriate decision making and responsibility it puts you, as a parent or educator, in more of a guidance and teaching role rather that a continual “law enforcement” position.
Originally created by Jim Fay, Dr. Charles Fay and Dr. Foster Cline it’s an approach that works beautifully because it forces the child not only to take responsibility but engage their brain not to beat the parent ….. but to prevent an outcome that they don’t want.
Too much parenting philosophy in recent years, to both our children’s detriment and our own, has focused around teaching ABOUT negative outcomes but never letting our kids EXPERIENCE the negative outcomes. While this sounds good in theory (who wants to have bad outcomes happen to them – burn your finger, lose a game, fail a test, lose your money, etc.) the reality is that we can’t learn if we don’t fail and you certainly can’t learn responsibility if you don’t first learn that bad things happen if you make bad decisions. For too many years we’ve been trying to shelter our kids in the hopes that they can learn from our wisdom instead of their experiences.
Love and Logic does the opposite …. instead of avoiding the bad things it says let them experience the bad things (part of being a kid and learning) but then insure that they understand what just happened and why (part of being a parent, educator or adult).
Put another way it’s the basic, age old philosophy of ….
“Don’t touch the hot stove.”
Stoves (and fires before them) have been burning people ever since Ug figured out how to rub two sticks (or two rocks – there’s different versions of the story) together and create a flame. About, ten seconds later while Ug was celebrating young Ug went and stuck his hand too close to the flame and burned himself. Thus began the age old battle of keeping kids away from “hot” so they don’t get hurt.
However, Ug knew he couldn’t keep little Ug away from the fire (Ug was a caveman but he was a WISE caveman) so instead he taught little Ug to respect the fire and understand that touching meant burning meant hurting and pain. With this lesson little Ug evolved, stopped burning himself, learned responsibility became and inventor like his Dad and went on to great things …
So is the lesson that you should let your little kids play with the stove?
Of course not, that would be IRRESPONSIBLE parenting and STUPID to boot. However, we have a tendency to go to far the other way ….
The happy medium? Maybe it lies somewhere in between. Maybe you let that child deal with a burned finger (or two) after touching a hot pot or pan when they’re old enough to know better. So that when they’re an adult …
Well, you get the idea.
So “Love and Logic” is about teaching your kids to play with stoves? No.
But “Love and Logic” is about letting your children experience the consequences of their behaviors in a way that hurts a little if it’s suppose to so they don’t become adults who hurt a lot because they never learned.
If you live in Michigan you can catch the Fay’s teaching their “Love and Logic” philosophy this weekend or if you can’t make it Jim Fay will be back again on May 3rd. There’s also a lot of great free information on their website here.
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