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A review by morgan3wade
Parenting Teens with Love and Logic: Preparing Adolescents for Responsible Adulthood by Foster Cline, Jim Fay
1.0
This book has many 5 star reviews and I honestly cannot figure out why. It opens with a story about a woman tricking her son into thinking he’s going to jail and tells the officer to put him in with pedophiles and sex abusers. That isn’t loving or logical, and I almost put the book down right then. Since I have several friends who love this book, I decided to keep reading.
The overall ideas such as not yelling, natural consequences, and giving teens responsibility make sense. But they don’t encourage building a strong relationship as a backbone to this, and they give many horrible examples and bad advice.
They encourage throwing a 15 year old out on the street, and then encourage putting your kids on the streets or threatening to several times throughout the book. The things they say to the kids do not sound loving, such as “it’s an irritation to be around you”, and the conversations in general are so fake and forced and will not go like that in real life. So what will you say when your kid doesn’t happily comply after you tell them they’re gonna live on the streets?
Instead of teaching basic human decency, like we should have compassion for each other in this house and do things for each other, they say “well I pay the mortgage so you have to do this.”
Some specific issues I had were the abstinence based stance they took, telling kids they will become infertile if they have sex too early, supposedly a random doctor wrote to this woman and congratulated her on her daughter being a virgin??? They say it’s okay to say to a gay child “I hope you will live a heterosexual life” and say that is still accepting them. They suggest kicking kids out or calling the police on them (and in my opinion that does not take into account that police encounters can be dangerous or the fact that they now have a record that is hard to bounce back from particularly for non-white people). They praised someone who left their kids alone because they were annoying her and made them figure out and pay on their own for a taxi. They say “cocaine is distributed to kids in almost every elementary school” ???! They tell a girl she will be raped and cut up and another girl she’ll be beat up and raped. I do encourage talking about risks with kids, but the way they do it is not at all with love. Parents have an obligation to feed their children, even if they spend all their allowance, and we shouldn’t say “you can get food out of the fridge when you pay for it” when they know the child has no money.
This book had no love or logic in my opinion and I can’t understand how it has been so praised.
The overall ideas such as not yelling, natural consequences, and giving teens responsibility make sense. But they don’t encourage building a strong relationship as a backbone to this, and they give many horrible examples and bad advice.
They encourage throwing a 15 year old out on the street, and then encourage putting your kids on the streets or threatening to several times throughout the book. The things they say to the kids do not sound loving, such as “it’s an irritation to be around you”, and the conversations in general are so fake and forced and will not go like that in real life. So what will you say when your kid doesn’t happily comply after you tell them they’re gonna live on the streets?
Instead of teaching basic human decency, like we should have compassion for each other in this house and do things for each other, they say “well I pay the mortgage so you have to do this.”
Some specific issues I had were the abstinence based stance they took, telling kids they will become infertile if they have sex too early, supposedly a random doctor wrote to this woman and congratulated her on her daughter being a virgin??? They say it’s okay to say to a gay child “I hope you will live a heterosexual life” and say that is still accepting them. They suggest kicking kids out or calling the police on them (and in my opinion that does not take into account that police encounters can be dangerous or the fact that they now have a record that is hard to bounce back from particularly for non-white people). They praised someone who left their kids alone because they were annoying her and made them figure out and pay on their own for a taxi. They say “cocaine is distributed to kids in almost every elementary school” ???! They tell a girl she will be raped and cut up and another girl she’ll be beat up and raped. I do encourage talking about risks with kids, but the way they do it is not at all with love. Parents have an obligation to feed their children, even if they spend all their allowance, and we shouldn’t say “you can get food out of the fridge when you pay for it” when they know the child has no money.
This book had no love or logic in my opinion and I can’t understand how it has been so praised.