Parenting With Love and Logic: Teaching Children Responsibility

commitment, decision making, and responsibility is the cheapest it will
ever be. Tomorrow it’s always higher.
The older a child gets, the bigger the decisions become and the graver
the consequences of those decisions. Little children can make many
mistakes at affordable prices. They can pick themselves up and try again
if things don’t work out. Usually all they’re out are some temporary pain
and a few tears. This is easy to illustrate.
Giving a three-year-old the choice “Would you like to go to the car
with your feet on the ground or in the air?” sets a safe, enforceable limit
in response to a rebellious refusal on a rainy night in front of a restaurant.
Telling school-aged siblings they can do chores or sell some of their toys
to pay for Monica, the babysitter from hell, to come watch them while
mom goes to the store is not an unreasonable consequence of their
previous tirades on such a shopping trip. Even, to some extent, letting a
smart-mouthed boy of five get his face rubbed in the grass a bit because
he wised off to bigger, older neighborhood boys will, if he is left to
handle his own problem, teach a major-league lesson in respect. Bigger
boys rub their hands with glee at the prospect of teaching smart-aleck
kids lessons. The lesson for the smaller child may cost a little — a bloody
nose or a black eye — but the price is affordable.
Yet these prices are too high for some parents. They protect. They
reason, “I love him. I don’t want little Johnny to learn the hard way.” So
they kneel in a puddle on a rainy night and try to plead their toddler into
the car. They let their kids run them ragged on trip after trip to the
grocery store. Or they yell at the neighborhood boys, “You kids be nice to
Johnny. If you can’t be nice, I’m going to tell your parents.” As a result,
the smart-aleck kid loses the opportunity to learn a lesson at blue-light-
special prices. Now he may have to learn it at age fifteen, and anyone
who has seen fifteen-year-old boys go at it knows that the price tag will
be far more expensive.
True, it’s painful to watch our kids learn through natural consequences
or, as we like to call them, significant learning opportunities (SLOs). But
that pain is part of the price we must pay to raise responsible kids. We