Parenting with Love and Logic involves setting strong limits and
boundaries in toddlerhood. Not only do limits protect our children
from harmful situations, they also allow us to model good adult
behavior by caring for ourselves. Let’s look at a couple of examples.
Two toddlers, “Thoughtful” and “Thug,” want to be picked
up. They raise their hands and scream demandingly at their
parents. Thug’s parents pick him up. In essence, they say, “Be
obnoxious with me and you’ll get your way.” However, when
Thoughtful raises her hands and screams, her father says,
without anger or sarcasm, “Thoughtful, why don’t you lie down
on the linoleum? I can’t pick you up when you act like that.”
Thoughtful learns right away to say, as politely as possible,
“Daddy, will you please pick me up?”
All infants at about six months discover their pitching arm
and attempt to train their mothers to fetch as the baby bottle
first falls off the high-chair tray and is then thrown by the baby.
Each mom plays fetch in her own unique manner. Some moms
are one-bottle retrievers; most are three-to-four-bottle
retrievers. Some are more enjoyable and will retrieve over and
over, at least twice or three times every meal. From a baby’s
point of view, the most fun are the sighing or noisy retrievers:
“Will you please quit throwing your milk bottle off the tray?”
Some retrievers are quiet but lovingly say, in their actions,
“You can choose to throw the bottle once every meal and I’ll
pick it up, and then you have chosen to save your arm for the
next meal.” The game is a lot shorter and less fun for the
pitcher, but the retriever leads a happier life, and soon the bottle
isn’t pitched at all.
The boundaries we set for our children are in reality the
boundaries we set for ourselves. The more squishy and
indecisive we are about our own boundaries, the more soggy
and inconsistent we are about the limits we set for our toddlers.The earlier they start, the better. When our children leave our care, we