104:42 Parenting with Love & Logic by Foster Cline & Jim Fay

I've heard of this book and actually had it sitting on my shelf for years. I excused myself from reading it as I used the basic principle in many interactions with my kids but with a things getting rougher with my teenager and hearing more and more about it from friends, I decided there was definitely nothing to lose and possibly a whole lot to gain so I dove in.

Can I just that I am so glad I did? Yes, I think I followed the principles in a lot of places but there were definitely many places where I didn't and was more like the drill sergeant (which I have even called myself before) rather than allow my kids to suffer consequences that I felt I needed to protect them from or consequences that I didn't want to have to impose or deal with, I fell back into yelling, threats, imposed punishments, etc all in the name of getting them to "grow up" and "be responsible". After having read this and looking back on things, we have started trying to give the kids more choices in the "bigger" issues and let them deal with the outcome of those choices. We are implementing some new systems on chores and the like. Mark is going to read it next and hopefully with us both on the same page, we will have more luck in accomplishing our goal of raising our children to be respectful and responsible adults.

Page count: 255p/12,721p ytd

Yes, I will be detailing what we are doing here on my blog for my own records and so that anyone who wants to follow our journey and see our successes and failures can do so.