Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Does "Love and Logic" work with gifted children

Has anyone tried and been successful using the "Love and Logic" techniques with their gifted child/children? We have done some reading on it but haven't really tried anything out yet. It sounds like it could work but wondering if anyone has any thoughts or guidance.

We've taken a parenting class on L&L. When I first heard about the basic idea of giving 2 choices for everything my first thought was, "What happens when they say neither one?" Which of course is what DD would say every single time, no matter how often I repeated that there were only 2 choices. Also, I noticed most of their suggestions for consequences are monetary, like, "You can clean up your room now or you can pay me to do it." Or, "You guys can stop arguing in the car or you can pay me $5 to listen to you." Obviously you could adapt this to find some consequences that work better for your family, but for DD she'd just pay up and leave me thinking, "Why did I even offer to let her pay me for this?? Sooo not worth it." (The pay comes from an allowance you give them, another of their suggestions.)

I think they're definitely on to something with the whole "let's hope they fail" thing and I have tried to set DD up with little failures to learn from.

You'll notice I haven't mentioned my DS in this and that's just because he's always been so naturally compliant. Even as a 1-yo toddler when we'd tell him no about something he'd just say, "awight!" and stop right away. We'd joke that he was under the Imperius Curse. If I could bottle that temperament and sell it, I think I'd be a billionaire.

Not sure how old your child(ren) are, but the techniques in Transforming a Difficult Child with a points system- transformed my Ds5 in 24 hrs. I think because he believes he's in control. I mean he is anyways, because it is he who has to make the choice of what to do. My ds is so motivated to get the points that he can use as he likes. It's great!
Btw, I never thought my son was difficult, but is strong willed, smart, and other techniques were not working.
Good luck.

Giving choices helped my son, somewhat, when he was around 3/4 yrs old. After that we had no idea what to do... this last year we moved to a chore/behavior chart tied to money and things are much better.

We have tried so many different things, and that may very well be part of the problem. We try something for a while (charts, point systems, payment for good days, etc) and then move on because nothing has truly worked. I hope we just haven't found the right way to handle the issues that come with having gifted daughters yet(DD8 & DD7). Right now the issue I see with L&L is that I understand it when I read about it, but can we really implement it into our situations. We don't give the girls any allowance since they are part of the family and are expected to do things as part of the family. Our consequences would be taking other things away like a cherished toy or computer/TV time, etc. Our girls would do the same thing as W'sMama said - they would just pay up and move on.
I'll look into the Transforming a Difficult Child and see if that system maybe needs to be the next one we try.
Thanks for the feedback!

My DS now 6.5 cannot be bought - chocolate for going on the potty, he decided the chocolate wasn't worth it and he LOVES chocolate. Just do your homework and you can have X, never worked either. And the flip side was true too - to a point. If you don't do this there are consequences. He also did the well I don't care. And that's where we had to up the ante - but that ante is not always about things - and you have to be careful to not go to far. Kid didn't apologize at the bus stop yesterday and parent said santa wasn't coming, that's pretty extreme in my view. For DS, it depends on how serious the transgression is in terms of what may be lost - he was accustomed to whatever he was doing rather than listening, lost one book, so I took all of them - yes one day I walked out with ALL his horrible science books. With chores we related it to being part of the family and if he doesn't do his part, we might not be able to do our part, so he might have to get school lunch rather than a packed lunch, which is not his preference, because I wouldn't have time. Or if he says he would do it later and then doesn't do it, then its a loss of trust and future privileges. Sometimes he is willing to risk that - and then you have to follow through. If you are going to use consequences, you have to find what they don't want to lose and I am not sure that is always stuff. Sometimes it is, but I have found that the carefully used, well I guess I won't be able to trust you to do it later next time, can be very effective.

I am the lay down the law parent in my house, DH is more likely to ignore little transgressions and then the pushing the pushing and then something bigger happens and DH BLOWS. And DS hates that. So he finds DH much more fun under most circumstances, and sometimes my conversations are peppered with nos and stop thats, but the pay off is that he is more mindful of my requests for action.

Its tough though and there was a period where I felt like I was correcting all the time so I started focusing on the you did a good thing - and also pointing out privately when we see other people's bad behavior, and having a discussion about it.

Not sure if any of this helps!

DeHe

I have read them all. We're currently doing Collaborative Problem Solving, and my DD8 seems to respond better to that than to most of the other things we've tried. I didn't really implement the Transforming the Difficult Child system, because it seemed to me that it would just not work for my daughter.

It's been a long time since I took the Love and Logic course so I apologize if my memory is fuzzy. We had the same issue as a prior poster in that the kids wouldn't accept the two choices given. My kids have been negotiators since they could talk and could see through these L&L manipulations in a heart beat. Also, neither of my girls are motivated by money. DS is motivated by money so we occasionally do use "paying mom" as a consequence with him.

In general, it seemed that their technique would be easier to implement with one kid. A lot of our challenges revolve around sibling issues. I did not find L&L to be as useful on sibling stuff. For example, I asked at the seminar about how to deal with one child making the other late for an activity. The presenter told me to let it happen and count on sibling peer pressure to kick in the next time. I thought that this was way off the mark. The tardy sibling was doing it on purpose and succeeding in making her sister late would only encourage repeated behavior of this sort. The presenter then suggested leaving the tardy sibling home. Again, off the mark, since she wanted to stay home and/or force one of the parents to miss her sibling's special event. We found it difficult to come up with a logical, natural consequence that didn't negatively affect her sister. I'm sure smarter parents could handle this better using L&L but not us.

I found "Siblings Without Rivalry" to have better suggestions re how to handle sibling conflict. My kids still never seem to follow their script either but at least it made more sense to me.

We seem to have very little luck with any kind of discipline. It's so frustrating. DS does listen a little better to my demands than to DH, because I do lay down the law. I find it extremely difficult to find the line between reasonable consequences and unreasonable ones. Especially when DS is doing something dangerous. You have to stop a kid from running into parking lots, for example, but what if they're struggling and trying to escape?

We're not in parking lots often, but we were a lot this weekend. I found myself spending a lot of time planning, as we walked through the garage, how to grab him if he took off at any given moment, because one of the times I grabbed his arm in a way that I know could dislocate his elbow (it happened once, in a similar situation, a year and a half ago), and I was terrified of grabbing him wrong again. It seemed like a lot of my time spent over a tantrum that hadn't even happened yet. He's also banged his head a lot of times, struggling to get away from me when something serious was going on. Once, we almost got caught in a subway door.

This stuff terrifies me.

The best approach seems to be to make sure he's getting what he needs in a day, but that can be nearly impossible, because some days he seems to need absolutely continuous, very focused attention, and gets frustrated if you so much as need to think before answering his questions.


Edited to add: There's no way in the universe that monetary/similar consequences would bother him. There are only two things per day that DS cares enough about to buy his compliance. Two. that's not a lot of currency.

Some kids are just really difficult to punish/reward using 'currency' since they are not very extrinsically motivated.

We have one of these kids-- and pretty much NOTHING works on her if she's determined/dug in. We've stripped everything from her as punishment, and offered some pretty incredible reward systems over the years, as well; I can assure you that for some kids, "sit on the naughty step, then" can go on ALL DAY if they don't want to... um... do five math problems that they KNOW how to do, clean the catbox, or put away the dishes. Yes, really; there is a reason why my DD's nickname is "Little Ghandi" that has nothing to do with social justice, let's just say. People who haven't seen this side of her simply can't FATHOM how immovable she can be.



Natural consequences tend to punish parents as much as kids, but sometimes that is all we have around here. Nobody ever promised that parenting was going to be fun or easy, right?

Like DeHe and knute, I'm the 'bad cop' parent-- my interactions with DD from ages 1-12 were mostly peppered liberally with behavioral modifiers and corrections. But I seldom had to deal with a kid who was way out of control or pushing ME there.

DH, on the other hand, wants to have "fun" with her so much that he ignores the little stuff until she pushes him into a corner, and then he comes out swinging (metaphorically, of course) and wondering how she wound him up so thoroughly.

It's because it's in her nature to push-push-push to get things her way. If you allow her to manipulate you, she WILL.

Most useful parenting book ever, IMO? The Manipulative Child which is particularly useful with non-extrinsically motivated children who are highly intelligent and socially adroit at a young age (in other words-- the little attorneys and negotiators).