Daring To Parent In the Nineties; Love & Logic Solutions

Your kids aren't ready for the bus on time? No problem. Toss their shoes and jacket in a carryall, and let them walk barefoot in the snow to the bus stop. That'll teach the "little buggers." Watching Daring to Parent in the Nineties, a washed-out looking presentation before a Colorado audience by Foster W. Cline, M.D., was like meeting a Dickensian villain in the flesh. Lovable, funny, and strict to the point of borderline abuse, Cline outlines in broad comic strokes his hands-off approach to child-raising. Parents should tell their children that they are loved, offer to answer any questions, wish them good luck, and then pray they fail early on so the lessons will become instilled at a young age. As a childrearing ideology, this is pretty standard old school stuff. But the advice to stop the car if your children are bickering and let them walk the last three miles home, among other suggestions, struck me as bit too draconian for parenting in the 90s. And judging from the hairline on Cline's picture on the video jacket, and the more hirsute Cline on the actual tape, this production might actually date from the 80s. Daring to Parent in the Nineties actually works better as a stand-up comedy routine in the W.C. Fields vein, than as a useful guide to parenting. Not a necessary purchase.Jim Fay, who is Foster W. Cline's partner at the Cline/Fay Institute, shares much of the same philosophy in Love & Logic Solutions, a two-hour seminar on raising children. Less manic than Cline, Fay also offers much more in the way of solid suggestions for handling specific situations. Fay's three golden rules are taking good care of yourself, offering kids choices when available, and letting empathy and consequences do the teaching, and he applies these rules to several areas, including meal-time, curfew, cleaning up, behavior in public places, being tardy, temper tantrums, and sibling rivalry. Fay punctuates each of his lessons with anecdotal tales that are often humorous though sometimes extreme. If, for example, Susie misbehaves at the grocery store, than Susie loses her shopping privileges and goes home to a baby-sitter. Simple enough, right? Ah, but here's the fun part. Since Susie messed up, Susie has to actually pay the baby-sitter, and since five-year old Susie is not yet a viable economic member of the family, she needs to sell a few assets...namely, her toys. A hard lesson, but that's gist of the presentation: children should pay their way and learn about the real world. Again, Fay's--like Cline's--basic message is solid: we do more harm by repeatedly letting our kids off the hook than by letting them suffer the consequences (as long as these aren't dangerous) of their actions and thereby learning accountability for their behavior. A little on the straight Republican ticket side of childrearing perhaps, but the suggestions might be more useful to some parents, especially when contrasted with current politically correct liberal notions of childrearing such as sitting down and reasoning with a 3-year-old. Recommended, with reservations. (R. Pitman)