It is easier for me to remember ideas or techniques if they are told to me in the form of a story. So to that end, I will relate a few more stories from my own experiences as a therapeutic parent.


As I have previously mentioned, I am a big fan of Parenting with Love and Logic. When I began using Love and Logic methods, my birth children were about 9 and 7 years old. As I struggled through these past fifteen years with Amy, I have somewhat honed my ability to be creative in discovering logical consequences for some of my daughter’s illogical choices.


When Amy was 14 and old enough to have a part-time job, we arranged for her to spend the summer with my parents and work at a Go-Kart/Bumper Boat amusement facility in Estes Park, Colorado. It was a win/win deal—we got a much-needed break, she earned back the money she had blown earlier that year on adult pay-per-view movies she ordered on the TV, and my folks received a bit more realistic picture of her “limitations”. They were far more on top of her schedule than she was. They encouraged her to make friends, to no avail.


The next summer my husband accompanied Amy to the Six Flags employee recruitment fair. He walked her through all the steps and she landed a job. Because she “didn’t like bikes” (more on that later) she chose to walk the four miles each way to work. No problem for me—it gave her something more to do.


The following year she turned 16 in January. She wasn’t working at that point because Six Flags is a seasonal gig. I didn’t ask, I told her to get a job. We lived a mile from a large mall with a significant number of restaurants and shops around the mall. Over a hundred places to get a job. For over a month I hounded her, even though my hassling her was not a Love and Logic approach… I was just desperate to get her out of the house and even more critically, have her putting away money for the absolute eventuality of having to support herself. Wait ‘til you hear what happened next…