What Is Tough Love For Children?

"The fundamentals of tough love are essentially the fundamentals of human reciprocity and learning practiced within a context of love," says author Jeff Huggins in the book "The Obligations of Reason: Exploring the Existence, Nature, Dynamics and Implications of the Natural Moral System." While tough love can prove beneficial when used with some children, it is up to parents to decide which parenting style works best for them.

General Information

The parenting style called tough love combines warmth with consistent and firm discipline. Parents establish clear boundaries and non-negotiable punishments. They temper these rules with love and understanding, making this parenting style tougher than a permissive approach yet less harsh than an authoritarian one. The tough love approach aims to teach children restraint and respect while building their self-esteem, and help children learn how to make good decisions on their own in the future.

Focus

A key technique described by Ron Zodkevitch in the book "The Toughlove Prescription" involves staying focused on specific current behaviors, not general problems. Children may not remember an event from two weeks ago, and may feel picked on when a parent brings up past wrongs. Further, when you talk to your child about an unacceptable behavior, say something good about her fist. For example, "You're so compassionate; I don't understand why you'd want to hit your sister."

Benefits

A 2009 study by the think tank Demos, a non-partisan public policy advocacy and research organization, found tough love may have specific benefits for children. The study, which tracked the lives of 9,000 families, found that children raised with a tough love approach had better empathy skills than children raised with other parenting styles, such as authoritarian or permissive. Kids raised with a tough love approach were also better able to control their emotions, more capable of concentration and task completion, and better able to bounce back from disappointment, Demos claims.

Criticism

Some critics of the tough love approach to parenting find it too negative, and caution that children may experience emotional harm. "Children whose parents practice tough love experience their parents as negative, critical and suspicious," note Martha Heineman Pieper and William J. Pieper in the book "The Smart Love Parent: The Compassionate Alternative To Discipline." The authors further contend that behavioral sanctions "are no better at changing teens than they are at controlling the minds of citizens of repressive governments," and focusing on behavioral sanctions leads to rebellion and defiance in children.

Condsiderations

No one parenting style works with every child. Parents must take their child's temperament and personality into account to determine the most effective method. ''How you parent requires knowing each child, as opposed to following one philosophy,'' advises psychiatrist Stanley Greenspan, author of ''The Challenging Child."

No matter what parenting techniques you employ, the bottom line remains the same. ''What's most important,'' says Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan, ''is that a child perceives he is loved.''