PORT TOWNSEND — A free, weekly drop-in course offers parents the tools to allow their children to learn from their own mistakes.
“The course is all about managing kids, and dealing with kids with empathy and not by getting mad at them,” said Grant Street School Principal Steve Finch.
“It’s about engaging with kids at the moment they make a choice and how you help them work through that,” he added.
“Learning about Love and Logic,” a 10-week course that began last week, is facilitated by Grant Street teacher Peter Braden and retired counselor Jeanie Glaspell, and is offered from 8:15 a.m. to 9:15 a.m. every Tuesday through April 10.
Parents don’t need to attend each class in order to participate in the discussion.
Grant Street has offered the class twice a year for the last 13 years, recently switching from evenings to daytime because more parents find it difficult to attend at night, Finch said.
Throughout the years, many parents have attended several times in order to refresh themselves and stay current, he said.
The guiding idea is that children who make their own decisions are better equipped to handle adulthood and won’t look to their parents to solve all their problems.
“Kids learn by the mistakes they make,” Glaspell said.
“If you prevent the mistakes, you are stealing their opportunity to learn.”
The “love and logic” process has four steps: Give a child a task he or she can handle, hope they “blow it,” let equal parts of empathy and consequences do the teaching, and give the child the same task again.
“A lot of people take issue with the part where we ‘hope’ the kid blows it,” Braden said.
“Obviously, safety is the most important thing,” he said.
“You never want to send a kid out to play in traffic and see what happens.”
Instead, the idea is to show the kids what happens when they make their own choices.
One scenario presented in a video talks about a child at a fair who sees a cheap toy and wants it, and is allowed to purchase it with his own money.
When it breaks that same afternoon, the parent hugs the child and shows empathy but does not buy him a replacement.
The lesson learned is that the child will not buy another cheap toy, or will ask the parent what toy to buy.
In another, a child is given an allowance of $1 a week but with a certain amount taken out for “taxes.”
This teaches him a lesson about financial management that is plain enough for a 4-year-old to understand, the video states.
Glaspell said that children learn by the positive and negative examples set by their parents.
He supplied one of each.
In one case, a mother goes to IKEA and purchases two bookcases but finds later she was charged only for one.
She calls the store in her daughter’s earshot and pays for the extra bookcase with a credit card, then retells the story when her husband gets home.
In another example, a mother drops a cell phone into a bathtub in front of her daughter and then takes it to the store for repair, saying she doesn’t know how the moisture got there.
“Kids watch what you do and learn how to behave from what they see,” Glaspell said.
Jennifer Herbig, who has two children in Grant Street, said she will have difficulty allowing her kids to make mistakes “because I am a problem solver” but she added that what she learned in the course “gives me a necessary tool.”
Grant Street School is located at 1637 Grant St., Port Townsend. The phone number is 360-379-4535.
For more information about the class, email Braden at pbraden@ptsd50.org.
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Jefferson County Reporter Charlie Bermant can be reached at 360-385-2335 or charlie.bermant@peninsuladailynews.com.