Have you noticed that the more you crack the whip with your teen, the worse their behavior becomes? That’s because punishment doesn’t work. Stick around and I’ll tell you what does work.

Hey there, I’m Ann Coleman, an attorney turned parent educator, and I made a mess of things with my teenage son before figuring out how to turn things around. In this podcast, I teach you science backed strategies that will improve your teen’s behavior. Welcome to the 7th episode of my fundamentals of parenting teens series.

Be sure to go back and listen or watch the rest of the series to get the big picture.

If you’ve been following all along, you may recall that back in the 4^th episode I talked about how important your teen’s autonomy is to them and the various ways you can support their autonomy and therefore, cut down on arguments and power struggles, which allows you to improve your relationship with them, which ultimately improves their behavior.

Teen’s need as much control over their life as possible—they need to be able to make their own decisions—as long as it’s not dangerous, unhealthy, illegal, unethical, or likely to close some door to their future.

They need to be heard, have their say, even make mistakes and suffer the natural consequences (as long as it doesn’t fit into one of those 5 categories).

So, you have to be willing to listen, discuss things with them, and negotiate solutions with them rather than making every decision yourself and just declaring it so…unless you just want to continue to cause conflict and bad behavior.

By supporting their autonomy, you build trust and connection with them, so they’ll be more willing to open up to you, tell you things, ask your opinion, and even consider doing what you suggest. That’s what you want, right? That’s how you can have influence now—not by TELLING them what to do. That no longer works.

You have to accept that this is the way to help your teen become an independent young adult. If you fight it, both of you are going to lose because their behavior will go downhill fast.

So, as I briefly mentioned in the 4^th episode of this series, even when your teen messes up, makes a mistake, breaks a rule, or does something wrong, you must STILL approach the situation in a way that doesn’t threaten their autonomy. Because, when you threaten their autonomy, you just push yourself further and further away where you have less influence over their life and behavior. Okay? Shake your head if you get it.

Now, this approach will probably require you to change the way you’ve always thought about “discipline”.

Most of us hear that word and we might think of obedience, making kids do what we think they should do—or keeping them from doing what they’re not supposed to do. We think about their outward behavior—their actions and inaction.

But we would be wrong. Discipline is not about outward performance and making our kids “act right”.

It’s about teaching them how to do the things they need to do (the skills they need) so they can gradually become a proper young adult, while also maintaining your emotional connection with them…by supporting their autonomy.

Discipline is about teaching – that’s literally where the word got its start in Latin – to teach or to learn – a disciple is a student.

Discipline is not about retribution. It’s not about striking fear in their hearts and making them afraid of the punishment they might receive if they do something wrong. It’s not about your control over them. And it’s not meant to be adversarial or cause arguments. That leads to disconnection, distrust, and eventually, rebellion.

So, let’s work on making that mindset shift right now – the goal is for your teen to learn the skills they don’t yet have (those executive functions their prefrontal cortex isn’t very good at yet, to supportively guide them through the mistakes they will inevitably make.

You know that’s how we all learn right? By making mistakes – epic fails. Have you heard the famous Thomas Edison quote? “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.”

Kids will go through 10,000 ways that won’t work before they figure out how to be an adult. It’s just part of the process…there’s nothing wrong with them.

It’s utterly ridiculous for us real adults to think that a teenager could act like an adult. Our job is to guide them through these 10,000 ways that won’t work, to help them understand why it didn’t work and how to try something different the next time and the next until they get there.

If instead, when they mess up, we just say nope – that’s not it – here’s your punishment – how will they ever learn how to do better next time? There’s no learning in punishment. There’s not even an incentive to do better next time. You’ve taken away their autonomy – they don’t want to listen to you – they don’t trust you to help them. You’re OUT.

For example, let’s say your teenager sneaks out of their bedroom in the middle of the night and stays gone for 2 hours. You can’t find them, their phone is turned off, their car is still in the driveway. By the time you catch them crawling back through their bedroom window, you’ve been beside yourself with worry, so you totally lose it, shame them for doing such a stupid thing, tell them how dangerous it was, how they caused you to lose sleep, make them hand over their cell phone, ground them for 2 weeks, slam the door behind you and tell them to go to sleep.

And when you do that, you’ve made yourself the enemy because you lost control of your emotions and you punished them – you’ve threatened their autonomy, you didn’t find out why they felt the need to sneak out in the first place, you don’t know if they’re having mental health or substance issues, if they need your help to sort through something…which could have helped you both figure out how to avoid sneaking out again. You’ve effectively put yourself over here in one corner and your teen over in the other and rung the bell.

I get it…I once nailed my son’s window shut to keep him from sneaking out. No, I didn’t leave it that way but I damn sure ruined that window.

So, what do you think happens next after you lose it and punish your teen? Your kid’s going to be seething with anger over the unfairness of it all. Because they’ve not been heard—you don’t even know the whole story. They’re probably going to do whatever they can to get around your punishment to do what they want to do. Your home becomes a battlefield.

You’ve mistaken punishment for discipline.

Think about the goal here. Is it just to keep them from sneaking out again? No. Your goal is to keep them safe and help them learn how to stay safe – to teach them the skills that they don’t have yet, or at least help them with some scaffolding until they learn those skills.

And the only way you’re going to be able to keep them safe and teach them anything is through your connection with them, which only remains intact if you support their autonomy.

So, how do you support their autonomy when they’ve done something so boneheaded that it makes you want to yank your own hair out?

You have to hear them out—let them talk while you listen. You’ve got to figure out what went wrong here, what do they need help to learn. And the only way to do that is to remain calm and ask, “what happened?”.

I know—this sounds like a totally foreign concept but hang with me. Let me take you through this same scenario from this new perspective.

When they climb back through their bedroom window, rather than blowing up, you calmly say, “I’m glad you’re home safe. I’ve been really worried about you. I love you. Now, get some sleep and we’ll talk about what happened tomorrow. Good night.”

If you have to go back to your room and scream into a pillow or cry in the shower until you get used to this…that’s okay.

So, when you have this conversation the next day, the first thing you do is ask them, “what happened last night?” That gets the ball rolling without shaming them or putting them on the defensive.

Notice this is not the same as asking, “why did you sneak out last night?” or “what were you thinking last night?” Leave all the judgment out of your tone, your words, your body language, and your facial expression. Just a simple, “what happened last night” keeps it neutral and non-threatening.

And this is where your emotion coaching comes in again (remember that’s what you learned in the last episode) – listen, reflect, validate, give them a loving touch if appropriate. This will help keep them calm and should make them feel comfortable sharing this information with you. If you need to you can ask questions to make sure you understand and to help them process what they were actually thinking and feeling as they made the decisions they made.

Then simply state what concerns you about this particular behavior, being careful not to be judgy or shame them. Then ask them to brainstorm with you to figure out how you can avoid this happening again in the future. And this brainstorming hinges on what you’ve discovered from them in this conversation.

Let’s say they told you they were stressed out and felt like they needed to go meet up with a friend to chill out. Well, then you’re going to brainstorm ideas with them for what they can do the next time they feel stressed out in the middle of the night. help them come up with a plan for the next time they feel that way in the middle of the night. Maybe they can come wake you up and you’ll go for a drive with them or talk it out or maybe they can keep a journal by their bed to write all their worries in. They need skills for dealing with their overwhelming emotions here. They may even be interested in talking to a therapist.

So, every situation is going to be different based on what you learn from them. You’ve got to help them, help YOU figure out why they did it so the two of you can work together to figure out how they can do better next time. This is how they’ll learn the skills they need for adulthood.

So, wait…no consequences? Well, maybe. It depends.

Natural consequences can be a great teacher. Actually, the word, consequence, literally means the “result or effect of an action”. And a natural consequence is just something that happens naturally or automatically in response to some action or inaction.

For example, your daughter forgets to study for a test - a bad grade might be the natural consequence. Or your son didn’t pick his clothes up out of the bedroom floor and put them in the hamper to be washed…wearing dirty clothes out of the bedroom floor is the natural consequence.

The wonderful thing about natural consequences is that you don’t even have to get involved – they really have no reason to be mad at you or blame you (of course, we know they can always come up with one).

Let natural consequences do their job unless allowing them would be dangerous, unhealthy, illegal, unethical, or likely to close some door better left open…and I would also add, if allowing the consequence would be unfair and cause disconnection between you.

For example, a while back a friend of mine got a panicked text from her son who’d locked his baseball bag up in his car accidentally, had to get on the bus right then to travel to a game about half an hour away.

My friend (who is self-employed) drove around 2 hours between going home from her office to get the spare car key, going back to the school to his car to get the bag, driving the bag to the ballfield and back to her office.

Now, she did that because he had been out for an injury for weeks, had not gotten to play, it’s his senior year, he’s normally extremely responsible, never gets in trouble, treats her well and makes good grades…and she had the time and ability to do it.

In this particular situation, to have said, “tough titties - I guess you won’t have a jersey or play tonight.” would have been just mean and it would have caused some major disconnection between them.

On the other hand, if she could not have gotten away from her job or didn’t have a spare key, he would have just had to learn the hard way.

So, obviously, we have some leeway here and have to sometimes make a judgment call. Natural consequences are hard on us parents. It’s scary, it doesn’t feel good, we love our kids and want to be helpful. I have a couple of audio podcasts that can help you with this—I’ll link to them in the episode description below. (episodes 14 and 91).

Now, what about non-natural consequences…so-called “logical consequences” – I’m just going to use the term consequences. And, the more I talk about this, the more and more convinced I become that consequences are rarely the answer for any behavior issue. Because most of us are actually punishing and just calling it consequences.

Let’s say your daughter has a meltdown and during that little episode she broke their bedroom door off the hinges. You emotion coached her through it and didn’t even mention the door until the storm had passed. But now, you feel she needs a consequence. She’s made a habit of breaking things lately despite working with her several times in the past to help her do better.

Before making a unilateral decision, remember, to help support their autonomy you 15 should discuss the consequences with them before deciding on anything. Ask them to brainstorm some ideas with you. You’ll have the final say but try to agree on something if possible.

And there are several other simple guidelines to follow to make sure the consequences don’t act more as a punishment, threaten their autonomy, and just cause rebellion.

First, if you’re going to issue logical consequences, they have to be…you guessed it – logical!

Your goal is to teach them how to do better next time, these consequences must, so at a minimum, they should be related to their behavior. That means you have to evaluate every situation individually and get creative. In other words, the phone is not fair game unless they’ve made a mistake regarding the phone (like sneaking it into their room after hours).

To be logical they should also be reasonable under the circumstances. Don’t let your emotions take over…“You’re not going anywhere the entire summer”.

Understand that a single WEEK is forever for a teenager…so that’s as long as any consequence should really ever be. I don’t know about you but I think it’s as hard on the parent to give some long consequence as it is on the kid.

So, think in hours or maybe a day or two rather than weeks. Remind yourself that the goal isn’t fear or pain, it’s to help them learn how to do something they didn’t get right. And consequences, are not that great at doing this and should never be your first choice. If there’s another way, choose that way.

As in the example, if you’ve given them a couple of chances to get it right, maybe then it’s time to consider consequences. You can even discuss that after the first time they do something, you could say something like, “Now, I’m hoping this doesn’t happen again, but if it does, what do you think would be fair as a consequence”. Because, if they agree up front, then mess up again, they only have themselves to blame—no heat on you.

Something else that’s really important here – be consistent. If you agree on a rule with your teen and you take a hard line on it one week, let it go the next then try to enforce it the next, you’re really muddying the waters.

Being inconsistent can be almost as bad as having no rules at all. So, be sure to only set rules in your family that actually mean something to you and that you can (or want) to consistently enforce. If you have a rule just because you think you should…you won’t be consistent.

Alright, this is a lot to absorb so to recap, just remember that discipline is about teaching your teens how to be responsible young adults – guiding them and helping them learn what they need to know.

It’s not about obedience or control or retribution or pain. It’s about figuring out what they need to get this right and helping them. What’s going on beneath the outward behavior. What are they feeling? What can they do to avoid the situation in the future? Consequences are not always necessary. You can easily consequence yourself into a corner where they don’t even care anymore.

Learn to let natural consequences happen in all but a few situations. If you decide they need logical consequences, make sure they’re actually logically related, and teach them something. I have tons of examples of real life situations in the workbook for Parent Camp. That link is in the description if you want to check it out.

And no matter what the issue, always be sure you’re listening to your teen, you’re validating their feelings, brainstorming with them, and trying to work through things together. This isn’t about making them do what you want. It’s about preparing them for real life and to do that, you must maintain your connection with them, which is what we’re going to talk about in the last installment of this series.

I’ll see you right back here to talk about this connection I keep mentioning. Be sure to subscribe or follow so you don’t miss it.

That’s it for today. I hope you got something out of the episode. Thanks for being here and I’ll see you next time. Now, go connect with your teen.