Today’s episode is Day 7 in my foundational series on parenting teens.

If you’ve not listened to Days 1 – 6, go back to episode 130 and start there because all of this will make much more sense if you go in order.

We’ve talked about how your teen’s brain works, we’ve talked about how to deal with their big emotions and teach them emotional intelligence, we’ve talked about the importance of controlling your own emotions and how your parenting style must change during adolescence because your teen desperiately needs to establish their autonomy.

And today, I want to talk to you about something I KNOW you want to know about – discipline. Stay with me.

This is Speaking of Teens, the podcast that that teaches you the science of parenting adolescents so you can be less stressed and more excited about having a teenager. I’m Ann Coleman, I’m an attorney turned parent educator and I’ve spent years studying the science of teen behavior and I want to help you learn how to parent your teens for the best possible outcome.

In episode 133 we talked about how important it is to your teen that they have as much control over their own life as possible. I mentioned the areas where you should have more control – when it could be dangerous, unhealthy, illegal, unethical, or likely to close some door better left open.

We talked about how, if you must exert more control that they should at least be given a voice in the matter – you have to listen to their side, how they feel about it and quite often there’s room for negotiation and compromise.

Remember, I said the days of just saying No are over – just telling them what to do is inviting conflict. You’re going to be listening, discussing, brainstorming for solutions, and doing a lot of validating how they feel as you go. No one said this was quick and easy – there’s a lot more to this than when they were little.

But the point here is that you’re building trust and connection with them. You are making sure that they will open up to you, be willing to tell you things, ask your opinion, even consider doing what you suggest. You’re sharing your control with them so they will be more willing to follow your lead, to believe what you tell them, to trust that your opinion is valid.

So, sure, it’s much more complicated than just telling them what to do…but telling them what to do doesn’t work – so this is the path forward. Accept it and use it.

Keeping all of this in mind, how exactly do you discipline teens when they do something wrong, break a rule, make a big mistake?

First, you have to think about discipline in a different way.

“Discipline” is not just about a kid’s outward behavior. It’s not just about making kids do what we want them to do or what they need to do – or keeping them from doing what they shouldn’t.

They have to know why and we have to teach them how.

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, in the context of parenting teens is about teaching them the skills they need to become a responsible young adult - while maintaining your emotional connection.

Discipline is not “I’ll teach you not to do that again!” It’s not about retribution. It’s not about striking fear in their hearts. It’s not about your control over them. And it’s not meant to be adversarial, cause disconnection and arguments. It’s about teaching.

So, make that mindset shift right now – the goal is for them to learn the skills they don’t yet have, to gently guide them through the mistakes they will inevitably make.

Remember, we all learn 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. Think about how ridiculous a concept it is that they would simply, intuitively, know how to be an adult when they’re still in school, their brain and body is still growing, and they have acne on their face.

So, your job is to guide them through these 10,000 ways that won’t work, helping them see why they didn’t work, how to tweak their behavior a bit for the next try and the next. Each time, trying a little something else that might help them get there.

If instead, when they mess up, you just say nope – that’s not it – here’s your punishment - where’s the learning? Where’s the incentive to do better next time? You’ve taken away their autonomy – they don’t want to listen to you – they don’t want your help.

So, 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. When they get back, you’ve been beside yourself with worry, so you 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.

But if you do that, you’ve made yourself the enemy because you lost control and you punished them – you’ve threatened their autonomy, you didn’t find out anything about 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 and you’ve done nothing to help them figure anything out that might help them avoid sneaking out again. You’ve basically put yourself over here in one corner and them in the other and effectively rung the bell.

Now what happens? Your kid’s not going to be speaking to you, they’re going to be seething with anger, and vow to do whatever they can to get around your punishment and do what they want to do. Your home is going to turn into a battlefield.

You didn’t understand the assignment. Is your goal to keep them from sneaking out again? No. Your goal is to keep them safe and help them learn how to stay safe – those are they skills they need here (at least on the surface).

How do you keep them safe? By staying connected to them so they will talk to you and share what’s going on here so you can guide them

You can’t possibly know what skills they need to learn, what you need to help them learn, until you know why they did what they did. And unless you ask, remain calm and listen to what they say, you’ll never know.

So, let’s look at this situation from a different perspective. Rather than blowing up when they climb back in their window, you tell them you’re glad they’re home safe because you’ve been really worried about them. You tell them you love them, you want them to get some sleep now and that you’ll talk about it tomorrow.

When you do talk, the first thing you do is ask, “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” will do.

And this is where your emotion coaching comes in again – listen, summarize what they’re telling you, make sure you got it right, make sure they feel comfortable sharing with you. You can ask more questions, help them process what they were actually thinking as they made the decisions they made along the way last night.

Tell them what concerns you about their behavior, and brainstorm about how you two can avoid this in the future.

Perhaps they were stressed out and felt like they needed to go meet up with a friend to chill out. Well, then 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.

So, every situation is going to be different – you have to get to the bottom of what happened and why, then discuss the what and how they can do things differently next time.

But when do we give consequences. Discipline isn’t always about consequences – remember you’re trying to teach and guide them to do better next time and consequences are simply not always required for that. With some kids it may be rarely if ever required.

I say you never have to give consequences the first time something happens unless you feel it’s especially egregious or as you’re talking through things, they just don’t seem to understand that they’ve done anything wrong. And if it’s happened before, and you already talked through a solution, how to avoid the problem in the future, but they’ve done it again, that could also be a situation where consequences are appropriate. But maybe not, depending on the situation and the kid. And we’ll get back to what kind of consequences in a minute.

But what if you’ve been punishing and consequencing for quite some time now, without it helping anything and your back is up against a wall. You have nothing left to take away and they don’t even seem to care anyway – they’re just doing what they want.

In that case, rather than issuing consequences, I would concentrate on trying to build your connection with them. Tell them your concerns about their behavior, letting them know that you’re not going to give them consequences because you can see that’s not working, and ask them to just talk to you. Tell them you want to support them more than you have in the past and that you love them and want to make sure they’re safe and okay.

I know it sounds a little whakadoodle but it’s the punishing that’s gotten you where you are with them right now and more punishment is not going to get you out of this spiral of rebellion. Only your connection with them can do that. We’re talking more about that in the last episode of this series, on Tuesday. So, I’ll leave this here.

So, if you’re not in this death spiral with them yet, and this situation does call for consequences – you’re going to need to discuss it with them first. Remember what we said in episode 133 about supporting their autonomy – they need to be heard on these issues or you’re going to have conflict.

Ask them what consequences they think are appropriate. Teens will surprise you sometimes. Brainstorm with them, keeping in mind, again, that these consequences have to work to guide or teach them something that will help them do better next time. And that doesn’t mean making it so painful they’ll be terrified to do it again. That’s only teaching them to fear you, not to respect you or want to do better.

So, let me give you an overview of consequences – some guidelines:

First let’s talk natural consequences. There’s no better way to learn from mistakes than natural consequences. The word, consequence, literally means the “result or effect of an action”. A natural consequence is just something that happens naturally or automatically in response to some action or inaction.

For example, your teen leaves her good shoes sitting by the basketball court at the park and turns around an hour later and they’re gone. The natural consequence of not taking care of her shoes – they were stolen. They forget to study for a test and a bad grade might be the natural consequence. They don’t wash their clothes, wearing dirty clothes to school is the natural consequence.

In any case where there’s a natural consequence, you should not also give them a consequence. They’re learning the lesson already and if you pile on and punish them for not washing those clothes, what is that doing? Nothing but threatening their autonomy, causing conflict, building resentment and disconnection. The great thing about natural consequences is that you don’t even have to get involved – they can’t blame you for anything.

Now the only time you would want to step in and not allow natural consequences to occur would be when 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 friend of mine just recently got a panicked text from her son who had 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. To help you figure out where the line is you can listen to episodes 14 and 91.

Now, about logical consequences. This is where a lot of parents mess up. Sometimes there are no natural consequences. If your kid gets angry and punches his fist through a sheetrock wall, other than scratched knuckles and having to look at a hole in the wall, there’s no natural consequences that automatically happens without your intervention.

But a good logical consequence could be to take his own money, buy a patch kit and paint and let you show him how to repair the wall.

You can’t pick one consequence for everything – taking their cell phone away for every single thing they do wrong is not logical.

Logical consequences have to be – logical! Remember, the goal of discipline is to teach them, guide them so they’ll learn how to do whatever it is they messed up. And if consequences are the way you’re going to achieve that, they’d better make sense and be related to the behavior.

Logical consequences also need to be reasonable in relation to the situation. If we were talking about crimes, you wouldn’t send someone to prison for life for stealing a loaf of bread. So, you wouldn’t ground a teenager for a month for coming home an hour late for curfew either.

What happens quite often is that we let our emotions speak for us and shout out some outrageous punishment which we then can’t even hold them to “You’re not going anywhere the entire summer”. Just remember, if you do something like that, you can always admit you screwed up, apologize, and discuss the matter with your kid.

A week is forever to a teenager and that’s really as long as any consequence should ever be. Think in hours or maybe a day or two rather than weeks. Remember, again, this is not supposed to be in retribution or to punish, this is supposed to help them learn how to do something they didn’t get right. And consequences should never be your first avenue of teaching or guiding them. If there’s another way, choose that way. This does not have to be painful like some people think.

If you give them a couple of chances to get it right, maybe then it’s time to consider consequences and you can talk about what they might be after the first time. “Now, we’re hoping this doesn’t happen again, but if it does, what do you think would be fair as a consequence”. If they agree up front, then mess up again, it’s them who has literally them who is in total control of whether they get that consequence. This takes the heat off you.

And another tip – 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 feel you should because other families do it, that’s not enough.

Okay – we’ve talked about a lot. 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, that they’re teaching them how to do better, not too big or too long.

And, critically, make 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 Tuesday in the last installment of this series.

So come back for the 8^th day – episode 137.

That’s it for Speaking of Teens today. I appreciate you taking the time to listen to me today and I sure hope it helped you a little bit and that you’ll consider sharing the show with a friend or relative, your Instagram, TikTok or Facebook followers – help me spread the word.

And of course, if you want to learn more details about how to successfully parent your teen, meet with me on a weekly basis, meet other parents with teens, learn from other experts – come join us in Parent Camp.

And if you’d like a little free support parenting your teens, head over to the Speaking of Teens Facebook group. The links for both are at the bottom of the episode description, where you’re listening.

Alright – until next time, remember, a little change goes a long way.