Discipline: pre-teens and teenagers

Discipline isn’t about punishment. It’s about guiding children towards appropriate ways to behave. For pre-teens and teenagers, discipline is about agreeing on and setting appropriate limits and helping them behave within those limits.

When your child was younger, you probably used a range of discipline strategies to teach them the basics of good behaviour. Now your child is moving into the teenage years, you can use limits and boundaries to help them learn independence, take responsibility for their behaviour and its outcomes, and solve problems.

Your child needs these skills to become a young adult with their own standards for appropriate behaviour and respect for others. An important part of this is learning to stick to some clear rules, agreed on in advance, and with agreed consequences.

Teenagers don’t yet have all the skills they need to make all their own decisions, so your agreed limits for behaviour help your child make good choices about how to behave.

Teenage discipline is most effective when you:

• communicate openly with your child – this allows you to talk about how the limits and rules are working, and guide your child towards good choices

• build and maintain a warm and loving family environment – this helps your child feel safe to make mistakes as they learn to manage their own behaviour.

Agreeing on clear limits with pre-teens and teenagers

Clear limits and expectations can discourage problem behaviour from happening in the first place. Limits also help your child develop positive social behaviour, including showing concern for others.

Here are some tips for setting clear limits:

• Involve your child in working out limits and rules. When your child feels that you listen to them and they can contribute, they’ll be more likely to see you as fair and stick to the agreed rules.

• Be clear about the behaviour you expect. It can help to check that your child has understood your expectations. For example, you could say, ‘Please come home after the movie’. But it might be clearer to say, ‘Come straight home after the movie ends and don’t go anywhere else’.

• Discuss responsibilities with your child. For example, ‘I’m responsible for providing for you. You have responsibilities too, like tidying your room’.

• Agree in advance with your child on what the consequences will be if they don’t stick to the rules you’ve agreed on.

• Use descriptive praise when your child follows through on agreed limits. For example, ‘Thanks for coming straight home from the movie’.

• Be willing to discuss and adjust rules as your child shows responsibility or gets older – for example, by extending your child’s curfew.

Using consequenc​es as part of teenage discipline

Sometimes your child might behave in ways that test your limits or break the rules you’ve agreed on. One way to deal with this is by using consequences.

Here’s how.

Make the consequence fit

If you can make the consequence fit the misbehaviour, it gets your child to think about the issue. It can also feel fairer to your child. For example, if your child is home later than the agreed time, a fitting consequence might be having to come home early next time.

​​Withdraw c​ooperation

This strategy aims to help your child understand your perspective and learn that they need to give and take. It also helps your child understand that every action has a consequence. By doing the right thing, your child can get a positive consequence. But doing the wrong thing means they get a negative consequence. 

For example, if your child wants you to wash a special item of clothing, you could say you’ll do this if they put all their dirty clothes in the laundry basket. Try to avoid making this into a bribe. 

Let your child know beforehand that you might withdraw your cooperation as a consequence for misbehaviour. For example, ‘If you want me to iron your shirt for tonight, you need to speak respectfully to me’. Saying that you’re prepared to follow through with a consequence is sometimes enough to influence behaviour.

Withdraw privileges

This consequence should be used sparingly. If you use it too much, it won’t work as well. 

The idea is to remove something that you know your child enjoys – for example, visits to a friend’s house, access to technology, or access to activities. You need to let your child know in advance that this is what you plan to do, so that they can weigh up whether losing the privilege is worth it. 

​You don’t need to withdraw privileges for a long time for this consequence to be effective. Aim for a short withdrawal that occurs within the few days following the misbehaviour.

Reinforcing consequences

Whatever consequence you choose, these strategies might help to reinforce it.

Communication

It’s important to explain calmly and clearly what the problem is to your child. Tell your child how they haven’t stuck to the rules you agreed on, and let them know that you’ll be applying the agreed consequence.

Self-reflection

The idea is to encourage your child to think about their behaviour and how it could be different in the future.

You can talk with your child about the agreement you had, and what they think should happen as a consequence of breaking it. Often teenagers will be much harsher than their parents. This allows you to settle on future consequences that you both see as fair.

Why teenagers test the limits

Teenagers have the job of developing into independent adults. One way they do this is by testing boundaries and seeing how other people react to their behaviour. This teaches them what the social expectations are. As they get feedback, they learn what’s expected.

On top of this the teenage brain goes through massive growth and development during adolescence. As a result, teenagers try new things but don’t always make good decisions. They’re more influenced by peers. And they feel things more intensely than you do.

At the same time, teenagers are getting better at seeing the big picture and reasoning. This means they question their world more and use creative ways to solve problems.

For all these reasons, teenage behaviour might sometimes seem hard to manage. But you can work on behaviour with your child and guide them away from tricky situations.

© raisingchildren.net.au, translated and adapted with permission