Connecting with Your Teen

Welcome to Week Three

You Need Boundaries,
They Need Boundaries.

Please watch the WEEK THREE Video above first.

This isn’t good for either party. It will make you crazy, because as they grow into being a teenager, the demands are bigger and it gets harder to send them to their room without a big upset.

It also doesn’t feel good for your teen because she never knows where you stand. Sometimes you say “no,” and then you change your mind and say “yes.” Sometime you say “no” to something you said “yes” to before, or vice versa. This indecisive behavior will make your teen feel like she is going crazy and feel very insecure in her world.

It’s hard to feel safe in an inconsistent reality. Boundaries make everyone feel safe.

Imagine your job being inconsistent. Your boss says he wants you to do a report a certain way, then he changes his mind. Then the next time you do it the way he asks, he changes his mind again.

What if he says you get 3 weeks vacation and then, when you’re planning your vacation, he changes his mind and says he thinks it’s only going to be 2 weeks, then at the last minute he changes his mind again. How comfortable would you feel in your position with this company? You would probably start feeling a bit crazy.

We want to make sure that you’re not giving your teen reasons to feel crazier than she might already be feeling. It’s bad enough for her to have all these new hormones running through her body that might make her feel a bit unsettled. Let’s look at how we can establish a secure, safe environment for your teen by creating consistent boundaries.

We have already looked at the areas where your teen may be pushing up against putting you in a position to not hold strong on enforcing a rule. This pushing will decrease when you have successfully mastered Week 1 and Week 2, but you still have to setup rules and let her know that they are non-negotiable.

A perfect example is her curfew. If you have extended her curfew 1 hour later, she needs to know that this is a non-negotiable rule. She is not allowed to call 5 minutes before she is supposed to be home and ask if she can come home later.

If she persists in doing this, you need to sit with her and first ask why she is having an issue with keeping the stated curfew. Let her know that you feel that you were stepping outside your comfort zone to extend the curfew and now that she isn’t respecting your new extended curfew, you aren’t feeling respected. Remember, this is an opportunity for you to explain how important it is for her to keep her word to you because this is how you monitor how she is handling her responsibilities. Explain that she is not being responsible by not keeping her word. Keep in mind at all times, this is a training period and this doesn’t happen overnight. It is your job to train her.

The key here is to be upfront and lay everything out and make sure she understands that. Before we move on to the next conversation, we need to talk about how important it is for your teen to be able to have boundaries as well. Aah, yes, this goes both ways.

You know how you feel when you aren’t allowed to have any boundaries and she doesn’t respect you? Well, your teen feels the same way when she isn’t allowed to have boundaries. She doesn’t feel like respected by you. I have talked to some parents that don’t feel that their kids deserve respect. I completely disagree. If you want to teach your teens to respect themselves and others, you need to have respect for them.

Use this exercise to write down the areas that you want respect from your teen and areas she wants respect from you.

Hopefully, this gave you some insight into how important it is for both parties to be allowed to have boundaries.

I would like to talk about a couple of the items that are normally on a teen’s list. As an example, I will use the information from a teen that I mentor.