How do you handle your teen?

In My Humble Opinion
81

Only partly correct. I would have no expectation that he “come crawling back on his belly;” as I said, I would only want assurances that he intended to obey the house rules. I wouldn’t even expect or demand an apology, knowing how hard they are for sixteen-year-olds to choke out. But certainly there would have to be the at least tacit acknowledgement that I am the boss – because I am. My rules are the rules that count in my house because I own the house, I buy the food, I put the clothes on your back. There is an implicit contract or agreement that in exchange for my support, you follow my rules. If you refuse to follow my rules, then you are no longer entitled to my support. And I’m not talking about unreasonable, abusive rules; I’m talking about rules that make sense and can be objectively jusitified.

My adult friends are not living in my house at my expense. I am not in charge of raising my adult friends, by notifying them of what behaviors are not acceptable and correcting unacceptable behavior when I see it. Certainly, if you want to explain to your child that curfew is eleven because you need your sleep in order to function tomorrow, and I need my sleep as well and I can’t sleep until you’re home – okay. But once the curfew is in place and is intentionally and repeatedly broken, the question becomes what you do then. When you are dealing with a child who is in his own mind so much in charge that he ruins the entire family’s vacation rather than get in the car, it’s not time to explain why there are rules, it’s time to explain the severe consequences for breaking the most fundamental rule, which is that you respect the household and every one in it.

Because he’s a sixteen-year-old, he lives in my home, and it is my responsibility to raise him to be a respectful, responsible adult, who respectfully and responsibly insists on what he knows is right – just as I am doing in my dealings with him.

He certainly has a right to his own opinions and preferences. When they are not in his best interests or in the best interests of the house, I expect them to give way.

Absolutely. Part of living in a cooperative society is sometimes doing things you don’t really want to do in order to reinforce the group, to meet your own responsibilities, and to put the preferences of others before your own. Those are things that as a parent I am responsible for teaching. You eat dinner at the table with the family, even if you’d rather have a sandwich alone moping in your room. You spend a Sunday afternoon with your boring aunt and uncle from out of town, even though you’d rather be hanging out with your friends. And when the family has planned a vacaction for which time, money, and effort has been and will be expended, you get in the damn car. AND you put a pleasant smile on your face about it, because your realm of acceptable options also does not include ruining everyone else’s vacation because it is your sixteen-year-old opinion that “this sucks.”

In the vacation situation, I think I would respond like this: “This vacation is a family outing that has been planned for a long time. You need to make a decision, and you need to make it now: Are you part of this family, or not? Because if you are, then you need to get in the car. But if you are not, then you need to live somewhere else, because I provide food, clothing, and shelter for members of this family only. You are not going to take what you like, and do what you like, and make everyone else miserable to make yourself happy. So make up your mind: are you in, or are you out. But know this: If you choose ‘out’ you are on your own, my son.” And if he wouldn’t go, we couldn’t go either, not knowing where he’d end up, but I would kick him out. I wouldn’t kick him out and leave town, so he can’t come back and so I don’t know where he is and so he can’t find me if he needs help – but I sure as shootin’ would kick him out.

MR2001 –

It does matter. Curfews exist for reasons, which include making sure you know your child has enough rest, keeping your child safe from bad influences and people, and being able to go to bed yourself knowing your children are all safely in the house. You might argue against these reasons or other pro-curfew reasons, but if the adult has decided a curfew is a good idea, then that’s pretty much the end of it. Teenage children should be encouraged to get jobs when legally allowed to do so and when it doesn’t interfere with their school work, because it teaches them the value of money and the fundamental expectation that they will be responsible for their own support. Just because these sorts of things don’t matter to you doesn’t mean they don’t matter to a lot of people, and a lot of parents.

Birth into a modern American family is in most cases a blessing, not a curse. The child hit the cosmic lottery, and any “I didn’t ask to be born!” boo-hooing would be met with me by amused derision. My respect for my children will be commensurate with what they deserve at whatever age they are. That will always include talking to them respectfully, not belittling them or allowing others to do soame, listening to their opinions and arguments (within reason), and not hitting them or allowing anyone else to hit them. It will NOT include allowing a teenager to disrespect me or my household.

So yes – at the age when a child is physically and mentally capable of making his own decisions and, by logical extension, providing for himself, I absolutely DO believe he owes me something. I offer food, clothing, shelter, and guidance, in return for which he submits to some rules, gatherings, and expectations that he might find annoying and that he might not personally agree with. That’s the deal. If he doesn’t like it, he can go out and try to find a better deal himself.

IMO, it’s a much harder situation when the child is this rebellious and is, say, thirteen. Then you really do have a problem because the child cannot take care of itself in the cruel world and cannot even reasonably be given the opportunity to try, because he or she can’t protect him/herself. But at sixteen? My way or the highway, baby.

82

And I should further qualify that the “disrespect” I am talking about is the fundamental, repeatedly breaking house rules, disregardng the parents variety. I certainly would not start by kicking the kid out, just because he’s mouthy or rolls his eyes or whatever variety of low-level “I’m asserting my own independent personhood by expressing some degree of defiance” behavior he is modeling. There is a certain amount of disrespect that is par for the course in parenting teens, although I do think kids should be called on it when it occurs.

But that’s not the level of lack of respect the OP is talking about.

83

standing ovation for Jodi

84

When my first kid was about 2, I told my sister, who already had two kids, “I’m going to raise Boy so he follows my rules and instructions out of love and respect, and never because I’m MAKING him do it.”

I was completely serious. I think she laughed for 10 solid minutes.

Today? I’d laugh my head off, too.

85

I was a patient undergoing abdominal surgery once. I do not feel that qualifies me to advise a surgeon on how to do operate.

I’m sorry if that seems flippant, but you must realize that being a child does not equate to being a parent. Perhaps this underlying assumption is what makes it difficult for you to understand the need for parental authority.

The parent-child relationship is inherently between non-equals. This is not the same as saying children are “slaves” or “servants”; merely that they are subordinate to parental authority. This is not an evil; it is both necessary and right. The degree of subordination decreases as the child grows and develops, but it must be enforced from earliest childhood if there is to be any hope of controlling the child’s behavior through the teen years. And controlling the child’s behavior is one of the responsibilities of being a parent.

Yes, explanations and descriptions of why certain behavior is unacceptable are also part of being a good parent, and reasoning and discussing with the child are essential to raising an independent, thinking, questioning human being. Blind, slavish obedience to capricious parental whim is not what I (nor anybody else here, I believe) have advocated. But ultimately, authority must reside with the parent, and to be meaningful, that authority must be enforced. That means restrictions, limitations, and sometimes, as in the case of sheer defiance, punishment.

The case described in the OP, as I read it, is one where the parents assert their authority, but have never in fact enforced it. So now, after sixteen years of seeing that his parents are ultimately powerless, the child believes that they do not have any real authority whatsoever. And he’s right: by failing to enforce their authority, they have abdicated it, and have no control over the boy whatsoever. In that, they are failures as parents, and at this late period in the boy’s life, it is unlikely they will ever be able to correct their failure. The boy does not respect them, because they have given him no reason to do so, and every reason not to. Why would anybody respect someone who claims authority verbally, but doesn’t have the backbone to enforce it physically? In that sense, the boy’s lack of respect is entirely justified and understandable; he’s never learned to respect them, because they never taught him to. So he is merely contemptuous, and repeated attempts to cajole or plead with him only deepen that contempt. Very sad. And very common.

86

Sorry I haven’t been able to contribute much of my own input, as work’s gotten a bit crazy unexpectedly. However, I’ve read all the entries carefully, and very much apprecitae the sharing of different viewpoints. I’ll try to distill them as best I can the next time I talk with the sibs-in-law!

Thanks!

87

constanze, thanks for the clarification. I thought you were arguing from the position that it is never okay for a parent to force a child to do something.

88

My parents do love me. They also raised me to be able to take care of myself and respect other people when in their homes - including them. And they give me the same consideration when they’re at my home. My parents are not authoritarian, but their house is THEIR HOUSE, and what they say goes. This doesn’t mean that I wasn’t allowed to voice my opinion (I was, emphatically) or have fun (so long as they knew where I was and what time I’d b e home). It just meant that they’d raised me to be better than that, and if I didn’t want to be a good person, I could move on with my life.

Yeah, well, my thoughts are that the parent IS the boss. Until you are 18 or legally emancipated, not only are you in their care, but they also have to take the fall for anything you do that’s going to get you into monetary trouble - if you break the law, they have to pay a fine, if you put grafitti somewhere, they have to pay to fix it. THE PARENT IS THE BOSS! That doesn’t mean that the parent has to be an asshole about it, but they. Are. The. Boss. Most teenagers nowadays have no freakin’ clue what is going on in the world around them (although a lot of adults aren’t much better). While I approve of trying to ease them into the world of Adulthood, I do not approve of letting them feel like they are on par with you as the parent. Until they move out on their own and are successful in their own life, they. Are. Not.

Also, I was raised to believe that you should always respect someone while in their dwelling. ALWAYS. Regardless of whether said person is actually worthy of respect, you have come into their dwelling and while you are there you will be polite and courteous. I was paying rent to my parents before I moved out and I still gave them that respect. It’s common freakin’ courtesy.

~Tasha

89

I want to try this in different language if I may. I do think that parents do their children a disservice when they refuse to accept their own power. And sometimes I think it is the more reflective of us that have the problem – it is after all a truly mind numbing amount of power at this time in this place.

I could be projecting; I was myself raised in an extended immigrant family and I know that the methods of power sharing and distribution in that family were, er, sometimes an issue for people who “married in”.

But truly, in your garden variety nuclear family, it’s just parents and kids, and usually one of the parents is dominant in terms of power regarding children. So then it’s really just one parent doing all of it. Which is I think really scary to some folks.

However, here is what I mean: it is fundamentally dishonest it seems to me to behave as though parental power does not exist, or to refuse to exercise it, or to refuse to take responsibility for its exercise for good or ill. And in large ways and small, I think some kids pick up on that and that this is part of the entitled child syndrome people are alluding to in this thread.

I have certainly seen more than my share, for instance, of children given false choices (choices being the name of the game nowadays). If I said to my young children to take a simple example that they might either eat dinner or go to bed hungry, I meant that. It was entirely their lookout and I was not angry or disapproving or in any way negative about it, whichever they chose. I never gave them a choice where I had a desired outcome – if I had a desired outcome I either requested or instructed them to do that, depending on how strongly I felt about it.

I still periodically say to them: “this is not a request, it is an instruction” and they still believe me.

I do not know that I can agree that children need to be “trained” except at a very early age – I did for instance train my children to stop dead in their tracks when I uttered the emergency word, and I did it mostly the same way I had trained animals in my earlier experience. And I cannot bring myself to go along with the idea that parental authority needs to be enforced exactly, at least with my own children my experience was not that I had to teach it to them. But I do think it has to be exercised. and I think it is unfair to children when parents do not acknowlege their power.

90

I don’t mean to pick on you, but I do want to ride this here coattail in on a mild tangent. I think that in general, one of the pieces of the “entitled child” syndrome is that children are not at this point in time a part of the family, not really. They are its crowning achievement or they are its purpose, but in some way I think the way of parenting at this moment in some ways excludes children from being important to the family and also from feeling that.

Possibly this has to do with affluence and also the decreasing number of children per family. But I cannot bring myself to think of my own children in terms of their living at my pleasure in my house. It’s our family, it’s our house. I didn’t follow the rules of my own family because it was my parents house they supported me and it was their rules; we all followed the rules of our family because it was our family.

My parents would have been insulted I think had I offered to pay rent to them at any time. I did give them all the money I earned at all my jobs when I lived at home until they told me not to. After that, I spent some part of “my” money on, well, joint expenses. Groceries. Repair. Whatever.

My own family does not assume (or hope) that kids will move out at 18, though they may if they like obviously, and some of us did. I did, as I went to school elsewhere and the commute was not practical. Some of us lived at various times with various extended family memebers and sometimes my cousins came to stay with us for a while – generally when they were having problems with their own parents which were easier to work out from a distance, ahem, like say the problem in the OP.

In any event, I look around me and what I see is children who do not feel important to, much less imperative to, the family in which they live. And in many ways they are right; kids have gone from being an asset to being an expense. And I think there is a certain amount of uuneasiness about that.

91

I think this is very wise. Growing up, my brother and I had regular chores from an early age, and it gave us the sense that in a family everyone contributes. My mom took care of three ailing grandparents and from about the age of twelve on, I was often expected to go with her when she visited them. It would be my job to do their dishes or help clean their house. It was never discussed, just “I’ll need your help at Grandma’s today.” It made me feel useful, not put upon.

I don’t have children, but I do work at a college, and it amazes me how many of our students have never had any real responsibility. It’s sad.

92

  1. If he’s not getting enough rest, the natural consequences of that will catch up with him soon enough. No need to impose your own. OTOH, if he can make it through the day with the sleep that he gets even when he comes home late, then more power to him, right?

  2. Bad influences and people? He lets you manage your own social life; let him manage his own.

  3. If you can’t go to bed while he’s out of the house, that sounds like your problem, not his. Sleep aids are available without a prescription at retailers nationwide.

I’d say it’s pretty much just pointless authoritarianism when you put your foot down without valid reasons.

Encouraged, sure. But a teenager who chooses not to get a summer job isn’t exactly “out of control”.

I’m not comparing it to being born into some third-world family. I’m comparing it to not being born. A person who doesn’t exist doesn’t need food or shelter. If you bring a person into existence, then you have an obligation to him - you’re responsible for the fact that he has needs.

Hmm. Summoning creatures who are indebted to you sounds like something you’d find in D&D (or the Old Testament), not a reasonable way to look at parenting.

Perhaps you can point out which behavior described in the OP is so disrespectful. As I wrote earlier, other than the vacation thing, it seems like no big deal.

93

I’m also wondering why the vacation standoff took eight hours. Because he kept arguing? Well, he wasn’t arguing by himself.

And I’m still wondering why it’s wrong to take the last doughnut. Someone has to take the last one.

94

Jodi:

Assuming it was your kid acting like this, do you not find it reasonable that your kid might respond, “Bullshit. If you can’t sleep when I’m out of the house overnight, how do you expect to sleep if I walk out that door right now?”

Moreover, what if the kid responds to said ultimatum by simply leaving the car, gathering his belongings from the house, and walking away?

Also, as has been pointed out, I’m going to call shenanigans on your rules being able to be objectively justified. As has been pointed out by Mr2001, none of your reasons for a curfew actually require a curfew. Tell me, if your teenage child was to hand you a bottle of sleeping pills, point to the speed-dial of 911 on his cell phone, and mention that he was having this particular discussion on three hours’s sleep, would you respond, “Oh. It appears that all of my reasons for requiring a curfew have been dealt with to my satisfaction. Stay out as late as you like.”?
Also, to those who have recommended taking stuff away from problem children as punishment: what do you do when they take your stuff? Trust me, having your kid take your wallet and car keys will hurt you far worse than taking their clothes or computer will hurt them.

Besides, it doesn’t address the root issue; if a kid has determined that your authority does not apply to him, then it doesn’t. Physical force only works until the kid hits you back (and a kid that has decided that you have no authority over him may well), and you simply cannot enforce your will on a person who has decided not to let you. You can’t put a lock his door that he can’t remove (possibly by demolishing the door, taking yours off its hinges, and replacing his with it), you can’t install bars in his window that he can’t, eventually, pry out (possibly by taking chunks of the house with them), and unless your refriderator is locked, you can’t enforce anything about the kid’s diet.

Once a kid learns that you cannot force him to do anything (and ultimately, you can’t), you can either make the kid want to follow your rules, or accept that the kid will only follow your rules when he wants to. You can physically remove the kid from your house via the cops and from your life via the courts, but you still won’t have made the kid do what you want.

95

I’ve heard it as “Never smoke the last cigarette or drink the last drink in the house.” The idea is that when you’re down to one, you go out and get more, so that your house is never devoid of cigarettes, alcohol, or doughnuts. Not sure if that’s how it worked with tashabot’s family.

96

This is such a fascinating thread, I’ve especially enjoyed your posts Jess and Marienee.

At 2 1/2 twins are at the other end of the spectrum - I can physically put them where I want them, I can (legally, anyway) spank them, I can easily take away toys to punish them.

But it’s still the same battle because the point isn’t “I can win, so we’re doing it my way”, but “I want you to choose well so that we don’t have to clash.”

The thing I keep reading about toddlers, and I can’t help but believe this is also true of teenagers, is that while they have an absolute need to push boundaries and develop autonomy, they have an even stronger desire for a close relationship with their parents.

I hope that rather than upping the stakes on this battle for power, your ILs explore ways of strengthening their relationship with their son. If he won’t go for therapy, by all means THEY should go anyway because THEY need to change.

97

I absolutely abhor the ‘my house, my rules’ argument, and thankfully my parents did as well. While legally it is their house, in practice it was OUR house, the house for the whole family. Nothing magically changes when a child turns 18 that grants them capacity for logical thought, and by the time they’re 16 you have to learn other coping skills than authoritarianism.

I’m one of the least rebellious people (against my parents) that I’ve ever met, and I was never more angry at them, nor as willing to disobey their wishes, as when they attempted to ground me for the first time in my life when I was 17. I don’t have kids so maybe my opinion is considered worthless by some of you, but I was present when I was growing up, and I have come down strongly on the side of treating your children increasingly like an adult who should be respected as they grow into one.

98

That’s an excellent point. If we were talking about someone having problems with another adult, we would never expect the other adult to change their behaviour; we would tell the person having problems to figure out what they can do to deal with the situation better. I absolutely think that applies here; what the In-laws have been doing obviously isn’t working, so it’s time for a different plan. And the boy in question is 16 - that’s pretty close to being an adult. At this point, maybe the best way they can continue to teach him is by example.

99

AFAIK the age of majority in all 50 states (plus DC, Puerto Rico, etc) is 18 and parents cannot unilaterelly emancipate their children. Even if the son agrees he’d need to demonstrate to the court that he’s capable of supporting himself without resorting to illegal activity or welfare. On the other hand 16 is past compulsory school-age in most states so all truancy will result in is being dropped from the attendance roles. Depending on the parents financial resources they can legally have him “commited” to an institution of some sort without a court order and still have it classified as “voluntary commitment”.

100

In my house, it was a matter of asking first. Don’t just “take” it, be polite enough to ask if anyone else wants it or wants to share it.