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| Actions if Consequences don’t Work | Lots of parents often say that they’ve tried everything, and consequences don’t work with their children. Fortunately there is way out from such situation. Firstly, we need to talk about the children for whom consequences do work. These are children who are used to arrangement and are used to restrictions being arranged for them. Such limits teach teens that there are rewards and consequences in life. If it is a problem for you to make consequences work with your teens, you have to take to your consideration one important point. In order to make consequences to work, you have to have rewards. If you have no rewards, then it’s very difficult to come up with a consequence without being punitive.
Parents should sit down and make up a list of consequences and a list of rewards for their teenagers. This list must comprise things they have the funds for, things that don’t cost a lot of money and things that they can get in the time they have in their day as parents. For instance, as a reward, you can take your child down to the park for a half an hour and shoot some baskets. Just half an hour is all you need. It’s not necessary to take two hours. Parents also have to be sure that the rewards and consequences on the list are sensible to that child’s developmental level.
Parents are also recommended to order the rewards and consequences from mildest to heaviest so that you have small rewards for small achievements, big rewards for big achievements. The same scheme goes for consequences – smaller consequences that flow out of minor infractions, and more serious consequences for more serious offenses. Besides, taking the phone is a main consequence, and parents should use that cautiously. It’s typically a main consequence because it is usually a very important thing to a teenager. The more important an item is to a child, the more he’ll learn when it’s taken as part of a consequence. But you have to remember that when you’re giving consequences, you don’t want to use all your big guns at once.
Having such kind of menu of rewards and consequences provides you with a roadmap for how to deal with the hills, valleys and forks in the road you come across each day with your child. Besides, it keeps parents from taking shortcuts, which we all do in parenting. Parents are tired, they work hard, they have high levels of anxiety over their money and their professional careers, and they have lots of demands beyond caring for the children. Because of this, parents often start taking shortcuts that are unproductive, such as taking the cell phone for every offense or grounding a teenager for a week. If you have a menu of rewards and consequences, you can give a suitable consequence for the offense – one that allows the child to learn.
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