Rules and boundaries help your teen learn that his or her behavior has consequences and help guide towards moral, mental, and emotional maturity.
Rules are prescribed limits for behavior, conduct, or action. Boundaries are those rules that a person creates to identify for themselves what are reasonable, safe and permissible ways for other people to behave around them and how they will respond when someone steps outside those limits.
Rules and boundaries can provide a sense of stability to teens who are struggling to decipher relationships, roles, and even their own personalities. Although they may protest loudly against being required to live up to certain standards, when they have a hand in crafting those standards, and when those standards are demanding but fair, teenagers will flourish. Having something steady, firm, and predictable in a complicated and confusing world is like being handed a map, with NORTH plainly marked. Through boundaries, teens learn self-discipline, balancing freedom with responsibility, as they become more independent and self-reliant.
It’s never a good idea to make up rules and consequences during an argument or crisis. Rather, engage children in the process of setting the rules and assigning consequences beforehand. When parents include teenagers in establishing clear rules about appropriate behavior and consequences, teens take ownership and usually the arguments end. Teens no longer can claim that consequences or expectations are unfair, and parents can take on the role of calmly enforcing the pre-arranged outcomes helping teens learn from their mistakes.
The temptation to react emotionally, rather than respond calmly, when children break rules is alleviated. The breach of the rules is no longer seen as intentional disrespect or an assault on parental authority, since it is by the authority of the family – not the authority of the parents – that the rules were established. When teens help set the rules and consequences, they take ownership of the family’s standards of behavior. Even though it may not stop teenagers from breaking rules, it does help parents avoid a power struggle with their teenagers..
Another big trap in parent-teen relationships is confusing psychological control with discipline. Psychological control is the opposite of psychological autonomy. Discipline is education that produces a pattern of thought and behavior for moral and mental growth or improvement. However, expecting a certain level of behavior does not exclude allowing or encouraging your child to have different thoughts and opinions.
Too many parents get caught up in focusing on controlling their child, believing that controlling the way their child thinks will translate into controlling what their child does. By using guilt, withdrawing love, or invalidating feelings or beliefs, the parent hopes to make the child see things the parent’s way, thinking that this will ensure compliance with parental expectations.
There is a fine line here; one of the roles of parents is to help children make sense of the world by offering explanations or interpretations of events. It is when these parental offerings take on the tone of exclusiveness – when parents cannot respectfully consider and discuss a teenager’s interpretation of his or her own experience – that psychological control has taken over.
Parents should also be aware that it is the teen’s perspective on the forcefulness or tone of the suggestion that counts. Psychological control is damaging if it is perceived by the teen to be inflexible, manipulative, and/or controlling, regardless of the parent’s intention. While a parent may feel that there has been a healthy debate, to a teenager the same interchange can feel dismissive or invalidating..
Interestingly boys are more likely to report that their parents squelch their psychological autonomy than are girls. Whether this is a difference in the way parents actually relate to teen boys versus teen girls, or whether it is a difference in perception of boys versus girls is unclear.
When teens go against family rules, break the law, or behave immorally, parents generally tend to respond with less behavioral control and more psychological control, such as shaming, inducing guilt, wounding with sarcasm, condescending or belittling remarks, discounting feelings or ideas, withdrawing love, and other manipulative and emotionally abusive behaviors. This sets up a vicious cycle, as teenagers respond to both lack of monitoring and psychological control by acting out even more.
Parents will have much more success in guiding their teen to healthy adulthood by building a close relationship with their child and concentrating their efforts on parenting with love and clear and consistent rules and boundaries.