Now that you’ve had the initial conversation with your teen and listened to their perspective, the next step is taking that feedback and drafting some expectations and consequences.
Clear expectations are so important but easy to fumble if not written well. We’ll provide examples of effective expectations and common mistakes to avoid, and give you a template to ensure you craft expectations that are clear, concise, and enforceable.
If it feels a little overwhelming to take all the thoughts shared and turn them into something concrete, here are some tips that might help:
Start with the issue that you feel will make the biggest difference.
If there were multiple critical issues you have identified, try to limit them to as few as possible to avoid overwhelm. You can always add more later as you all become more comfortable with using Trustyy and following this process.
Focus on integrating areas of agreement from your discussion to build buy-in
When setting consequences, try to make them proportional to the issue, and be sure you are committed to following through on enforcing them.
Be sure to also include positive rewards/incentives they would find motivating
Write each issue down clearly and concisely organized by issue
Review the draft with your co-parent before sharing
The goal is to demonstrate to the child that you reflected on their perspective while outlining fair guidelines to address the priority issues together. This collaborative approach gives the draft its best shot at being well received when reviewing it.
At this stage, we recommend doing this on paper using the worksheet we have provided. We will show you how to add them into the Trustyy app in a later step.
You can revise the template you used previously, or download a new blank template:
Expectations and Consequences Template – Download and complete this Special Expectations & Consequences Template to get a sense for how you might best address and discuss the concerns you have identified.
After you have completed a draft of expectations and consequences that can be shared with your child, you are ready to move on to the next step!