Principle #4: Choice and Accountability Invite Growth

Most parents’ greatest hope is that their children will turn out to be healthy, productive, and successful. During the period of adolescence as children exercise agency, parents are often presented with mixed indications as to the direction their children will go. Naturally, it is hard to watch your child make poor choices. It is easy to fear the worst and imagine where these poor choices may lead in the years to come if allowed to continue.

Most parents would love it if their children came with a “manual override” feature that allowed them to take over at times when a child begins making unwise decisions. Unfortunately, no such feature exists and, in the long run, it would not be beneficial for children learn from their choices, including the poor choices that is, if parents will let them learn.

As a parent, there are some things you can do to help your child learn to make good choices. We have already mentioned several of them in the first three parenting principles.

• Strengthen your relationship with your child so that they will want to please you and will value your guidance.
• Lead by example.
• Be clear about your expectations.

We will now highlight three more:

• Provide choices.
• Help children think through their choices.
• Hold them accountable for their choices through consequences.

Provide an appropriate level of choice

The truth is that your child always has a choice no matter what you do. You may set an expectation that your child be home by midnight on weekends. Nevertheless, it is his choice whether to honor that expectation. What he cannot choose is the consequence for his choice.

To develop skills in self-governing, children need to:

• Learn that when they choose something, they are also choosing the consequences that go with it. (“When you pick up one end of a stick, you pick up the other end too.”)
• Learn to think before making choices to evaluate the possible consequences of different choices.
• Recognize that actions are a choice they alone make and are responsible for.

Effective parents set rules and expectations that include an appropriate level of choice. Along with that, they find opportunities to help their children think through choices before making them.

The diagram below illustrates differing levels of choice which a parent may use for different circumstances. Each of these has merit and can be useful for different circumstances. Notice how they differ in the level of freedom they offer to the child, with less freedom on the left, moving to more freedom on the right. The goal is to move gradually toward more freedom as children mature.

• • • Setting a clear expectation/rule and then allowing the child to choose to follow it or receive the consequence.
    • Providing the child with two or three options and letting the child choose between those options.
    • Providing guidance as your child talks with you about their ideas and plans for how to handle a situation, then letting your child choose.
    • Allowing the child to make decisions they feel are best without guidance from you.

Less Freedom

More Freedom

As you decide how restrictive to be in the choices you offer to your child, consider the following questions:

• Does my child have adequate information to make the decision?
• Does he understand the possible consequences for the different choices involved?
• Does his decision put himself or others at probable risk for harm?
• Will he be able to carry out the decision without assistance from others ($, resources)?
• Can he shoulder the consequences of his choice if things do not work out?
• Is he mentally and emotionally stable?
• Is the decision he wants to make in harmony with legal guidelines?
• Is the decision compatible with our moral standards as parents (if living at home)?

Consider the following scenarios. For each one, what degree of choice would you suggest? ( Refer to the diagram above.)

• • 1. Your ten-year-old wants to loan his X-Box and all of his games to a boy he just met at school.
  • 2. Your sixteen-year-old wants to smoke cigarettes.
  • 3. Your teen wants to spend the night at a friend’s home two days after returning from boarding school.
  • 4. Your seventeen-year-old wants to manage his own schoolwork, including homework, etc.

Be Flexible

Adolescence is all about becoming an individual and learning to steer one’s own life. Parents will do well to allow and even point out and offer as much choice as possible within the limits of their expectations and rules. When you can’t be flexible about the “what,” look for ways to be flexible about the “how,” “where,” or “when.” Take the example of a teen who is expected to wash and vacuum the family car he uses.Parents could allow him to choose whether to wash and vacuum it at home, or pay with his own funds to take it to a drive through car wash. He could decide which day he’d like to do it, as long as it gets done by an agreed upon deadline. Even when something needs to be done very soon, a teen will appreciate the choice to do it “now or 15 minutes from now.” The more choices you make available, the more tolerable it is for the teen when you must direct and restrict.

We were in the car heading to a weekend vacation in a familiar nearby city with our two early teens. Sitting there in the back seat was kind of symbolic of how they must have often felt about such trips–not much chance to “steer.”

Then we said, “Look, we figure we have X amount of money for this trip. Y amount of money is already committed to the hotel. We also need to do ______. What’s left is�for food and activities. We could eat at cheaper places and do more activities or vice versa, whatever you decide. How about you draw up a plan for what you’d like to do and what kind of places you’d like to eat at? Make sure we still get to eat on the last day!”

Parents can help children learn to think through the consequences of a choice before acting. This is easiest to start doing when the teen has a choice before him that doesn’t involve things parents disapprove of. In that case he may be more open to guidance while the parent, as an ally, walks with him to think what the consequences of different choices might be. The habit of thinking in this way will serve the teen well on tougher issues.

Think of a couple of expectations or rules you have for your teen. What flexibility can you allow or offer?

Consequences teach accountability

The best consequences are natural and logical consequences that are understood in advance. Natural consequences are those that will happen without parent intervention. For example, if your child chooses to skip a shift at work, he will likely be reprimanded or fired. Natural consequences teach children realities about the results of their behavior. When you allow natural consequences to follow your child’s actions, the consequence itself does the teaching. There is no need for lectures or such from you. In fact, adding your anger or disapproval on top of a natural consequence can lead the teen to focus on resentment toward you rather than on realizing the results of his behavior.

Natural consequences are great teachers. There are just a couple situations when you might want to interfere. That would be when the natural consequence includes danger or harm to others, or serious harm to your teen. An example would be when a teen driver continually speeds. In those cases logical consequences are more appropriate. In addition, when natural consequences won’t occur for many months or years, it’s generally better to rely on logical consequences.

Logical consequences are those that are logically tied to the misbehavior. For example, if your child gets a speeding ticket while using the family car, you may choose to take away his ability to use the car for a designated period of time– a logical consequence. In this case there’s also a natural consequence, a ticket that must be paid by the teen.

Examples of logical consequences are temporarily losing a privilege that was misused; being required to replace/fix something of someone else’s that was damaged or lost; or completing a task that was left undone. When it comes time to enforce the consequence, it should be done in a calm, matter-of-fact way. As with natural consequences, trying to punish with anger actually weakens the learning opportunity.

Here’s an example of a parent who mustered the strength to follow through with consequences in a difficult situation:

• This man’s 16-year-old daughter had some oppositional behaviors and a history of some drug use. Family rules and consequences were set up. In order to have her freedoms —spending time with friends, going places, etc. she would need to stay clean and sober. That would be confirmed through drug testing administered by her therapist. Dad had told her if she didn’t take a drug test he would count it as testing positive.
• When she went to therapy she refused to be tested. So the dad said, “You’re back down to only being able to have friends at the house. You can’t go other places.” She threw a big tantrum. She told him how much she hated him, how unfair this was and how she wished he would go back to being the old Dad that he was before she was sent away to a treatment program. She told him if he implemented this consequence she would run away. He calmly stood his ground and said that if she chose to run away there would be additional consequences.
• When that night came, she didn’t have friends over; she didn’t go away; she didn’t do anything. It had been a lot of bravado. She continued to refuse to take a drug test for another two weeks. Then she took the test and it came back clean. They were able to move forward.

Sticking with it and following through with the consequences allowed the dad to avoid the power struggles he had so often engaged in previously. He set the clear expectation, then followed through and upheld the consequence. That was a very empowering moment for him. It really changed how he looked at his parenting.

Traps that rob children of learning accountability

Of course it’s not easy to follow through with consequences. It’s definitely not the path of least resistance. We’re going to point out three “traps” parents commonly fall into, hardly aware of doing so, that keep them from holding their children accountable.

1. Threaten and Release

• Many parents, motivated by concern for their children, end up doing what we call “Threaten and Release” parenting. It happens in situations when you as a parent have set a consequence. For example, you may “threaten” your child with harsh consequences (e.g., lengthy groundings, being kicked out of the house) in attempts to get him to obey a rule. When your child does not obey, you may find it difficult or impossible to follow through with the consequence because you know it is too extreme.
• As a result, by doing nothing, you “release” him from the consequences of his own choices, teaching him this devastating lesson: “Even if I make poor choices, things will work out in the end.”
• A solution is to be more thoughtful about consequences you set. When you can, look ahead to anticipate issues for which you will need a rule and a consequence so you can plan them before the heat of the moment. Also, reflect on recurring trouble spots between you and your teen to see if setting clear expectations and logical consequences would help.
• When parents fall into this trap, their children learn: “Even if I make poor choices, things will work out in the end.”

2. Prevent and Rescue

• Another trap well-intended parents fall into is “Prevent and Rescue” parenting. This trap is more common with teens than with younger children. It is when you interfere with consequences the “real world” provides. The first step into this trap occurs when you thoughtfully begin to put together a plan to “prevent” your teen from failing, usually without talking with him. Then comes the attempt to force-feed the plan to your teen. This step generally goes about as well as trying to force-feed unwanted food to a 1-year-old! Even when the plan does “get into his mouth,” it often is spit out when you aren’t looking. In other words, they generally don’t follow the plan.
• Why is that? Adolescence is a time when teens seek to prove to themselves and others that they can succeed on their own. By simply adopting their parents’ plan for success, they tend to feel more dependent on their parents, not less.
• With the parent’s strategy for success not being followed, the frustrated parent watches from the sidelines as failure approaches their teen. Then at the two-minute warning, thinking they are doing what is best for the teen, the parent puts on his “rescue” hat and jumps in to save the game (e.g., finishing the homework or completing the project for the teen, negotiating a settlement, paying the bill). Unfortunately, while the parent may have won the battle, the overall war is being lost as the child learns another destructive lesson: “If I don’t do the work, somebody else will.”
• Because their parents have done the work for them or rescued them, they did not develop the skills they would have if they were to have struggled through it themselves (sometimes with parental support). The longer these patterns occur the more and more helpless the teen feels. The more helpless the teen feels, the more dependent he becomes on his parents to do things for him. This is often referred to as “learned helplessness.”
• When parents fall into this trap, their children learn: “If I don’t do the work, somebody else will.”

3. Set and Forget

• A third trap is to invest thought and effort into setting an expectation or rule, but then to not monitor or check whether the rule has been kept or broken. Busy schedules lead us to feeling fatigued and wanting to avoid additional conflict. As a result, it’s tempting to fall into this trap � even when we realize we are doing it. Still, falling prey to this trap robs your child of learning opportunities. Although teens may seem glad not to be held accountable, they get the negative message that parents are not reliable or don’t really mean what they say. It also contributes to the mistaken impression that life beyond the family operates this way too.
• A mother told her daughter she wanted her cell phone turned in to the parents at 10:00 p.m. every night, but never asked for it, and never held her accountable when she didn’t turn it in….until about a month later when she found out the daughter had used the phone to text her boyfriend all night long. She tried to set the rule again but her daughter didn’t take her seriously.
• The mother can improve her parenting at this point by setting the rule again. However, she will need to be very consistent if her daughter is to learn from this situation. The mother may experience a period of time when the daughter continues to resist, before she realizes that her mother will follow through.
• When parents fall into this trap, their children learn: “Chances are, if I break a rule, I’ll get away with it.”

A teen was sent to a wilderness program and a therapeutic boarding school for a number of reasons, among them poor academic performance, drugs and alcohol, sneaking out and taking his parents’ car, and disrespect to the family. He did well in his program and achieved the highest level possible.

When he returned home the family was encouraged to randomly drug test him, in order to help provide incentive for staying off drugs. One day they had some suspicions that he was high. As they went to drug test him he told them that it really hurt his feelings that he was being drug tested just because he was being hyper. He said in essence, “This is who I am! If every time I’m happy you drug test me, then I might as well not be happy.”

Based on his statement they decided not to drug test him at that time. Another time his sister received a text message from a boy who said he saw this teen at a party and that he was high. The teen denied it. Based on the fact that he was doing fairly well in other areas, they decided not to drug test him. As it turned out, he did return to alcohol and drugs.

Children who have learned these types of misguided assumptions tend to put off homework, skip classes, miss work shifts, and in general do things that are reckless and self-sabotaging.

An example is a student who puts off an assignment and a mom who reminds and reminds and encourages. The student continues to put it off and chooses a night with friends rather than doing the homework assignment. Mom then stays up late after the son gets home, completing the assignment with him. Is this really helping? It is more important to her that he complete assignments than it is to him, and she works much harder.

Assignment:

• In your own life, identify a time when you learned a valuable lesson by suffering the consequences of your actions. (Consider sharing this experience with your teen.)
• Identify one or two times when your child made poor choices, but learned from the natural consequences of her behavior.
• Identify one or two times when your child made a poor choice but you rescued him from the consequences–and the lesson. What lesson did he/she miss out on?
• What will you have to “let go” of in order to stop rescuing your teen?

If you are one of many parents who have unintentionally fallen into the traps described above, take comfort in knowing that your child can still learn.

Reversing these parenting patterns is a scary and painful process to work through. However, the alternative — continuing to “Threaten and Release,” “Prevent and Rescue,” or “Set and Forget” — is exponentially more painful because the stakes just get higher as your teen gets older.

Scott’s parents watched as the time he had to complete his independent study melted away. In frustration, they decided to inform Scott that he would need to spend one hour each day on the class until he had finished it.

Scott protested. His parents insisted. Out of a desire to finish the conversation he agreed to the plan. Soon, it became apparent that agreeing to the plan and following the plan were two different things. His parents constantly reminded him of the plan, but days passed by without any work on the class.

The parents realized that they should re-evaluate the way they were handling this. They took a careful look at what the naturally-occurring consequence would be. It was that Scott would need to repeat the class and pay the fee himself. They realized this would teach Scott the importance of managing his time better. So they decided not to keep pushing Scott to follow their plan, and to let him deal with the consequences.

They let Scott know they would no longer consider themselves in charge of getting him to finish on time; and they made sure he knew they would not step in to pay any more for the class. Scott found out that for a fee he could extend the deadline. He paid for that himself, then finished before the new deadline.

The key to teaching accountability is to establish reasonable consequences, clearly stated, and then hold your child accountable by enforcing logical consequences and allowing for natural consequences. Remember, your teen may not believe that you are going to follow through with holding him accountable and may continue to act out until he sees that you are serious. As a result, things may get worse before they get better.

Alex continually disregarded his curfew despite his mom’s attempts to invite him to do so. Finally, she informed him that if he was not home by curfew, she would leave a tent and sleeping bag in the backyard for him to use. Alex did not believe his mom would actually follow through. To his surprise, at 2 a.m. that night he found himself locked out. He called his mom and tried to convince her to let him in. She reminded him that when he chose to break curfew, he also chose the consequence of camping outside that night. She said good night and hung up the phone.

From Your Trustyy Coach

• Avoid the reactive extremes. In other words, if you are the type of parent who has consistently used the “Prevent and Rescue” approaches, be careful not to jump to the other extreme by withdrawing all support. Instead, begin by helping your child create her plan to succeed. Listen to her ideas first and then, if she is open to it, help build on her plan by offering suggestions.
• The longer you have used the “Prevent and Rescue” or the “Threaten and Release” approaches, the more time it will likely take for your child to unlearn the lessons you have taught her. As a result, you need to not be surprised if she initially fails when you first stop these patterns. When this happens, take courage and find support. Remember, reversing these patterns will be painful for both you and your child.
• Keep in harmony with Principle #3: “Clear expectations encourage consistency and teach values.” Let your child know that you will no longer be rescuing her. This will invite her to act differently by not leaving things up to you. Don’t just change your strategy with no explanation. Let her know too that you are happy to talk with her and support her as long as it doesn’t mean doing for her what she can do for herself.
• Remember, you cannot force your children to make good choices, but you can help them learn to make good choices! You can teach them, share ideas with them, give them options, clearly communicate expectations, and then allow children to choose whether to follow them or not. If they make good choices, good things follow, including increased trust and freedom. If they make poor choices, they need to experience the difficult but instructive consequences. Consequences help them learn the following lesson: “The choices I make will ultimately determine the quality of my life and my relationships with others.”