What If There’s Nothing Left to Take?

This is a common question, most therapists will typically hear from frustrated parents, who in an effort to control their teen’s behavior, have resorted to taking back every luxury item from their teen, only to find themselves holing on indefinitely to these items, while the teen’s behavior seemingly worsens. In more severe cases, the teen becomes so brazen in his or her defiance and takes back the seized items from the parents. Regardless, such parents can easily avoid such nightmares with their teens if they follow these three guidelines.

Problem Solving

When teens engage in behaviors their parents disagree with, they are usually trying to solve a problem in order to get their needs met. However, due to varying degrees of maturity, the teen may not be fully cognizant of how his and her behaviors are likely to influence the lives of others. In such cases, the teen engages in a behavior which inconveniences him or herself, and subsequently the entire family.

It is a natural human response for parents to become reactive, upon learning that their teen has engaged in worrisome to harmful behaviors they object to. Such as smoking marijuana, drinking alcohol, theft of money, and truancy from school. When parents are reactive in response to inappropriate behaviors by their teens, a popular approach is to seize items of luxury owned by the teen. Such as video gaming devices and smartphones. The problem is that when parents habitually engage in the behavior of seizing properties from their children in response to bad behaviors, it does little to change the mindset of the teen. Sure, the behavior may change, but the change usually becomes short-lived as the teen resorts back to a familiar pattern of behaving.

Our behaviors are how we go about getting our needs met, therefore habits represent success more times than otherwise in getting a need or set of needs met. Even if that habit is harmful to ourselves and others. So, when your teen engages in a behavior you are trying to correct, he or she is doing the best by he or she can in getting a need met. This means that before you resort to punishment, it would be beneficial to both the parent and child for the parent to learn from the teen what he or she was trying to accomplish through the behavior.

Once the parent and teen reach an understanding regarding what need the teen was trying to get met, or what specifically the teen was trying to accomplish, the parent can work with the teen to develop and practice healthier behaviors to get his or her needs met.

An agreement on consequences

Once parents and their teen have determined why the teen engaged in inappropriate behavior and agreed on a more appropriate behavior for the teen to use in getting his or her needs met, the next step is to for parent and child to agree on consequences if the inappropriate behavior repeats itself. This step is relatively easy if the process of working with your teen to understand just what he or she was trying to accomplish was successful. With this step, it is important to clarify with your teen that your goal is to help him or her practice self-discipline instead of being punitive.

As such, you may then reach an agreement with your teen to surrender, for a specified period of time, items such as video game consoles and smartphones, if you both agree that such items create too powerful a distraction for the teen to get back on track in his or her practice of self-discipline.

What if your teen absolutely refuses to cooperate with you?

In this situation, there are other issues going on with your teen, which would require professional help. It may be issues stemming from a traumatic experience or it simply may boil down to relationship issues with parent and teen.

At the end of the day, you want to seek to understand where your teen is coming from as much as you possibly can before you resort to any consequences.