Parents - Reminder that this is a short week. Students will not attend school on Thursday the 15th or Friday the 16th due to Teacher Professional Development days. PreK parents; We encourage you to continue to work with your students on developmental skills during these days. Reading to your child and play based learning are great motivators for your students to continue to grow! Alt Ed parents make sure your students is logging into Edgenuity to continue to work toward their completion goals.

Setting Rules and Consequences with Teens The teen years can certainly be challenging for parents!

How can you be successful raising your teenager? One important part of parenting a teenager is establishing rules and consequences. Rules and consequences become a critical piece of negotiating your way through the teen years.

It helps to ask yourself some questions about your rules periodically. General questions to ask include:

 Are they reasonable?

 Have the reasons for the rules been explained thoroughly?

 Are there too many rules?

 Are they enforceable?

 Has my teen been involved in making any of the rules?

 Are they consistent with other parents’ (those whom you respect) rules?

 Whose needs are the rules designed to meet? Remember, no matter how reasonable the rules are your teen will probably challenge them.

This means that you need to be prepared to impose consequences. Consequences need to meet certain conditions in order to be effective.

They should:

 Be related to the behavior so they make sense (being grounded for every infraction doesn’t allow connection to a specific behavior, but if your teen damages someone else’s property, part of the consequence might be to help pay for the damage).

 Teach your teen how to express feelings and desires in acceptable ways (you don’t damage other people’s property just because you’re angry; anger can be expressed with words).  Not be so severe or unenforceable that there is no hope of compliance (being grounded for six months will contribute to non-compliance).

 Be useful in changing behavior. They need to be unpleasant enough that your teen doesn’t want to repeat the consequence. They should not include things that you want your child to learn to enjoy, like going to Grandma’s for a weekend.

Remember, always think through consequences in advance and take time to manage your own anger or frustration before talking to your teen. For more information about setting rules and consequences with teens go to: http://circleofparents.org/downloads/circle_of_parents_teens.pdf