Hi, I'm Nicholeen Peck and I teach all about parenting, relationship development
and self-government and in this video we're going to be talking about getting kids to obey curfew.
In this video we'll be talking about how to set things up so your child understands curfew
and wants to follow it and then what to do follow-up wise if you do happen to have a curfew
problem. When a person learns self-government, that means that they plan ahead and self-government is
definitely a powerful principle for success. So how do you plan ahead for curfew? Well there's certain
things that you can teach your children ahead of time that make a very big difference. Now for this
teaching to stick, you definitely want to have a good, solid relationship with your child. So if your
relationship with your child is struggling, then a lot of the teaching or skill development that
you're trying to impart to the child just doesn't really attach well. In fact it makes it much harder
for them because they're emotionally attached to being oppositional to you so make sure that
you take the time to develop a good relationship and bond with them. This means that you've got to
talk about other things besides behavior, other things besides what they should and shouldn't do
but instead have shared experiences together and talk about other meaningful things. Once you have a
good relationship in place, then you're ready for a really good skill that makes not just curfew
easier to obey but everything. So what is this magic skill? The skill is called following
instructions. In the teaching self-government parenting course, we teach four basic skills to
children. They are following instructions, accepting "no" answers and criticism, accepting consequences
and disagreeing appropriately. That first skill following instructions is vital for obeying
curfew. In fact for obeying any instruction that a parent gives. So you're going to want to make sure
that your child understands following instructions, not just related to curfew but related to anything.
Doing chores or helping cook a meal, maybe running an errand for you, whatever it happens to be. What
type of steps do you need to keep in mind? There are five of them. You look at the person, keep
a calm face, voice and body, say okay or ask to disagree appropriately, do the task immediately
and then check back. So remember that one that said say okay or disagree appropriately? Disagreeing
appropriately is also going to be a very useful skill for helping children learn to obey curfew
and did you notice that one that was accepting consequences? If you need to correct a problem,
remember they'll need to also be able to accept consequences and wait, what if you tell them no,
you can't stay out extra late tonight? Then they might need how to accept "no" answers so
there you go. There are four basic skills and those four basic skills are gonna help you with
any problem you might have related to curfew. We're gonna talk about how to teach these
skills and how to fix things when they don't obey the curfew but before we get to that,
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So before you ever allow the child to have that moment where they are in the time that they're
going to have to obey curfew, you've got to have a talk ahead of time. So you've already strengthened
that relationship and you're continually working on it, that's step number one, step number two
you've taught them the four basic skills they need for success with anything that they're instructed
to do or any "no" answer they might receive from you so now what do you do? Now you say
okay, here's the situation with curfew. So we have a certain rule in our family that curfew is at this
time. Maybe it's midnight, maybe it's 10, this depends on you know what age the child is and
how you run things in your home but you explain to them what the curfew is, then you explain to them
why that curfew is important. Be sure to give a why and then explain how you're going to handle the
situation if they do not obey the curfew. So in our family, if a person does not follow an instruction
then they are choosing to earn an extra chore but maybe you've decided curfew is so important that
it's and it's such a safety issue that a person gets in the house by a certain time of night that
maybe there's going to be even a special negative consequence that's not an extra chore. So maybe it
would even be something bigger. You would have to explain what that is the child right then because
if you don't and you just start pulling phones away, you're limiting things that they can do, as
soon as they miss the curfew the first time, then you've actually started a power struggle with them.
You don't want to be engaging in a power struggle with your child, you want to lay things out ahead
of time so they know exactly what to expect. This makes things a lot better for you and for them
because it decreases everybody's anxiety and increases predictability as well as consistency.
But what do you do if you've set it all up and you've explained this is how we'll handle it,
these are the positives if you obey curfew, these are the negatives if you don't obey curfew and
then they don't obey curfew, something happens. Now hopefully they do like my children and they call
me or they text me and they say hey mom, can I disagree appropriately about curfew and then
I'll say sure and they'll say I know I'm supposed to be home by midnight but I have to take a couple
of other people home first, it could take me a few more minutes. I might not be able to be there until
about quarter after, is that okay with you? Well guess what I'm going to do is I'm going to say yes
because they're using a great self-government skill called disagreeing appropriately but if I
did say no, they would tell their friends I'm so sorry. You're going to have to get somebody else
to take you home. I've got to go and that's what they would do because they would honor that but
they know that I'm a reasonable person, I'm not just some crazy tyrant or dictator. I want them
to problem solve and to learn those skills which means I'm definitely going to hear a disagree
appropriately but let's say they didn't do that. They didn't call, they didn't text, I'm reaching
out to them and they're not there and they didn't come home and it's way later and they finally show
up, what am I going to do then? I'm going to do a correction, what I call an effective correction.
I'm going to keep calm, I'm going to go through the steps of calmness which I will talk to you about
at the very end of this video. So I'm going to go through the steps of calmness for myself to make sure
that I am calm and then I'm going to describe the situation that happened, I'm going to describe the
situation that should have happened, I'm going to describe what reason they need to remember for why
it needs to happen the right way so I'm going to give them a rationale, then I'm going to tell them
what they earned and remember, I already set this up ahead of time. So if they earned an extra chore
then it's an extra chore but if they earned to not be able to go out with friends for a little while
then that's what they earned. You know whatever it happens to be that you choose for your child
as far as the negative consequence goes but be sure that it's reasonable, okay, as well. I'm also
going to make sure I ask questions and make sure I understand if something happened that they haven't
told me about yet so I can understand fully why they didn't make it home in time but I'm not going
to get emotional. I'm going to be calm and then I'm going to help them follow through with their
negative consequence, be consistent but be loving and hopeful all at the same time. So what about
that calmness that I was talking about? Well I have a whole skill set for calmness that I use to make
sure that I'm in the right place emotionally, mentally so that I can help my child handle
the difficult moments. The moments of correction that may have a tendency to raise a little bit
more emotion. I want to share those steps of calmness with you as well as much more. So I
have a free toolkit, it's called the calm parenting toolkit and I would like to share it with you. This
toolkit you can access by clicking the link directly below this video in the description
section. If you click on that link right now, you'll get the calm parenting toolkit for free. So, click
on that link now, learn more about calmness, start your road to self-government, I'll see you there.