Do you want to know how to discipline a teenager who doesn't care about consequences?
I'm Nicholeen Peck and I teach all about parenting, good communication and I have
worked a lot with troubled teens and in this video we're going to talk about how to help them care.
If you are worried that your teenager really doesn't care about consequences, you are not
alone. There are so many parents that come to me on a regular basis and say seriously they
don't care. There is nothing I can do. I remember a woman came to me one time and she said about
her teenager. I have taken away his birthday, I have taken away Christmas, I have taken away everything
and he literally doesn't care. Well that's not the direction to go just so you know because that's
power struggling. But truly she felt she had tried everything and he still didn't care and I said
let's talk a little bit more in depth about what's going on here. So, what I'd like to do is share some
stories from personal experience helping troubled teens learn to care and then give you some of the
key things that you can implement in your home so that you can help your teen choose to care about
solving their problems and fixing some of those pesky behaviors. I am the mother of four children.
In fact all of my children are now adults and they're all launched from the home and so this is
the stage of life that I'm in where I've raised a lot of teens but not just my own four teens.
Also for many years I brought treatment foster children into my home. They were all between the
ages of 12 and 18 so yes, teens. Troubled teens. I had to do therapeutic treatment care for them
and many of them had really become calloused or uncaring about what they needed to do to change.
They would work a system for a little bit but then in reality they just didn't care. They felt
like life had given up on them and they felt like they were just being controlled by a lot
of other people. They needed empowerment and I knew it. In fact if your parenting
is just disciplined, disciplined, discipline and not empowering and teaching and stuff at the same time
then you might be missing the magic sauce that your child needs in order to decide
to care. Did you know that one of the key things that they need to care about their consequences
and about being corrected and fixing problems is they need a relationship with you,
that's right, that is number one. They need to feel a connection with you. So I knew with all
of the foster children that came to my home, I had to start with that. Could I form a connection with
them. Now of course I'm going to have boundaries and negative consequences even if our connection
is not perfect yet but my focus was going to be on the connection. My focus was going to be
on understanding them and empowering them. Giving them the things that they needed to create success.
There was one young girl who came to our home at age 14 and she was a compulsive liar. She had a
lot of anger control issues, she had some pretty bad habits and she needed a lot of correction.
In fact I felt like all I did some days was just correct her and correct her and correct her
and sometimes she would kind of accept it and go along with it because she was at a new place and I
wasn't her parents but most the time she was just not wanting to care. So then we had to do something
else. We had to do what I called intensive teaching to help her care and it actually took a few months
of some pretty consistent intensive teaching with her every time she would go through these
moments of not caring before she decided why am I doing this, why am I making my life harder,
why am I earning even more negative consequences and these people are not power struggling with
me. This isn't about me against them, it's about me against me and I remember we sat down and we had
a conversation and she said Nicholeen, for the longest time, I've just been fighting everybody
because the girl had oppositional defiant disorder. Okay so I was really grateful that she was
ready to open up and have this little conversation. She said I've just been fighting everybody, that's
just what I do but suddenly I'm realizing I'm really just fighting myself huh and I said yeah.
You're just fighting yourself. You don't have to fight us. We're never going to fight
you and that is one key thing. In fact if you remember nothing else from this video but that,
that's going to make a big difference. You should not be power struggling with your children,
you should not be fighting with them to get them to care. Force does not cause a person to learn.
In fact in order to create an environment where someone will learn, it needs to be with a tone of
trust, that they can learn setting up the environment in a way that shows them the battle
is with themselves, not with you because you're not going to engage in that battle. Let's talk about
how to do that. Let's talk about that tone and the structural elements that you're going to need to
set up to help your child care about consequences and self-correcting but before we do that, click
on that subscribe button. There are a lot of videos on this channel that are going to relate to your
situation and you're not going to want to miss them so hit the subscribe button now and don't
forget that notification bell as well. I decided as a foster parent and the parent of my own children
that I would set up my home environment based on one principle and that principle was the
principle of self-government. I want to share with you the definition of self-government so that you
are aware what it is. Self-government is being able to determine the cause and effect of any
given situation and possessing a knowledge of your own behaviors so that you can control them.
So, what that means is that a person actually learns how to analyze themselves, make plans for
themselves and follow through with self-correction. Whoa, that's intense. How does a person
actually learn to do that? So that was my goal for all of my treatment foster children. I thought I've
got to teach them how to self-correct because they're going to leave my home, they're going to
go into adulthood and they're going to need to correct their own problems. They're not going to
have me there to do it and their family bridges have been burned. So what can I do to help them?
I can teach them how to control themselves but it's going to start with
me bringing to their attention what needs to be corrected and then teaching them how to accept it
because if they won't accept it, if everything's always about me against them then we are going
to have a problem with them not learning to control themselves. They will just learn how
to try to dodge people in authority who could make it so that there might be a negative consequence
in their life and that's not the recipe to a happy life. So instead I knew that I needed to help them
with the corrections so that later, they would learn to self-correct. So that's the whole goal.
Now in order to create this type of environment where a person learns how to self-correct and
how to accept correction from other people, there needs to be a certain type of a tone and a certain
type of a structure. Let's talk about the tone in your home that needs to be there so that somebody
cares. So, I've already touched on it a little bit but the ideal tone is calmness. You've got
to have calmness in order to have connection in your relationships and if your relationships are
not good, they're not going to care. All teaching happens through the lens of the relationship.
Make sure that you have calmness yourself in all of the interactions with your children. If it
feels like a power struggle going back and forth, then your child will constantly stay aggressive
and they will think of you as the enemy instead of the person that they need to be working with
in order to improve. So, a tone of calmness, a tone of acceptance which means that when you have
to correct a problem, accept that it happened and that this moment is required and that it
doesn't hurt you or kill you to have to correct a problem. So, you need to accept when things happen
and embrace the opportunity to do the teaching or the correction for the child. You also need to
trust that the child does actually want good. They actually do want to connect with you on a regular
basis. I had a conversation the other day with the teen and she told me about her family and how her
family was hard to be around she told me about how her parents had burnt a lot of bridges with her
and of course that made me sad and I understood that that could be the situation sometimes but
I couldn't help but say to her do you think maybe that you want a better connection with them even
though right now you're pulling away and she's like oh yeah. I totally want a better connection
with them. I want our family to feel like some of these other families that I see that are not
what I feel. So then I said how about you work on your connection with them as well? How about you
trust in the goodness of your parents because they're trying to do good things by you and
if you can trust that they're trying to do good even if it's not good all the time
then it's going to help your bond with them and hopefully it will improve things
and she was like huh. I never thought of that before. The same thing goes for you as the parent.
Even if their bond to you isn't great, bond to them, trust them, have that tone of understanding,
trust, calmness, acceptance. There are so many other tone elements we could talk about but
they're all wrapped in that big word that is love. When you love someone, you value them
and that's the tone your home needs to have even if someone needs to be corrected. We can't be put
out by it. If we get put out by having to correct them, we're just being selfish. All right that's
the tone. Let's talk about the structure. There are certain structural elements that you're going to
want to have in place in order to discipline a teen who doesn't care. You've got to have a
process that you go through and they need to understand that process. First off you need to
teach them the skills that they need for success. There are four basic skills that I teach parents
how to teach their children for success in my TSG parenting course. One key skill that your
child needs is the skill accepting consequences or accepting corrections. There are six steps
to that skill. The steps are to look at the person or the situation, keep a calm, face voice and body,
say okay or disagree appropriately. So, imagine you're correcting the child and the child says
okay or the child asks if they may disagree appropriately with you about whatever it is
that you're correcting them for and the answer would be yes and you would let them use that
skill which is a whole other skill. Anyway so they say okay or disagree appropriately
and then they do whatever the negative consequence is and in our family we use work a lot because
work is the antidote for a sick character. So, they do a lot of extra chores and things and then
they check back and drop the subject. Dropping the subject is difficult, that drop the subject steps
means that they're not going to think about it anymore. They're going to just let it go and move
on and bond and focus on the relationships and the good things. In fact one little extra chore or some
little negative consequence. Come on, that's not the end of the world. It's fast, it gets over with
quickly and we need to present it to them in that way so that it's not like hahahaha, you're gonna
feel the pain for this, that's not how parenting should happen. Parenting should be optimistic,
positive, empowering. Go ahead do that little extra chore, you're gonna be just fine. Come check back
to me, I'll praise you and then boom. You can just move on with your day, that's how it needs to feel
when we correct them and that could make all the difference. You might need to have a conversation
with them about how you are going to change the way the corrections are presented and how they
might have been presented incorrectly in the past. Another skill that you want to talk to your child
about is how you will do the corrections. They need to know the step-by-step process, the words
that you will say when you do a correction. This will make it so that they stop power struggling
with you because they know no matter what they do, the battle is actually between them and themselves.
If your words stay the same every time, if you follow through with the plan as you outline to
them then they know when they're having a hard time that actually it's about them battling with
themselves and not wanting to follow through with the skills that they already know that they can do.
That's when it really hits them, they have to care because they're fighting themselves all the time.
So there is a skill set I have for doing a proper correction that is in my teaching self-government
parenting course. I do a lot of training there and if that person does not accept the correction at
that point when I do that correction then there is an intensive teaching skill set that I use this is
also part of my teaching self-government parenting course which is on teachingselfgovernment.com
and I tell parents how to help the child get to a place of calmness because that's the tone they
need in order to reach that prefrontal cortex and do some thinking so that they then can analyze. Oh
wait a second. This is me against me here and I've got to control me. This intensive teaching moment
helps them get to that place, helps them get to calmness and you do it in a calm way. Calmness is
huge, it's so very important and oftentimes when we correct our children we don't do it with calmness
and then we wonder why they distance themselves from us and our corrections it's because they stop
trusting us because we're too dramatic. We've got to be self-governing ourselves. If we're going to
teach them self-government, shouldn't we learn some self-government too? Since you have stayed to the
end of this video, I have a free gift for you. It is my calm parenting toolkit. It's a starter course,
it's not the full TSG parenting course but it will get you started on improving the calmness in
your family. It has 10 lessons that you can start using today. So in the description below this video,
click on the top link that says teachselfgov.com/toolkit that will take you to a free version of
the calm parenting toolkit so that you can get started on improving your self-government and
the self-government of your teen that seems like they don't care. They're not going to stay that
way. They will choose to care at some point. I mean unless they're totally a psychopath or something
which I know can happen occasionally but no one in their teen years would be diagnosed with that yet,
which means there's always work that you can do to improve the situation. Some of them may
take longer than others to learn which means you're going to need skills to go the distance
but they need skills too so that they can have a change of heart. Click on the link to the calm
parenting toolkit now and get started on your self-government journey. I'll see you there.