My country of origin, Bolivia, was under a dictatorship for eight years when I was growing up. From 1970 to 1978, the government prescribed and proscribed the public behaviors of the Bolivian citizens. This is what dictatorships do. Although I do not believe we needed such a rigid set of rules, I do believe that all societies need rules and laws to function; the alternative is complete chaos. In fact, our brains are evolutionarily and biologically conditioned to generate rules that are reinforced by our social environment within different contexts, such as family, school, and friendships. Rules are necessary to function, but taken to an extreme, such as what happens inside a dictatorship—or in a home where rules are rigidly enforced—they can have a devastating effect.
Most parents understandably come up with different rules or expectations about what behaviors are appropriate or not for their children. These rules usually come in the form of shoulds, musts, or oughts, and they usually do their job when your children are young, but everything changes when your child becomes a teenager with a mind of his own. In this chapter, you will look at the rules you make for your teen, the purpose behind them, and how well they are working.
Maybe you have very few rules, or maybe you have many rules about what’s appropriate or inappropriate behavior at home. Every time you are telling your teen he should or shouldn’t do something, that’s a rule. Sometimes rules or expectations are unspoken, and sometimes they are easier to name. Let’s begin by learning about your rules. A clue is to listen to the should-statements that you make to yourself and to your teen about your teen’s behavior.
Exercise: Naming Your Rules
Take out your parenting journal and make a list of all the expectations or rules that you have for your teen. Complete the sentence My mind says that my teen shouldn’t…and the sentence My mind says that my teen should…
When Stefan was asked this question about Benny, his sixteen-year-old son, his responses looked like this:
Are these rules similar to the ones you have for your teen? Maybe you have all, some, or none of them. If you carefully observe your teen’s behavior in response to your own rules and expectations, what do you notice? Take a couple of moments to reflect on this question, and then write down your answers.
Stefan answered: No matter how many times I tell him that he can only play video games for one hour at night after doing his homework, he just keeps doing it into the night. Every single night, we have a battle because of this. Sometimes I feel that I come up with a new rule every day because I just don’t understand how Benny thinks about the things he does at home.
Are your rules working? Take a moment to examine which rules are working and which ones aren’t.
A teen’s noncompliance with the house rules can be a source of problems in your daily family life, and these problems are surely exacerbated when your teen has an emotional switch that goes on too much, too quick, too soon or who simply shuts down when it comes to listening. This is a very sensitive issue for many parents, since part of your job is to create frames of behavior within your family life with the hope that your teen will learn how to behave in different social settings.
It’s quite likely that all the rules you have for your teen have an important purpose for you as a parent, which is the only reason you hold on to them. Let’s take a minute to look at these rules to fully understand the purpose of holding on to them.
As our minds come up with evaluations, judgments, and criticisms, they also come up with expectations or rules to organize our internal and external psychological landscapes. The parenting rules you have about your teen’s behavior are influenced by many variables, such as your teen’s past behaviors, personal family history, and your own upbringing, to name a few.
You, like most parents I work with, probably have good reasons to hold on to different rules when it comes to your teen’s behavior, and usually behind each rule, there is a teaching purpose driving it. For instance, Stefan had the rule “no food is allowed in the bedroom” because for him it was important to teach Benny cleanliness and to prepare him for when he goes to college and has to share a room. Other parents mention other principles, such as protecting their teens from being hurt, teaching them how to be more independent, preparing them for the difficult moments in life, or teaching them a sense of accountability. These are all explanations for having different rules.
Exercise: What’s the Teaching Purpose Behind Your Rules?
Copy this chart into your parenting journal. In the column on the left, list some different rules or expectations you have for your teen. Look carefully at each rule or expectation and see if you recognize a teaching purpose, a reason behind or explanation for it. Write your teaching purpose down next to the rule or expectation that it explains.
| Rules or expectations | Teaching purpose or reason |
|---|---|
Your teaching purpose may vary or be the same in different cases. Look over this list and then ask yourself, which is more important, the rules or their teaching purpose?
Exercising a teaching purpose is certainly an important part of your parenting job: how else can you help your teen be the best person he can be if it’s not by creating limits and a framework for his behavior? Having teaching purposes and rules for your teen’s behavior is necessary, understandable, and a reasonable behavior for you or any parent raising a teen. So far, so good, right? However, as with many things in life, applying these rules isn’t always easy.
Over the years working with parents, I have witnessed certain challenges that come up when parents get rigidly fused with specific rules. Here are the most common rules I found parents get hooked on:
If you’re hooked on any of the rules mentioned above, you may be carrying a dictator within your mind, where the rules are too rigid. Let’s take a look at how carrying this dictator is working for you and the relationship with your teen.
Parents of teens struggling with intense emotions are often faced with an abundance of situations in which the teen breaks a single house rule or all of them at once. Naturally, the more this happens, the more the dictator within the parent’s mind is likely to be turned on. When you’re totally hooked on a rule, you may react to it being broken as if your teen had pressed a personal hot button, and you may respond with a laundry list of additional rules.
Within ACT, a fundamental skill is to check in with yourself about whether a particular behavior is working or not in your parenting life. If you determine that it’s not working, then you have an opportunity to change it.
Exercise: Are Your Rules Working?
Pick up your parenting journal and answer the following questions:
If your response to rules being broken hurts your relationship, then it may be that you are fused to a rule that is not working. When Stefan answered these questions, he realized that when he gets fused with the expectation that Benny should follow rules at all times, he usually screams at him, throws a series of punishments at him, or comes up with additional rules. In the short term, Benny usually screams back and runs to his bedroom, and then he avoids his father for a couple of days. Stefan continues to feel angry for hours and, in the long term, feels more frustrated and disconnected from Benny.
Looking back at your answers to the questions, can you relate to Stefan’s situation?
Getting fused with rules and acting quickly on them is depriving yourself of a chance to choose your response and teach your teen how to handle a difficult situation without hurting the relationship with him. Every time your teen receives a rule about how to behave, he is naturally going to reflect on it, make sense of it from his own perspective, and then figure out whether or not to follow it. And of course, sometimes your teen will simply reject it out of a belief that it’s not right for him. That’s typical teen behavior. Teens are in the process of learning about themselves, the world, life, and others through their own lenses, not yours.
When the dictator gets activated in your mind, it’s as if your only option were to hold on to your rules, which means you’re not acknowledging what’s going on for your teen, his social context, developmental stage, and unique thought processes. This may even lead you to prescribe more rules. This type of parenting is called an authoritarian parenting style. What’s the outcome of this style of parenting? It’s quite likely that he will continue to reject your rules over and over again. The final outcome of parents insisting on 100 percent compliance with their rules is that they will have a very rocky relationship with their teen; an authoritarian parenting style is simply a recipe for disconnection and isolation between parents and teens.
I’m not saying that having expectations or making rules is a negative thing in and of itself. Rules are necessary for any teen; however, you need to take into consideration the social context of the teen’s reality and developmental stage. Adolescence by nature is a time of changes, challenges, and unpredictability. Teens are often moody, argumentative, and opinionated. They tend to like to be alone in their bedroom, are passionate for social media, and sleep long hours. Getting fused to a rule that your teen “should not spend time alone in his bedroom” or “should not do any texting for one month” is not taking into consideration your teen’s reality.
Adolescence as a developmental period is intensified when a teen struggles with emotion dysregulation, because he is predisposed to experience higher levels of sensitivity to his environment, heightened emotional experiences, and it takes him longer than it might take someone else to get back to his emotional baseline when upset. A teen once told me, “It’s as if suddenly I become a bull and see red all around me. I don’t know how to stop it; it’s so real.”
The only situations in which strict rules apply are when a teen is unsafe because of intentional suicidal plans or impulsive risk-taking behavior.
Creating expectations and rules for a teen is another parenting task, a natural one. The challenge is when you get fused with your expectations and rules; the dictator within your mind starts prescribing and proscribing your teen’s behavior, and then you quickly act on whatever it dictates without pausing to check whether your response is helpful or not in that particular situation. To keep the dictator within your mind in check, it is important for you to do the following:
Watch if the dictator within your mind prescribes rules that ignore your teen’s social context, developmental stage, and unique emotional sensitivities. Pay attention to should, must, or ought-to statements. They are cues that the dictator within your mind is on. Keeping the dictator within your mind in check will help you to find workable responses when dealing with your highly sensitive teen. It’s doable!
Here is another classic defusion exercise to let your thoughts come and go when the dictator in your mind takes over.
Bring into your mind a moment in which your teen broke a rule, and see if you can catch when the dictator within your mind gets activated. If the answer is yes, give the dictator a name (any name you like). Then, imagine that you’re driving on the freeway, bring into your mind all those rules you have for your teen, and place each one of them on a billboard, so you can see the types of fonts, colors, and sizes of each rule as you drive by and they are out of your sight.