I’ll return Nicole’s phone.”
“I’ll mow the lawn tomorrow.”
“I’ll pay you back next week.”
“I’ll get my homework done this weekend.”
“I’ll be at the parking lot at 3:00 p.m. for the car pool.”
Adolescents, like all of us, make many different kinds of agreements.
Agreements and promises are important parts of life. Love, friendships, and even business are built on them. They undergird and support trusting, dependable, and safe relationships. When people stand by their words, life goes better. When they do not, life often comes apart at some level. While no one follows through perfectly, if your teen has a habit of making promises that he doesn’t fulfill, it affects him, you, the family, and your teen’s relationships.
Defining the Problem
Many teens do not have the capacity to keep agreements. To do so requires good judgment, a basis in reality, an orientation toward the future, and an understanding of what is being agreed to. Few adolescents have honed these skills. So they make all sorts of promises without thinking about what is involved. Their thought process is similar to that of a credit card addict who is eternally optimistic: I’ll pay off the debt later. But later never comes, and the debt continues to mount.
If your teen isn’t good at keeping commitments, have some compassion while you work with her on this. It is less likely to be about defiance and deception than about having limited experience and judgment in this part of life. Of course, some teens do make agreements with no intention of keeping them, and that is a matter of deception (see chapter 29, “Deception and Lying”), but most aren’t that way.
As your teen learns to make and keep agreements, she is also developing a future orientation, which will be invaluable. The capacity to ask, How will what I am doing now affect my future? will assist her in impulse control, delay of gratification, frustration tolerance, and goal achievement. Your adolescent’s ability to keep her agreements affects a broad range of her life, today and tomorrow.
Keeping agreements is not the same as following house rules and requirements. Those are formal, often written, and are broad expectations of chores, behavior, and attitude. Agreements are more informal and have to do with situations that just come up and that require a quick negotiation. You can’t have a rule about every agreement in life. That would require a giant notebook. But as we shall see, you can have an expectation about making agreements.
Handling the Problem
Here are some ways to help your teen put his “saying” and his “doing” together.
Get the problem out in the open. First, talk and bring the issue into the relationship. Be warm and accepting, but also be direct. Approach the issue as a problem to be solved by both of you: “Stacy, I’ve noticed that you make a lot of promises, but that you have trouble keeping up your end. For example, last week when you said you would sort out your clothes to give to charity, it never happened. And yesterday, you said you would fill the car with gas, and it’s empty today.”
“I was busy. You know how much homework I had.”
“I know you have a lot of homework. But when you agree to do something, it affects other people, and we depend on you. When you don’t follow through, it makes things difficult, and I have a harder time trusting you. That is a problem, and I want us to work on it.”
This first step will often cause your teen to be somewhat more aware that breaking agreements is an issue. It usually doesn’t solve the problem, but making her aware of a pattern you are observing can help.
Give your teen a way to think before making an agreement. Again, most adolescents don’t understand how to think about agreements, especially if they have never been required to keep them. Here’s an example of a conversation you might have to help your teen learn to think through an agreement.
You might begin by saying, “I think that sometimes you will agree to do something to get me off your back and stop bugging you. Or sometimes it’s because you think you can get to it at the time. I understand that. But I want to help you start thinking through this more.”
“Like what?”
“Well, maybe you should have told me you didn’t have time to sort your clothes because of finals. I would have understood, and we could have scheduled it for a better time.”
“You get mad when I say I don’t have time to do something.”
“Yes, I have done that. But if it’s reasonable, I want to listen to you better. But sometimes it has nothing to do with me; you simply don’t think about whether you have the time to do what I ask. You’re a little overly optimistic about what you think you can do. Do you think this is possible?”
“Maybe.”
“Well, most people can do that. I certainly have. But before you say you will do something, it’s important to think through whether you can and will do what you say. I would rather you say you can’t than have you say one thing and do another. Would it help if, next time, I reminded you to think about it before you make a promise to me?”
By having a conversation like this, you are helping to make your teen more aware when he is making an agreement, and that others are negatively affected if he breaks it. And you make yourself available to remind him to think the agreement through until he starts thinking about it on his own.
Establish consequences. Even so, awareness and guidance may not be enough to help your teen think before making an agreement. If this proves to be so, then you may need to provide the structure that consequences bring.
Don’t drive yourself and your teen crazy with specific consequences for each and every failed agreement. Make it about the bigger issue. Say, “It seems you’re still not following up with what I have been asking you to do. So until you improve in this area, I’m going to take away your phone privileges for a couple of days. I’m not asking you to be perfect, but I want to see the pattern change.”
Sometimes parents make it a consequence that the teen has to do what she said she would do, but this approach often doesn’t solve the problem. The worst that can happen is that she has to do the task and has an annoyed parent. In the best scenario you will forget to ask her to do what she agreed to do, or she will have bought herself some time.
So require follow-up, but have a separate consequence. This helps your teen be more aware of how her inaction will affect her in ways that she would like to avoid.
You Can Do It!
Your teen needs you to help him become a person whose word means something, for then he will be happier, and his relationships will be better as well.