Our Kids are Out growing Old Rules

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]All right, so real truth bomb coming your way, so get ready.

[00:00:03]Preteens, if you're grounding them for a week when they mess up, you're actually training them to be better, drum roll, please, liars and not really better kids. I want to talk to you about the difference between punishment and a consequence and why one could be ruining your relationship. So, let's just get right into it, skip the fluff. The core difference comes down to who owns the problem. The punishment turns the parent into the enemy, while the consequence turns the bad behavior, if you will, into the enemy. You know, I love myself some real life examples, so here is one for you.

[00:00:35]Let's look at a 11-year-old who sneaks their phone in the bed in the middle of the night on a school night and gets caught scrolling at like 1:00 a.m., sleeps under the covers, right? If we choose to take the punishment approach, which unfortunately most parents do, why? Because it is the easiest, because we're going to react with anger. You yell, you slam your hand on the counter, "Why would you do this? I'm taking your phone away. You're grounded for 2 weeks and that means you're not going to your friend's birthday party, no more practice."

[00:00:57]It goes on, right? Why does that fail?

[00:00:59]Grounding them from social events, taking that phone away for long durations of time has nothing actually to do with the scrolling at night and it's unrelated. Their preteen brain completely bypasses the reflection on lack of sleep. Instead, they focus entirely on how unfair and a mean you are. Unfortunately, they're not really getting the lesson there, right? We want them to respect the sleep boundary.

[00:01:22]They, unfortunately, are just learning to be a little bit more sneakier, right?

[00:01:26]They're going to hide their phone under the mattress tomorrow night and that's not what we want them to learn, right?

[00:01:30]Now, let's learn on the flip side. If we go to the consequence approach, which is more of a relationship saver, you're going to take a breath, of course, and you're going to wait until the morning until you're not so angry and you're going to deliver a more logical, related consequence that is in a more calmer tone. You know what, listen.

[00:01:47]Phones are for people that can manage their sleeps and because you couldn't turn your phone off last night, you lost night time phone privileges for the next 7 days. Your phone is parked in the charger downstairs 8:00 p.m. And we're going to try again next week. Why does this work? This works because it mirrors the actual infraction. You aren't attacking their social life. You're simply removing the tool that they mishandled. The results is that you're no longer the villain here in the backstory, right? They can't blame you for being a dictator because the math makes sense. It's math in here.

[00:02:19]They start to learn that digital freedom requires personal accountability. Look, your job isn't to make them suffer for screwing up. Your job is to prepare them for a world that won't care about their excuses. And when we use logical consequences, we then allow the mistake to do the teaching so we don't have to do the screaming. And I'm not going to lie to you. It's exhausting in the moment, but it builds the exact accountability that we want our learners to have as adults. And listen, if this makes sense and you're ready to trade in screaming matches for some actual respect, hit follow, hit the like, and let's talk about part two.