Help Build Rules In The Home
So for the last week I’ve been trying to narrow my focus for the “Ten Rules For Your Home” material. I received a few questions from people asking how to get started in coming up with rules. The main concerns were, “How do you keep the leadership role of the father in the home when the teenager is coming up with the rules?” Another question was, “Why do you do time out when it does not seem like it is working?”
These are great questions. When I enter the picture as a counselor, things have usually gotten to the point where the family needs immediate help. They can’t wait three months to see improved behaviors in their child. Usually the school is giving ultimatums to the family about their child’s behavior too. A comforting word from an overly optimistic counselor will not get the school to stop sending home letters about their kid’s bad behavior. There needs to be some sort of plan to get everyone in the child’s life on the same page. This is why I needed something adaptable to the most difficult family situations. Families with less intense issues can always scale back the plan if it is too much.
Working with teenagers can be very frustrating at times. Having the ability to manipulate concepts is a new skill for them. They are sometimes overwhelmed by the new information that they are now capable of understanding, but they do not have all the right places in their mind to store the information from new processing abilities.
I came up with the “Ten Rules” after my two years as a counselor in a Specialized Therapeutic Group Home. I was responsible for the counseling of foster children who needed an extremely high level of supervision. We had a 24-hour staff that was accountable to where the children were at all times. These workers all had differing opinions of how things should be run, but we couldn’t do it a different way for each staff member. Additionally, I learned that the kids would have been very happy for us to try to run the group home eighteen different ways. They could exploit that. That is why we emphasized the concept of “splitting” or divisions. By having a common plan, we were able to keep the children from using the different “parenting” styles of the workers against each other. Sometimes the kids understood it better than the grown ups though.






