83. Choice, Consequence & Accountability: Helping Your Struggling Teen Understand

Parenting Post-Wilderness: Parenting a Struggling Teen Before, During and After Treatment

How can you help your struggling teen take more accountability?

What can you do to help your teen understand choice, consequence, and accountability? Those are the questions Seth and I will be exploring in today’s episode.

[Struggling to set boundaries & consequences? Check out my free guide to help you create your own Parent Home Plan 🗺️]

Our brain likes going into defense mode. It’s what it does automatically. With conscious work, we can catch ourselves there (and teach our struggling teens to do the same) and learn to recognize that we almost always have a choice in the matter. Even when we feel like we don’t.

“It takes a lot of practice to realize what is a choice and what isn’t a choice” - Seth Gottlieb

Pushing your teen to take accountability isn’t beneficial for you as a parent or your teen. Instead of trying to force accountability, we’ll discuss ways to grow the conscious awareness of choice and action, leading to an understanding of accountability.

In this episode, we discuss:

• We all sometimes justify our own behaviors by telling ourselves we didn’t have a choice, even if we did;
• Probing questions to understand (and help your teen understand) their thought process regarding their choice;
• Helping your teen understand the relationship between choice, action, consequence, and accountability;
• The role of black-and-white thinking when it comes to choices, and consequences.
• Validating feelings;
• Taking accountability for facts versus story;
• How to bring the conversation and accountability back to facts when you’re used to being lied to by your teen;
• And more!

Need support?

🗺️Need help setting healthy boundaries with your teen AND following through? My free guide will help you do so by creating your own Parent Home Plan!

🤍Influence lasting change in yourself and your struggling teen with my private coaching or parent group program specifically created for parents of struggling teens.

Ps. Are you getting great value out of this podcast? It would mean the world to me if you could leave a review on Apple Podcasts. This way, you will help me reach and help more parents of struggling teens develop healthy responses and boundaries instead of acting out of fear and anxiety. You can leave a review by clicking here, scrolling to the bottom, tapping to leave a star rating and then write your review. Thanks so much!

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And remember parents, the change begins with us.

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