Who Threw the Switch?

Boundaries with Teens
by John Townsend, Ph.D.

In this exciting new book, Dr. Townsend gives important keys for establishing healthy boundaries — the bedrock of good relationships, maturity, safety, and growth for teens and the adults in their lives. The book offers help in raising your teens to take responsibility for their actions, attitudes, and emotions.

Helping Your Teen Be Responsible and Responsive

The teen years can be challenging and even scary for parents and those involved with youth. Attitudes and behaviors of the adolescent can be unhealthy for him and for the family. However, good boundaries are the bedrock of not only better relationships, but also maturity, safety, and growth — especially for teens and their parents. In order to help teenagers grow into healthy adults, parents and youth workers need to help them experience how to take responsibility for their behavior, their values, and their lives.

Dr. John Townsend, coauthor of the Gold Medallion Award-winning book Boundaries, is a parent of two teenagers himself. With wisdom and empathy, he applies his biblically based principles to bear on the challenging task of the teen years, showing parents:

• How to deal with disrespectful attitudes and irresponsible behaviors in your teen

• How to set healthy limits and realistic consequences

• How to be loving and caring while establishing rules

• How to determine specific strategies to deal with problems both big and small

The book begins by giving parents a way to look at adolescence itself, so they can better understand how a teen thinks, feels, and relates to others. Then it provides the nuts and bolts of what boundaries are all about and how to apply them. There are many topically based chapters devoted to specific problems, from moodiness to school problems to aggression. Finally, Townsend addresses the attitudes, conflicts, and difficulties of parents themselves, helping them resolve their own personal obstacles to being an effective maturing force for the teen.

I had known Trevor since he was six, because our families ran in the same circles. As a preteen, he was a normal kid, not perfect, but not out of control either. He was respectful of adults and fun to be around.

Then, when he was thirteen or fourteen, my wife, Barbi, our kids, and I ran into him and his mom, Beth, at a movie theater one night, and we adults started talking. It wasn't long before all of the kids started getting restless, particularly Trevor. He and his mom had a conversation that went something like this:

"Mom, I wanna go."

"Just a minute, honey."

"I said I wanna go!"

Beth looked a little embarrassed and said, "Trevor, we're almost done talking, okay?"

"HEY! I —SAID —I — WANT — TO —GO!"

People standing around in the theater began looking over at our little group.

His mom looked mortified. His face was a little flushed, but he didn't look at all self-conscious. He had only one thing on his mind— getting his mom moving.

She quickly said her good-byes, and the two of them left.

This encounter sticks in my mind because of the huge contrast between the Trevor who used to be and the Trevor who now was. It was as if a switch had been thrown.

Whatever respect he'd once had for his mom, and likely others, had been greatly diminished.

Perhaps you can relate to Beth's experience as a parent. You may have an adolescent who, as a preteen, was more compliant and easier to connect with. Or perhaps you saw seeds of trouble in your child's preteen years, only to watch those seeds sprout when adolescence hit. Or maybe your child doesn't seem that much different, just bigger and stronger. In any case, it all points to the reality that parenting teens is not like parenting at any other age, because children change dramatically during their teenage years.

The Challenges Parents of teens Face

Parents face many different issues and struggles in their efforts to parent their teens effectively, as demonstrated in this list of typical adolescent behaviors:

• has a disrespectful attitude toward parents, family, and others
• challenges requests or rules
• is self-absorbed and unable to see things from anyone else's perspective
• is lazy and careless about responsibilities
• has a negative attitude toward life, school, or people
• is emotionally withdrawn and distant from you
• has a tendency to pick friends of whom you disapprove
• erupts in anger that sometimes seems to come out of nowhere
• lacks motivation for school and fails to maintain grades
• neglects home chores and responsibilities
• has mood shifts that seem to have neither rhyme nor reason
• is mean to siblings or friends
• lacks interest in spiritual matters
• detaches from family events and wants to be with friends only
• lies and is deceptive about activities
• is physically aggressive and violent
• is truant from school or runs away
• abuses substances — alcohol, drugs, pornography, and so on
• engages in sexual activity

This list could go on, of course. It's no wonder that when faced with one or several of these problems, many parents become discouraged, overwhelmed, or confused about what to do. You don't have to be one of them. If you are reading this book because your teen exhibits any of the above behaviors, be encouraged. These problems have solutions. You don't have to resign yourself to simply coping and surviving for the next few years. Life with your teen can be much better than that. You can take some steps that can make major differences in the troublesome attitudes and behavior of your adolescent.

I have seen many teens become more responsible, happier, and better prepared for adult life after their parents began to apply the principles and techniques discussed in this book. Many of these teens not only made positive changes in their lives, but they also reconnected with their parents at levels that the parents had thought they would never experience again. These principles work—if you work them.

Teens need Boundaries

The problems listed earlier all have a common foundation: the battle between the teen's desire for total freedom and the parents' desire for total control. All teens want the freedom to do what they want when they want. They need to learn that freedom is earned and that they can gain freedom by demonstrating responsibility. Adolescence is the time in life when kids are supposed to learn this lesson.

By the same token, parents need to be able to recognize when they are being overcontrolling and when they are being healthy and appropriate about saying "no." They need to be able to make this distinction in order to do their job: helping teens learn responsibility and self-control so that they use freedom appropriately and live well in the real world. To do this, parents must help teens learn boundaries.

I cannot overstate the importance of your role here. In the midst of your teen's demands, tantrums, threats, and acting out, your task is to sift through the craziness and lovingly set firm, appropriate limits.

When your teen behaves responsibly, you can loosen the reins a little and grant more freedom. You are the clear voice of sanity in your child's world. Your teen needs your voice and your help in learning how to set boundaries.

What are boundaries? Simply put, boundaries are one's personal property line. They are how you define yourself, say who you are and who you are not, set limits, and establish consequences if people are attempting to control you. When you say "no" to someone's bad behavior, you are setting a boundary. Boundaries are good for you and good for the other person, for boundaries help people clarify what they are and are not responsible for in life. (For a fuller treatment of boundaries, please refer to the book Dr. Henry Cloud and I wrote: Boundaries: When to Say Yes, When to Say No, to Take Control of Your Life.)

Because of all the developmental changes teens are going through, they often don't have good control over their behavior, a clear sense of responsibility for their actions, or much self-discipline and structure. Instead, they often show disrespect of authority (as in Trevor's case), impulsiveness, irresponsibility, misbehavior, and erratic behavior. They are, as the Bible describes it, "like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind."

Teens need to develop good boundaries in order to make it successfully through this season of life. Healthy boundaries give them the structure, self-control, and sense of ownership they need to figure out all their "who am I?" questions and to deal with the physiological and developmental changes they are experiencing.

Boundaries function somewhat like the trunk of a tree. The trunk holds the leaves, fruit, and roots together. However, all trees with strong trunks started out as weak saplings. They needed to be tied to a stake because they couldn't yet handle their own weight. They needed to lean on and be supported by something outside themselves. Then, in time, the trees matured and took over that job for themselves.

The process of developing boundaries is similar. Teens can't create their own "trunks." They don't have the necessary tools to become responsible, thoughtful, and empathetic with others. Like a tree sapling, they need help from outside themselves. Parents are the stake for their teens. They are the temporary external structure teens need in their last launch into real life. When parents tell teens the truth, set limits, establish curfews, confront misbehavior, and do a host of other things, they are providing a structure and helping teens to develop a structure. If all goes well, teens will ultimately and safely discard their parents' structure and, using their own structure, be able to meet the demands of adult life and responsibility.

And that is the purpose of this book, to show you how to help your adolescent shoulder responsibility for her actions, attitudes, and speech so that she learns the gift of self-control and ownership over her life. The whole process starts with you, the parent. So in this book you will learn a deceptively simple skill that all parents of teens need: knowing when to say Yes, and how to say No, that is how to implement and enforce healthy, loving boundaries with your adolescent.

After reading this you may think, I don't really have good boundaries either. How can I dispense what I don't possess? That is a common and important concern. A teen without boundaries needs a parent with boundaries. You'll find help for how to do this in the first part of this book, which teaches and equips you to develop your own personal limits so that you can transmit what you know and who you are to your teen.

© 2006 Zondervan. All rights reserved. No Part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any other information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher

About the Author

Dr. John Townsend is a popular speakers, and co-hosts the nationally broadcast New Life Live! Radio program, and a co-founder of Cloud-Townsend Clinic and Cloud-Townsend Resources. His best-selling books include the Gold Medallion Award-winning Boundaries.