by Jo Ann Wentzel

If I could give only one word of advice to parents that word would be consistency. A consistent parent gives the child a gift of always knowing what to expect. Neither, the rules, nor the consequences change daily.

I had foster kids who called this "nagging", but they knew what they could or could not do and what would happen if they made the wrong choice. They would come in the door and before they knew we knew what they had been up to, they were discussing the consequences. They knew them in advance. I knew I had hit home with a message when the kids started to finish the sentence. No kid, upon learning they were in trouble, could claim ignorance because I had heard them repeat that very rule.

They claim the average attention span for teens being talked to is about 30 seconds, so that is the time you have to get messages across. If that is the case, a complete message needs to be broken down into small, short bits, and repeated often.

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