- 1). Children cannot be put on restriction for a rule they didn’t know they were breaking. Take the time to discuss your house rules, city rules and the rules of the land. Ask your children if they need clarification and make sure they understand the consequences of their actions.
- 2). Younger children should not be places on restriction for long periods of time. They cannot decipher between an hour and a day and will soon forget why they’ve been put on restriction. Older children often find a few hours of inconvenience to mean nothing, so longer time constraints may work better.
- 3). Before placing your children on restriction, discuss the offense. Just sending your child to his room, restricting him from attending an event or preventing him from using his phone or computer for a week will do no good if your child doesn’t understand what rule was broken and why it’s important to not break it again.
- 4). Be flexible in your disciplinary action. Make sure the restriction fits the crime. Restrictions can be the taking away of privileges like attending a school event, watching television, talking on the phone, using the Internet or hanging out with friends. It can also mean spending a certain number of hours on "house arrest," volunteering in a soup kitchen or doing yard work. If, for instance, your child runs up your cellular phone bill because she chooses to text her friends when you clearly stated it was forbidden, restricting phone privileges is in order. How long you restrict those privileges will depend on how large the phone bill is, how old the child is and whether this was the first or second offense.
- 5). Always follow through with your disciplinary actions. Your children need to know that you’re serious. With each offense, lengthen the restriction period. If, for instance, your child continues to break the phone rules, you may have no choice but to turn off the phone completely or require her to work extra chores to pay back the bill.
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