Try to avoid power struggles with food. Beyond a certain age, it is unwise to try to force your children to eat as you see fit. Instead, you plan the menu for dinner. Set an amount of time per meal, for example thirty minutes. After that, the meal ends, even if they did not eat all that they were supposed to eat. If they are hungry later, offer them a healthy snack that they can fix for themselves or requires little effort for you. Rather than force them to eat, they eventually chose to eat on their own rather than deal with the other option (nothing).  This method does not work as well for older kids who have fallen into a pattern of withholding or refusing to eat, or who may have an eating disorder. Such patterns require interventions that are more complex than can be addressed in this forum. [i]

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Try to avoid repeating the same instructions, harping on a point, or yelling. Wait until you are in the right state of mind for the conversation. There is no time limit on when to discuss consequences. Try to make specific statements as calmly as possible. Statements are not open-ended complaints or rhetorical questions. They specify the rule that was broken and the direct consequence.

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Make sure your teen is paying attention to you. Try to avoid giving commands from another room. You can even try having him repeat it back to you. [ii]

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Choose your battles. Your teen will cause you to worry. They will do things that scare you. Draw the line when it is necessary and you can follow through. Otherwise, sometimes a small warning and a little life experience teach better than trying to protect them by restrictions.

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Let your teen make some mistakes and learn from them first hand. You can’t protect him forever. As long as it is not a question of safety, try to avoid taking over for him and showing him. Instead, try guiding him by simply making a recommendation, or noting the likely consequence of his action, whether those are natural consequences of his action or consequences that you will dole out, and then letting him choose how to proceed. Some lessons he will only learn by ignoring your advice and then seeing that you were right.

After a mistake, help your teen learn the lesson. Instead of simply punishing without discussion, take the time to explore what happened and what she would do differently if she had it to do over again. Sometimes mistakes can be the best opportunities for learning; if they can be treated with patience and compassion.

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Try to avoid reinforcing negative behaviors like tantrums, swearing, or whining by giving in or giving too much attention. Giving her what she is whining/yelling for this time will only make her whine/yell louder next time. Tantrums are a child’s attempt to use your embarrassment and her will power to get her way. In general, ignoring such outbursts repeatedly sends the message ‘yell as long as you want, it won’t get you want you want.’ [iii]

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Large empty threats rarely bring about results. Fear is not respect. A threat is different from naming a specific behavior or expectation and a realistic consequence. A threat is trying to use anticipation and forethought to force your teen to make a different choice or alter his behavior. A consequence follows behavior, and does not attempt to force his hand. Ideally, you can make it so that consequences that you know that he wants consistently follow behaviors that you want, and consequences that you know he dislikes consistently follow behaviors that you dislike. Instead of trying to force his hand, you allow him to repeat this pattern until he chooses to do the behavior that you want in order to get what he wants. It may not be pretty. It may not be ‘learning his lesson.’ But sometimes you have to go with what works. [iv]

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Say what you mean and mean what you say. Don’t make promises or threats that you can’t back up. Your teen won’t trust the former or fear the latter in the future. Make a demand different from a request or a recommendation, so that your teen can tell the difference. The most effective consequences are immediately after the behavior, and connected to the behavior in some logical or natural way. Sometimes this is not feasible. In such cases it is best to wait until you have calmed down before laying down the law. Punishments set in anger are often excessive. Corporal punishment[v] in particular can be too harsh and the research indicates it is more likely to lead to more behavioral problems than have any positive effect.[vi]

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Try to have reasonable, consistent and appropriate consequences. Some parents set such harsh punishments that they are punishing themselves more than the teen for the amount of effort that enforcement requires. You also want to avoid a teen getting lost in a self-destructive pattern that can result if he loses hope due to overly harsh punishment that can seem endless to him. If your teen despairs that he will never get out of the period of punishment, and loses hope that he can ever regain his privileges, this can become motivation to only continue to misbehave with a ‘nothing to lose’ attitude. He needs to see a path where positive behavior can lead to positive consequences. [vii]

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Once your teen has ‘paid for her crime,’ try to give her the opportunity to connect with you. Although you may still be ticked off, your teen may need to see that you still love her, that her mistake has not cost her the relationship with you. To do otherwise can make her feel hopeless. Try to distinguish between disliking the behavior and still loving her as a person.

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When possible and appropriate, natural consequences tend to work best. Consequences that are naturally and logically connected to the misdeed tend to result in the best behavioral learning. Natural consequences flow from the environment with little or no intervention from you. For example, a teen that leaves his bike in the street (after you warn him of the potential consequences) and finds it run over or stolen in the morning. If you can resist the ‘I told you so’ moment, you can help the teen learn the connection between his action and its consequences, and apply that learning to future choices. In this moment it is easy for the teen to become defensive out of frustration or shame. So your task is to help use this as a positive opportunity for learning. Natural consequences only work if they are safe and tolerable enough to you that you can live with the consequences of your teen’s choice. In some situations, this is inappropriate. Logical consequences are given by parents, but retain some logical connection to the behavior. For example, not putting away the video game system results in not getting to use that game for a set number of days. Some teens will see these as the result of ‘mean parents,’ and can lose the lesson, so it can be easier to use natural consequences when possible to remove yourself from the line of blame. [viii]

An article on communicating with your kids about social networking / socializing online:

http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/article/20120210/NEWS01/202100313/Teen-TLK-Parents-key-educating-children-about-cyber-socialization?odyssey=mod|newswell|text|Frontpage|p