I need help in dealing with my oldest (26) and youngest child (14). They both have similar tendencies such as difficulty with emotional regulation, low frustration tolerance, always seeing the negative side of things, and they can be impulsive and risk taking.
The older one moved to another country by herself since when she was 18. She has a very strong need to feel independent and in control of herself. I feel anxious if she doesnt abide by common sense safety rules when she comes home to visit (i dont know what she does when she is away and I know I cant control that). For example- She will scoot home from the gym alone in the middle of the night or go in a car with a strange man she just met at the gym. I ask her to be considerate and not go out alone when shes here but she said she will not come to visit if I make her abide by these rules. I know she is grown up but I get alot of anxiety from knowing that she is walking alone at night and feel she should be considerate and not make me worry when shes home. I also feel like I need to walk on eggshells when talking to her. If I say anything she doesnt like, she will hang up on me or block me, for days or weeks at a time. I only have her best interest in mind and good intentions when talking to her or giving advice but she cant see it that way.

I see the relationship with my son who is 14 going on a similar path..I also have to walk on eggshells when talking to him to prevent an intense reaction and he also hangs up on me all the time and has blocked me. He is also a risk taker (he just broke both his wrists by falling off his bike) and I worry about giving him the independence he craves like his sister. I have kids in the middle who are more cautious and I dont worry about them nearly as much.

Please tell me how I can deal with these behaviors in an adult child and in my teen?

How would you do core phase work in homeschooling when your state requires you to complete a certain number of days and requires testing for math and reading, etc. ? Do 11 year-olds have an option to not do math? Also, how do you help an 11 year-old to use a planner effectively? Thanks for your help.

I'm struggling with morning routine with my 5 year daughter to get her to school. It is irrespective of whether she goes to bed early or late the previous night. I practically do everything for her in the morning while she is in bed- put on her dress, shoes, comb hair etc. Making her do it on her own is impossible. She will not get up from bed nor will dress herself. That is why I have resorted to dressing her up. And she kicks and struggles throughout. I lose my patience and really feels angry and give out to her. I gets a vibe that she is purposely fussing and being adamant sometimes. My logic is that all she has to do is to lie still and I get her ready and she is not even doing that. I wish she would wake up and get dressed herself. She likes being at school. She is not trying to skip it. Once she is off bed, getting her to do use the washroom is another one, then breakfast. Today I got really exacerbated that I gave up and asked her grandma to get her ready. I'm not sure how to handle it especially when a child is in bed sleepy. Kindly guide. Thanks

When a child is 11 years old and is in their 24 hour loss of privileges but keeps hitting and kicking their siblings, would you use the soft hold? Could you explain more about how you do it, for what, etc.? How can you de-escalate the situation if two 11 year old siblings are both fighting each other and both are already in their 24 hour loss of privileges? Thanks. I'm looking forward to when your new practical self-government course is released.

Hello again, I have just discovered that a box of chocolates that were given to me from a work client which my children asked to eat but I said I was going to think about if I was going to let everyone in the family have or if I was going to use them as a gift to someone else to save us some money. My husband store them in our cupboard and every time I was asked about them I maintained that I was thinking about it still. I certainly was feeling the pressure to let them have the chocolate but I was not convinced that I should give in to the pressure and especially as the younger child was so impatient about it which she usually always is. She never likes to wait on things, she ate all her advent calendar chocolate in one day too. They were only very small but still they are not allowed sweet treats from Monday to Thursday but only weekends. I need to still find out if the 14 year old child has been helping the younger child with taking the chocolates, even though she has never even mentioned the chocolates at all. However, she can be very deceitful and I am pretty sure she is in it too. I have just found the box less than half empty. What do you recommend I do? And is there something I should have done differently so they didn't feel tempted? I don't like to hide things from them but we usually have to. I have at the same time found that they have also taken another bag of chocolates that I was going to give to some of my students. I had bought two bags one for our girls and one for my students but I have just found that they have also stolen these too even thought I gave them their bag. I feel so disappointed and angry that I want to ban chocolate for the rest of the Christmas season.

Hi Nicholeen, We would like some help managing the chores we give to our two daughters, making them fair, being consistent and find ways to motivate them to do things because is the right thing to do, to help in the home as they are part of the family and not because they are going to get something. We have a few issues, one is that it seems unfair that we let our 14 year old keep her phone which means she can watch youtube and message her friends but our 8 soon to be 9 year old doesn't have a phone, and we won't let her play on technology or watch tv until she has done her chores. This comes across as unfair and inconsistent on our part. However, the reason we avoid taking our eldest phone is to avoid power struggles and also we have heard your advice to avoid confiscating things from our kids. We have a long history of power struggles and giving too many consequences to the older child and we feel we have exasperated her and made things harder over the years.
When the older child earns chores she often avoids doing them. So they end up accumulating and the more they accumulate the less she feels motivate to do them. She often uses the excuse that she is unwell, we don't have any proof other than what she says so we struggle to reinforce the chores in case she is in fact unwell. She eventually ends up doing the chores over a period of days or weeks but she has gotten away sometimes with not doing them at all. If we insist that she does not get privileges like watching tv or have her phone she starts power struggles and says we make her life miserable as we taking everything away from her and that makes her not feel motivated to do anything. The problem is that her younger sister is learning from her example and is also avoiding doing chores. With the youngest it's a bit easier as if he hold off technology away from her she will eventually comply but then she sees her sister having her phone when she has chores to do. We feel like they are getting a lot of chores which is due to poor choices on their part but it feels frustrating to both us and them. We already have an incentive scheme at the moment where we can give them signatures on a board when they do things without us asking them or get to school early or have some kind of good behaviour like not arguing back. And at the end of the chart they get something they want. But these issues are a daily frustrating thing and I we don't always know what to do.

Our 12-year-old daughter is constantly saying and thinking negative things. Everything that comes out of her mouth is negative and when were not together she thinks I died. Even if she recalls a memory from childhood, she twists it into a negative experience. She is only child and the youngest child on both sides of our families, so she's used to being babied. We took the parenting course last January because her anger episodes were happening every day. We're struggling being consistent with TSG principles, because were not naturally consistent people. She can't seem to say anything nice about her peers, parents, and even horses. How can we as parents work on being more consistent? How can we help her to start seeing the positivity in things. Thank you for all your doing to protect children and parents at the Capital.

How do you handle this situation:
You and your daughter come to a conclusion and next is “drop the subject”. You gently remind the daughter that a conclusion has been reached and it is time to drop the subject but they have to absolutely have the last word and so: Darling daughter says “If you say one more word then you will prove my point that it is you who are not dropping the subject.” SO, I stop talking and she, in her mind thinks that she “won” and has control of the situation.
This happens a lot where my daughters will turn the tables and use TSG on ME. I will tell them that they are not calm or dropping the subject or disagreeing appropriately and they will turn around and tell me that I am not calm or disagreeing appropriately or dropping the subject and when I open my mouth to speak, they say, “see, I told you.” They will tell me that since I am not calm or doing the skills that maybe TSG just isn’t for me and TSG isn’t working.
Sometimes I just stop talking, which feels a bit like them being the parent and my becoming the child and sometimes I respond, which then often becomes a power struggle. I feel like there are just no good options here. Can you help me? I am trying to focus on my behavior and roles, but it seems like the roles are constantly reversed and I don’t know how to get back to being a parent when they are using TSG wording on me and putting me in a “no win” situation.

My 4 year old has recently starting lying frequently. At first we didn’t do much (corrected her, saying “that’s called lying and it’s not ok”) but not necessarily enforcing a consequence specifically for the lying because we figured it was pretty innocent at this age. But she went from innocently realizing that lying is a thing to realizing it works and now she is intentionally lying, knowing that she shouldn’t. She also hides around the house or under blankets sneaking behaviors (like eating a snack when we said no). One of the problems is that we don’t always catch it, so she does get away with it sometimes. And another problem is we don’t know how to enforce it in general. And sometimes (unless we catch her in the act) we are only 95% sure that she is lying. We think there should be a stricter consequence for lying than just the thing she’s trying to avoid getting in trouble for. Any advice?

My 9 year old son tends to find the easy way out in whatever he does. For example, I tell him to go and get a math book in our math and science pile of about 8 books. After one look in our homeschool book cabinet, he whines and say he can’t find it. I tell him to look in the rooms he might have left it in and he goes. Still no book. But when I go look for it in the homeschool book cabinet, the math book is right there in the pile, slightly covered up by a wider folder on the top. This kind of situation happens a lot and I think it’s due to laziness which frustrated me. So I decided to tell him this time, ‘when you only look once and you’re not choosing to be diligent. What you need to do is lift up each book, instead you are choosing to be lazy.” My son then started crying. My husband thinks that he broke down because he wants my approval. Is this kind of describing harmful? How will he know what is diligence or laziness if it is not pointed out? I grew up without much emotional guidance from my mother and did not recognize the emotions/ character flaws that I struggled with until I was in my late teens. I met a mentor then, who would label the emotions and behaviors she saw in me (like jealousy, pride, resentment, anger).. After a while, I would recognize patterns in myself and we would discuss the underlying problem to why I behaved such a way, how to overcome etc. After doing these with her quite a bit I began to recognize these emotions in myself and others. However it did make me very critical of myself and others. Would you recommend doing this in TSG? Would this be the same as observing and describing?