Curfews are an inevitable part of parenting. They can be sources of conflict or you can use them as learning experiences. Dr. Charles Fay explains…
Curfews: To Set Them or Not Those of you familiar with Love and Logic have probably already noticed that we are rather old-fashioned codgers. We believe that parents should run the home rather than the kids.
Now for the shocker: In our book, Parenting Teens with Love and Logic, we teach that parents are typically better off if they allow their teens to negotiate a reasonable time to be home each evening. “Reasonable” is the key here. Depending on the kid, the activity they are involved in, the degree of responsible adult supervision, the weather, the type of community we live in, etc., a “reasonable” time to be home might range from 6 PM to the wee hours of the morning.
The key is showing that we are more concerned about their emotional, physical and spiritual safety than whether we can make them come home at a certain time. Expressing worry about their safety results in far less rebellion than trying to dictate an arbitrary time for them to walk back over the threshold.
“We need the phone numbers of the people you will be with so that we can find you if something goes wrong,” is also a wise and reasonable request to make. Doing a little detective work to keep them honest never hurts, either!
Here’s the overall goal: Get your teens setting their own reasonable curfews so that they will be good at it by the time they turn eighteen and leave home.
Thanks for reading!
Dr. Charles Fay
The Love and Logic Show
Visit this page to listen to The Love and Logic Show with Dr. Charles Fay. New shows are posted regularly and they feature different parenting challenges…and they provide tried and true techniques for taking the exhaustion out of raising respectful and responsible kids. Podcasts are available, too.