He didn't come home last night...

Hi Mark,

From my last email you could see things were progressing well and you said they would get worse before they got better. Anyway, it was the winter formal at the high school last night. A__ asked if he could stay at a friends house after the dance and we said no, we don't want to argue about it.............anyway, he called twice still trying to stay at a friends house, we continued to say no.......So, he didn't come home last night, he was to be home at 1:30am, he had no excuse for not coming back we even told him that we'd pick him up from wherever he was at 1:30am if he didn't have a ride.

So, my question to you is am i going to simply do the 3 day grounding thing or something else? Let me remind you that he was kicked out for not listening to our rules and only allowed to return on Tuesday evening being 3 days ago.

J.

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Hi J.,

First of all, don't be disappointed. Set-backs like this are very common (in fact I would wonder what's wrong if you didn't have any set-backs periodically).

Clearly, staying at the friend's house was very important to him.

Allow him to make these mistakes, then calmly implement the appropriate consequence as outlined in session #3.

Re: So, my question to you is am i going to simply do the 3 day grounding thing or something else?

I am quite concerned that you are leaping ahead in the program. You should still be in session #1. You will learn that we do not start out with 3-days for discipline. It will be best for you to digest most of the material -- and then ask any unanswered questions. Many of the questions you seem to be having here in the early going will be addressed in the eBook.

A good rule of thumb for new members of OPS is as follows:

Handle problems the way you ordinarily would -- until instructed to do it differently.

We must not implement of bunch of new parenting techniques over night. If we do, it will most likely be the kiss of failure. And most parents are really tired of failing.

Mark

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