How can I deal with kids that are non-compliant or break the rules?

Julie Greenlee: If you have got a difficult kid, and you have got a kid that has said no, a time or two and you have got kids that will blatantly break the rules, this is our entire population at The Emergency Diagnostic Center. None of our kids want to do what they are asked, that s how they end up living with us for a while. Basically you want to do what we talked about earlier. You want to share control by giving choices.

You want to turn all your No s in to Yes s and we want to make sure that we are positively reinforcing what our kids do. We want to shower them with a lot of love. We want to make sure that we are paying attention to all of the things that that child is doing right. We also want to make sure that we are setting some very firm limits. We are going to talk in depth about, how to settling this with our kids in the next question. But I want to remind you of some things that we need to make sure that our kids understand the limits that we have set for them and we do that by having them gain into a conversation with us about it. I want to set a limit and then I want them to explain to me what that limit is. We also can do some strategic planning around kids that consistently are non-compliant. That they consistently break one or two rules. That s where we come together and we develop some sort of scenario for this kid to suffer immensely, if he chooses to wear shoes on the carpet as muddy, cleats on the carpet onetime, if he never makes curfew, if he decides to use alcohol or drugs in your home.

These are things that we can strategically plan by using other parents, other community members, by getting the police involved and we want to do these things with our kids. We want to be harsh with them in real life consequences before it s too late. The price tag for these consequences are very affordable, when they are young and before they turn 18 and have permanent records.