I receive many letters from parents about how to help discipline their teenagers.  Here is one letter I received recently:

"My fourteen year old son has a serious behavior problem and he is willing to endure any number of discipline processes that we have.  For example, we take away his cell phone, take off his bedroom door, we make him stand in the corner, we send him to bed early, and we also do other things to limit his freedom.  However, he continues to make poor choices – he lies, he steals, he cuts classes and he talks back to us.  Nothing we do seems to motivate his behavior to become good.  How do we get our teenage child to behave?"

This is a problem facing many parents of teenagers and I get this question often. What do you do to make your teenager behave better? The problem is there really is nothing you can do to make a teenager behave better because a teenager is almost an adult. You cannot force an adult to do anything.

The way you improve your child’s behavior is by changing your own behavior and I will give you an example of how you do such a thing. First of all, let me explain why that is.

When your child is a young child, say three of four years old, and he is not behaving properly, you can simply pick your child up and place him in his room. Why is that? You are bigger than he is, you are stronger, and you are the one in charge and really a small child can do nothing about that.

By the time the child is ten or eleven, he is much bigger and already can resist you somewhat, but since you are still bigger than the child is, you can still place him in his room or enforce your authority physically.

What happens as your child becomes a defiant teenager – sixteen, seventeen – in many times he may be bigger than you are. In such a situation, your child could pick you up and put you in your room.

The problem parents face is they try to force their teenagers to comply with their rules, but you cannot force your teenager because your teenager will not be forced. The older your child gets, the more resentment he will have and the more ability he will have to resist your authority.

You need a different approach. The proper approach to discipline a teenager is to focus your energy and your efforts on developing your relationship with your child. Here is why.

The single most important thing that you have as a parent is your relationship with your child. It is the strongest bond you have with your child and your child has the same bond with you. No matter how bad things look, no matter how bad the behavior is, no matter what your child is doing, or how he appears to behave towards you – this bond is always there. You can change your child’s behavior – even a teenager – through working with the relationship and the bond that you have with each other.

Now, it may sound impossible to you but it really is extremely easy to do because you have this natural bond and your child has a bond with you. That means that no matter what they are saying or doing, this bond is always there. If you ask any defiant teenager privately if they have a problem who do they rely upon most, almost always they will say – even though they may go to their friends and ask them – the real advice that they value is from their parents.

You have that parental authority and parental bond and what you must do is develop the relationship with your child. That is how you get control of your teen’s behavior, even though he is already a teenager; through that parental bond.

The main issue is how do you do such a thing? How do you develop a bond with your child? You do so by giving your child respect and responsibility and if you do not know how to do that we have a program called the Complete Connection Parenting Program for Teenagers which will help you do this.

The one thing I must discourage you from doing is trying to use force to discipline and coerce your child into doing anything. As I have said before, what is going to happen is that your teenager is going to get older and older and the bigger he gets – the stronger he gets and the more powerful and self assured he becomes, the more he will resent your authority and eventually he will turn away from you completely.

You want to avoid that at all costs.