Reply to 16YO step-DD coming to live with us full time

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Reply to "16YO step-DD coming to live with us full time - rules and expectations?"

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[quote=Anonymous]OP here is something to think about.

You are parenting little ones. They and you are at the stage of life when you think of rules in terms of adding rules.  When do we add rules?  What kind of rules do we need to have? Ooh, I didn't realize xyz would be a problem, now we need to come up with some rules...

Sometime around middle school, parenting gradually moves from adding rules to removing rules.

You begin to think about how to start letting go and giving them more freedom, not just to succeed but to fail, so you can hopefully turn out a fully functioning young adult when they graduate and move to college, the military or job.

Your rule making starts to become about where you can let up and give them freedom, and how you can guide them to maintain their own "rules" to keep themselves safe and moving in the right direction.

As a 16 year old, your teenager and you at parents should be at the removing rules part of life, not the adding rules part of life.

Parents do that more or less naturally when they raise the kids full time, if not with the oldest then certainly with 2nd, 3rd, 4th siblings.

You have gotten some great suggestions from this thread.  Please don't overlook them and go into this by looking at this as what rules to add. I promise if you do this, you will have conflict.  Have standards of behavior by all means, but make her a part of the process rather than a recipient of your rules.[/quote]

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