Parenting advice for future me.

 Hello everyone! I have mentioned here that there are several things that I wish I had done earlier in life and some that I wished for a while that I hadn't done, like prioritizing work overstudying. this last one drove me to stop studying and working several dead-end jobs and finally made me leave my home country because I couldn't study and my skillset wasn't helping much, and was more valued overseas. I read some advice that I really wished someone had shown me earlier in life and its about logical consequences, it sounds simple, but it's deep and important when you had never seen it before, or nobody showed it to you at an early age, this principles were created by Michael Popkin, I'll share each one of them followed by a brief description:

1. Ask the teen to help decide the consequences: Whenever a teenager or a kid is doing something they shouldn’t remind them that if they keep doing what they are doing, you will do something in return. For example, a kid is taking away the toys from his brother, tell him a couple times that if he keeps doing that, he won’t be able to play with the toy in question.
2. Put the consequences in when/then, if/then choices: make sure that your wording in the previous point says if/then or when/then, foe example, if you keep taking the toys without asking, you won’t be able to play for 30 minutes
3. Make sure the consequences is logically connected: try not to say things like “ if you don’t ask for the toy then I’ll make you study an extra hour everyday, or something like that.
4. Give choices you can live with: don’t take things away that will make you feel bad, like saying your kid you won’t feed them or stuff that you will regret later.
5. Keep your tone of voice firm and calm: always show love, remember you are doing them to teach them, not to show power or just to punish them.
6. Give the choice one time, then follow through with the consequence: if you say you are going to take something away for some minutes, or something along those lines, follow through and do it, if you don’t they’ll believe they can get away with it.
7. Expect testing (it may get worse before it gets better): be firm in your if/then statement.
8. Allow your teen to try again after experiencing the consequences.

There are many times where I thought I could’ve been taught this way and I’m pretty sure I could’ve listen better, like when it comes to studying and working, if someone had told me at a young age that “ If you study now, then when you start working, you won’t need to do jobs that will pay bad, and the experience will be worth it in your field of preference, when you study early in life, the more experience you will get as you get older and the more valuable you will be in the workforce“, this sounds much better and more compelling than “you should get good grades”, right? . I’m pretty sure in our communities there are streuggling teenagers that don’t wan’t to go to church or that are not motivated to follow gospel principles, this rules I just mentioned can greatly impact the way we talk and teach teenagers or people struggling, by showing them how doing something or following a commandment can impact their lives and improve it, and how the blessings to those promises and commandments won’t be received in case they are not obeyed.