Roxane Lehmann, Ph.D.

Grandma Gracie’s Theory About Rules

Season 4, Episode 24

The Framework

Tonight on Modern Family’s season finale the three households travel to a retirement village in Florida to mourn the death of Phil’s mother. The episode, though, is as much about rules and rule breaking as it is about saying goodbye to Gracie. In fact, it turns out Gracie had her own theory about rules.

Upon their arrival the family is greeted by a bossy security guard who warns, “We run a tight ship here at Leisure Park,” and rides around on a Segway enforcing pointless rules. She lights into Phil for having breadcrumbs in his pocket (how did she know?) because there’s no duck feeding allowed, and Haley and Alex get kicked out of an empty pool because it’s for residence only. The girls respond in character: Alex as a rule follower; Haley not so much.

Cam charms a bunch of mahjong-playing senior women and then calls one of them out for taking the winning tile out of her pocket and another for swiping a whole plate of cookies into her purse. He’s right; they’re wrong. But what’s the point of stirring things up among the players? Just stir the punch, Cam.

Meanwhile Alex is miffed to find that Grandma Gracie, who she felt so close to, left her only an old lighter. Later, though, after finding the note and learning the meaning behind the gift, she uses the lighter to set-off fireworks at the funeral. She’s sure her grandmother would approve – even if it does break with traditional memorial service protocol.

Flipping the Frame: My Notes

Almost all of us break rules sometimes. Teens are especially prone to doing so. In the past we blamed teen rule breaking on peer pressure and rebellion – wanting to do things their parents don’t do just because they don’t do them. We now know that rapid changes taking place inside the teen brain also play a big role.

One way to think about the brain is to think of it as a balance between two different systems: an emotional pleasure seeking system that pushes us to seek rewards and go for excitement and novelty and a rational system that plans ahead and puts the brakes on impulses. These two systems are changing during adolescence, and the changes are uneven. While the rational system (in charge of braking) takes its time to mature, the emotional system gets a kick-start in early adolescence and goes into overdrive. Researchers have likened this to having an unskilled, thrill seeking driver at the wheel of a car with a high-powered engine and brakes that barely work.

This means that one of the most protective things we can do for our teens is to help with the braking action. But because our teens are making more and more decisions without our supervision, we cannot be their protector as we were when they were younger. Instead we provide protection by clearly drawing lines between right and wrong so our teens will know where the boundaries are.

It’s up to our teens, though, to decide whether or not to stay on the right side of the line. So we need to win our teens’ cooperation if our rules are to offer any protection. And we have the best chance of selling our teens on the rules if we keep things simple.

We need a few simple rules about the things we’re most concerned about – each with a purpose that’s easy for us to explain and for our teens to understand. Here are three rules that fit the bill:

• Be safe. Most teens underestimate bad consequences. Their still developing brains are like a magnet for trouble. So Be safe is about helping our teens stay away from things that could hurt them – things like smoking, drinking, drugs, driving while under the influence or riding with someone who is, getting arrested, and unsafe sex.

• Be respectful. We often find ourselves arguing with our teens, and one of our biggest areas of disagreement is respect. So be respectful is about helping our teens act respectfully towards other people, other people’s property, and to themselves. This rule addresses concerns such as acting rude, avoiding schoolwork, breaking curfew, neglecting home chores, lying, arguing with siblings or us, cheating, and stealing.

• Be in contact. There are now things our teens would rather we not know. Because they fear that we’ll interfere with their fun. And because they want to protect us from what they think is needless worry. So be in contact is about helping weed out our teens’ bad decisions and reinforce their good ones. This rule is about our teens keeping us informed about who they’re with, what they’re doing, where they are, and where they’re going – especially if their plans change. And it’s about our teens letting us know when something unexpected happens and how they plan to deal with it.

Any issue can be matched to one or more of these three ways to be. Plus these rules give us a ready reason when they ask why: Because you need to be safe. You need to be respectful. You need to be in contact. Over time, we’ll float more information about each of these rules by them – always keeping our messages simple and brief.

Resources: “7 Things Your Teenager Won’t Tell You” by J. M. Lippincott & R. M. Deutsch

The BottomLine

Grandma Gracie (in note left for Alex): Alex, who I love so dearly, who’s probably too much like me for her own good, don’t be afraid to break the rules.

At the end of the day our teens must decide for themselves how to act. Whether we like it or not, it will always be our teen’s choice whether or not to abide by our rules. And, frankly, most teens are more like Haley than Alex; they’re not afraid to break the rules – particularly rules that don’t make sense.

So we should expect our teens to test our limits. But we can help tip the balance back in the right direction by making and enforcing rules that our teens can understand and respect. We can link our discussions and actions back to three simple rules: Be safe. Be respectful. Be in contact.

Flipping the Frame: Your Parenting Experiences

• What are your rules for your teen? Has your teen tested the limits you’ve set? What do the discussions with your teen about rules sound like?

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Reframe: Will Luke Be the Last Man Standing?

Season 4, Episode 16 (Rebroadcast from 2/20/13)

The Framework

The verb “fall” and its various forms like “fell,” “falling,” and “falls” help shape the storylines of tonight’s episode. In one storyline Cam is doing a movie-theme photo shoot with Lily and baby Joe as his models. All goes fine until Lily glues a wig to Joe’s head. Mitch and Cam eventually cut the wig off – and with it much of Joe’s hair. Now they’ve got another problem: Who’s going to take the fall and tell Gloria?

Woven into tonight’s storylines about falling there’s a string of con artistry – all orchestrated by Luke. And with perfect sitcom logic, Jay becomes the fall guy for baby Joe’s haircut when Luke blackmails him by revealing that he’s on to how Jay’s team won the bowling tournament: They broke league rules by subbing in a pro.

As it turns out, Luke also knows a thing or two about breaking rules:

Luke (to camera): I have to get [a] letter signed because I failed my assignment on the Revolutionary War. I recreated the Battle of Bunker Hill using one of my old science projects. Seemed re-revolutionary to me…

(To view the original post, click here.)

Flipping the Frame: From My Life as a Parent

We send our kids to school to learn content and skills and how to figure things out. But in many ways we parents are in the best position to teach our kids about how to work and to encourage them to work hard. So what do you do when you have a kid like Luke who seems to be always looking for shortcuts when it comes to their schoolwork?

My son was one of those kids. Try as his father and I might to model the advantages of hard work, our son’s preferences as a teen were different. I’ll never forget the supper one night when my husband asked our son, then 16-years-old, about his plans for the evening. Upon learning that the plans didn’t include any studying, my husband suggested that our son needed to take his schoolwork more seriously. Our son then turned to his father and, using his best “get out of my life” teen voice, told his father that he didn’t want to be anything like him. Our son saw his father working almost all the time without the big social life packed full of fun activities that our son craved for himself.

When your teen rejects your model – and they probably will to some degree – it’s important to remember you don’t need to accept their values or agree with their ideas. But respect is like air to teens; take it away and that’s all they can think about. So if you want to be able to influence your teen, you do have to respect that their preferences may be different than yours. And the wisest approach when it comes to school (and most other things that don’t involve their health or safety) is to try to strike a balance by providing some guidance while giving them some room to find out who they are. A fitting first response at our dinner table that night – the one I’d wished we’d been smart enough to have – might have gone something like this:

You don’t have to choose the work ethic we’ve chosen. You can choose to have a bigger social life. But to be successful and have the advantages that come with success – including the lifestyle we enjoy – require hard work.

Right now your work is school. You have to go. And you have to get passing grades. We hope you’ll do much more than that. We hope you’ll work hard enough to excel at school. But the choice about how hard to work is mostly yours.

It’s our job to help you understand that the choices you make about how hard to work now are affecting the habits you’re developing and the options you’ll have when it comes time to choose what to do next. If you want one of the cool, in-demand jobs and the matching lifestyle, you’ll have to do more than pass. The cool jobs are snatched-up by people who learn the self-discipline of working hard on stuff – even when that stuff is boring and seems irrelevant.

Keeping our emotions in check while having this kind of ongoing conversation is part of the safety net our teens are counting on us to provide. Here are a few other things that can help us strike the right balance when it comes to our kids’ schoolwork:

• Taking a longsighted view of their education. Our kids’ willingness to work hard is the best predictor of how much they’ll ultimately achieve. So rather than acting as if grades are the most important thing and punishing, threatening, and bribing them to get A’s, we’re at our best when we take a longsighted view and focus on instilling a willingness to work hard and a love of learning.

We can teach our teens to focus more on effort and learning by:

Asking more about their learning process and their opinions about their effort and less about the grade. (You can find a sampling of questions that foster a longsighted view of learning here.)

Sharing with them the findings from recent brain research, showing that learning prompts neurons in their brain to grow new and stronger connections. Tell them that their brains are like muscles and that the harder they work, the smarter they’ll get.

• Organizing your family’s routine to make schoolwork a priority. It’s wise not to impose more structure than our teens need, but if your teen seems low on willpower when it comes to getting at their schoolwork, try collaborating with them to establish a homework routine. Together agree on a regular starting time and the duration for study. A good rule of thumb is 10 minutes of study per school night for every grade in school. So for 7th graders this would mean 70 minutes a night, for 8th graders, 80 minutes and so on. And if you have an unmotivated teen who is floundering, consider rewarding them for regularly getting their homework done. (You can read more about using money to bribe your teen here.)

• Helping them get started on big projects. This is particularly important if your teen procrastinates when it comes to schoolwork. (You can read more about helping your teen overcome procrastination here.)

• Continuing to be a role model. Our highest form of influence in our teens’ lives is what we model on a day-to-day basis. So if you have a teen who seems to reject your hardworking model (as mine did), you can redouble your efforts to share the highlights of your day with them to model work as fascinating. And perhaps nothing we do can model the importance of hard work better than letting our kids regularly see us doing some type of mind work or quiet work while they’re doing their homework. Yes, we’ve worked hard all day. But our teens will argue that they have too. And you have to admit that demanding they get at their homework while we settle into watch our favorite TV show doesn’t send a particularly clear message.

Flipping the Frame: Your Parenting Experiences

• If you have a teen who’s a bit like Luke when it comes to schoolwork, what has your approach been? If you’ve done some tinkering to try to change your teen’s work habits, what have you tried?

Flipping the Frame: What’s in the Picture for Next Week?

Next week there will be a brand new Modern Family episode and a brand new post to go with it. See you next Monday!

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