When I was 15, I went with two friends to New York and we tried to buy fake IDs. I cannot now remember why or even really fathom what we might have had in mind. At any rate, being the kind of people who did not have a plan for how to use fake IDs, it will not surprise you to learn that we had no plan for buying them either. Which is how we found ourselves scammed out of $100 each and with no fake IDs to show for it.
When I returned home, I needed to account for the missing $100, since we hadn’t bought anything. One of the friends and I came up with an elaborate pickpocket story, which our parents saw through in a hot second. The truth came out, and I distinctly remember the conversation in which they told me how disappointed they were. I remember asking, “Am I going to be grounded?”
This had never happened to me before, but I had definitely seen it on television. In the 1990s, grounding was the punishment for teens. On TV, sometimes they even missed prom. I think I just assumed that this was what happened when you, a teen, did something bad.
That was the 1990s, though. Our approaches to discipline for small children have changed over time — for better or worse — but I had not thought much about discipline for teens until a question came across my email. Is grounding still something we’re doing? What does the data say?
And I wondered: What does the data say? Is there any data? And if not, where did this idea come from and does it make sense?
So, what does the data say?
Sadly, more or less nothing. I can find no data evaluating an approach of grounding versus anything else. Any discussion at all of grounding as discipline focuses on theory, not evidence. Even those generally just list grounding along with various other punishments.
This isn’t very surprising, if you think about it. It is difficult enough to do experiments with behavioral interventions with little kids, where you have a lot of control and where they engage in negative behaviors pretty often. With teenagers, the range of what they might do and the frequency mean that you’d need a huge sample to learn anything. And kids are so different, it’s hard to imagine being able to draw strong statistical conclusions.
In a situation like this, is there anything to do? Should we give up on the idea of deciding with evidence?
Maybe not. When scientists have medical questions about humans and they can’t yet experiment on people, they experiment on “model organisms” — mice, rats, pigs, monkeys. People are not pigs, but they aren’t as far from them as we might like to think, and you can often learn something.
Teenagers are a special breed, but we do have two model organisms where we have better data or ideas — namely, younger kids and adults. So what does the data say about managing bad behavior in those groups? In particular, what does the data say about approaches to developing better behaviors?
Discipline for younger kids
I’ve talked extensively about discipline for younger children elsewhere, but this is a place where we do have some data. Notably, behavior systems like 1-2-3 Magic, which focus on younger children and emphasize a system of warnings and consequences, do have data to support them.
In these systems, the central approach to addressing bad behavior is a series of warnings and, if the behavior doesn’t stop, a time-out or loss of some privilege. Generally, these systems also emphasize not discussing the behavior after the time-out. The time-out happens, it’s over, and we do not revisit why the behavior occurred.
The goal of these systems is, broadly, to teach children how to regulate behavior and, over time, to change behavioral patterns. By clearly communicating that some behaviors are not acceptable, the idea is that kids learn boundaries and self-control.
These systems are targeted to children ages 2 to 10 or so — basically, young kids. And they do seem to improve behavior.
This evidence is relevant here because one way to think about grounding is as an extension — literally, an extension — of a time-out. If it works for little kids, maybe it will work for big ones.
“Discipline” for adults
On the other end, we have the model of how we deal with “behavior issues” in adults — namely, the other adults in our household. Of course, you are not disciplining your partner. But there are times when our partners do things that we see as problematic, when they behave badly, or we do.
In our ideal moments, we approach this with discussion. Fixing issues in marriage isn’t about giving the other person a time-out, even if we would like to sometimes (and a cooling-off period for both people is often a good idea). It’s about talking about why people behaved in the way they did, what their motivations were, trying to understand how things might go differently next time.
The reason this is the approach is that we assume the adults in our household can think about and understand their emotions, at least to some extent. If you ask them why they did something, they have the capacity to explain. This is not the case with a 5-year-old. They don’t know why they do what they do, so a detailed discussion isn’t going to help. Clear and simple boundaries are the only meaningful approach.
Teenagers: Are they more like 5-year-olds or adults?
We have, then, two models that call for fundamentally different approaches. Simple boundaries, without much discussion, have been shown to be effective for young children. It is not the approach that we take with other adults, where we instead tend to want to talk it out. The question is: which model appears to best capture your teenager — are they a 5-year-old or an adult?
Obviously, they are neither. A 15-year-old is much better able to reason and understand than a 5-year-old, but their frontal cortex isn’t developed like an adult’s. If you ask your teenager why they did something, they’ll be better able to answer than your kindergartener, but the honest answer some of the time is “My judgment was poor; I didn’t think it through.”
This intermediate situation means that neither “model organism” is ideal. Grounding is a clear extension of the young-kid time-out model, and it probably doesn’t make sense for many complicated teenage behaviors. On the other hand, teenagers still need clear boundaries and still need you to be the authority. Sometimes this will mean doing things that look a bit like grounding. If your kid abuses their car privileges, it may make sense to limit their car access.
But if they aren’t completing their homework on time, taking away their car privileges doesn’t really make sense. A better approach is likely to be figuring out what needs to change to make time for homework — maybe it’s removing the phone during homework hours, or changing extracurricular time. The problems are more varied than with a little kid, and the solutions have to be more varied too.
One of my old colleagues used to say, “There’s no substitute for thinking.” For me, this applies nowhere more strongly than parenting teenagers. It is extremely difficult to outline a set of “rules” the way we have been able to with younger kids. This is why it is so hard.
The Bottom Line
- The data we have on time-outs for small children is compelling, but a teenager isn’t a 5-year-old, and grounding as a single-purpose approach to behavior change doesn’t make sense.
(As for my fake ID debacle, in the end, I didn’t get grounded — I think my parents decided the self-imposed shame spiral was punishment enough, and indeed I didn’t pursue another fake ID until college. But that’s another story.)
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