Welcome back to Feeding the Mouth That Bites You, a weekly podcast guide on parenting teens and launching them into the world.

I'm Jessica Pfeiffer, and as always, I'm joined by psychologist and author, Dr. Ken Wilgus.

Hey, Dr. Ken.

Jessica, how are you?

I'm good.

I think this is going to be a great episode.

But I think it's really funny because we are discussing grounding today on this episode. And I think that our kids think that we are spending quite a bit of our time thinking up terrible

ways to punish them. And we're actually proving them right today, right?

Yes, we sit around cauldrons of weird potions and make up mean things to do to our kids.

I do say in the book, though, because the alternative to appropriate punishment, whatever it is, is yelling. And so I think it is a

moderately loving thing to do to be creative about how you're going to, what consequences you'll

give to certain behavior. But we get a lot of questions about grounding, which usually, you know,

that's the thing you do with something really

big, right? Well, sometimes I do it with small stuff. Like you're being a pain. That's it.

You can't go there with your friend. It's such a specific thing, isn't it? You've now broken the

rule of, quote, being a pain. So go to your room.

No, but there are quite a few things that I feel like if I know ahead of time, hey, these are some tools in my pocket,

then it keeps me from yelling about it over and over again, repeating myself and seeming

like a fool. But it also gives teeth to your, you know, what you want to see happen. It doesn't

just let your kid off the hook every time. Like yelling does. yelling lets them off the hook.

It's not really a punishment. And then I think, too, I get so flabbergasted in the moment. Sometimes I'm just like, well, that's it. You're grounded forever. Yes. You know, it's stupid. It doesn't make any sense.

And my kids are looking like, okay. Right, right. That's exactly right. So having some ideas ahead of time

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