Early adolescence, Few responsibility.

While parents consider that preaching is enough and allow confronting results go, not confessing to the sufferer, not hearing from the sufferer how incorrect their actions are, and not making recompense to the sufferer. Just telling children they did incorrect is the simple way out.

Symbolically speaking, liberty is the adolescent's "drug" of selection both for the latitude of action and the excitement it offers. Teenagers long for liberty in ways most kids never do. Liberty is the possibility to open up an elder world of experience, to experiment and to discover the thrill of daring the unknown and sometimes doing the forbidden.

Now the child relationship becomes more challenging and abrasive as healthy adolescents start to push for more freedom to grow as soon as they can get it and healthy parents act to restrain that push within the limits of safety and responsibility. This is the ongoing conflict of interests that plays out over the ten to twelve years that begins with the separation from childhood in late elementary or early middle school and ends with the entry into young adulthood some ten to twelve years later when functional independence is finally gained.

What drives the adolescent push for freedom is an innate need to break the old boundaries of childhood to create more room to grow and act more grown up. What drives parental restraint is an innate need to direct and protect the adolescent from harm, particularly harm of his or her own making.

This is where setting limits comes in. Parents restrict freedoms in order to moderate the risks involved, only permitting more freedoms as evidence of responsibility is given.

It is unpopular for parents to set limits, taking stands for the adolescent's best interests against what he or she wants. Furthermore, it takes consistency and supervision to make them stick. Parental inconsistency sends a damaging double message - "sometimes we mean it and sometimes we don't," the young person usually betting on "don't." The adolescent isn't grateful for the parental efforts on his or her behalf, but usually resents them instead. "You never let me do anything!" Now thankless parenting has begun.

Most of all, it takes the willingness of parents to close the loop of responsibility when social limits are broken to show the adolescent that rules mean business, that social rules are here to stay. How is this done?

Consider three common social limit-breaking activities that can occur during early adolescence -vandalizing, and shoplifting. They are all usually done in the company of peers in the spirit of shared adventure, bonding, and support. At this age, what none of these young people would dare to do alone, all will encourage each other to do together.

For example, the seventh grader has two friends over for the night and about 2:00 A.M., long after parents are asleep, one of them gets this fun idea. They decide to make a threatening phone call to the old guy down at the end of block, and the result is very satisfying. He gets really upset. Thinking they have pulled it off, they are congratulating themselves when the phone rings and one of the parents picks it up. Turns out the man had Caller ID.

What do parents do? They close the loop of responsibility. They march the three young miscreants down the street to confront the victim of their prank, to hear from him what it felt like to get a call like that, and then to arrange some reparation to be made.

Or, to show a guy they all agree to dislike how much they dislike him, a group of girls sneak out and egg and oreo his parents' car. Next day they boast about it to the boy who tells his parents who call the parents of the girls. So what do the parents do? They close the loop of responsibility. They have the girls confront the victims of their vandalizing, hearing what it felt like to be attacked in this way, cleaning off the car, and coming up with some reparation to make to the boy and his parents for damage done. Vandalizing that began as girls paying mean attention to the boy ended up bringing unwanted consequences to themselves.

Or, a group of friends, not to get anything particular they wanted but to see what they could get away with, decide to shop lift CD's from a store. The police are called and they are taken to a detention center where one young man calls home. So what do his parents do?

They listen to the teary voice, promise to come down right away, wait a couple hours, then after signing out the unhappy adolescent, drive away but not, as the youngster observes, the familiar way back home. "This isn't the way home, where are we going?" he asks. "We are going back to the store," reply the parents. "I don't want to go back to the store," protests the young person.

"I know you don't," they explain, "but that is what we are going to do. And when we get there, you're going to confess to the manager. You're going to hear what it felt like to be stolen from, and then work out some way to pay that person back for what you've done." Shop lifting that began as a good idea with peers ended up as a bad experience for the adolescent.

The rule for parenting around social limit breaking in early adolescence is this. Usually, the young person is unaware of larger risks that he or she was taking, so parents have to spell them out - what might have happened for the worse, but luckily did not. For example, what the early adolescent thinks is just for fun overlooks the possibly serious side. Thus frightening an "old guy" may be less funny if the threatening prank call succeeds, the man who has a heart condition gets really scared, and fear provokes a medical emergency. Doesn't seem so funny now, does it?

Most important, they have the adolescent declare what they did to the sufferer face to face, hear what it felt like to be the sufferer, and make reparation to the sufferer for injury that was done. This is how the loop of responsibility is closed.

While parents fail to do this and dismiss societal limit breaking in early teenage years as guiltless harm or simply deal with the problem discretely by punishing the infraction at home, they are likely to encourage more significant limit breaking later on.

I'm not hearing anything new here. I believe there is a certain amount of knowledge  in your basic suggestion but it isn't going to be super effective in the long term, particularly given that the attitude of the parents is not obviously addressed. From what I know, many people who passionately think that this is the correct way to parent end up in a never-ending cycle that doesn't get really bad but just kind of stays the same until the "child" outgrows the stage and break frees of his or her parents so they do not have to deal with it any longer.