"Convince me"

I hope the "convince me" method will be the one I favour when my children are teens. I love this concept. The idea is that, once you have raised your children to their teens, it is time to let them start making decisions. If you are authoritarian until they leave home, they will be unprepared to make rational, smart, difficult decisions on their own. So those teen years are perfect for helping them to learn how to make good choices.

That being said, I don't believe you can leave them all to themselves, since hormones and other cray brain activity can impare good judgement. Enter the "convince me" method. When my instinct is to say "no" but my teen is firmly on the other side of the fence, instead of just saying "no," I say "convince me." This will hopefully mean that my child will go away and think about the situation, the outcomes, the problems, the solutions. I'm a pretty good debater, and they will soon realize that they will have to think out the situation from all angles if they are truly going to convince me. The end result of this method is that eventually by the time my kids come to me with a request, they'll have thought it out completely before hand, thus equipping themselves with good decision making skills.