Home Rules Contract: A Guide for Families

A home rules contract is a written set of expectations that the adults in a household hold for the teens and preteens in it. It contains basic rules, the consequence when a rule is broken, and the privilege that stays in place when it is kept.

What It Is For

The point is accountability on both sides: your teen is answerable for their behavior, and you keep a reasonable amount of control without renegotiating every night. It also teaches something portable — that rules carry consequences, which is as true at school and in the legal system as it is at home. Be clear about what it will not do: a contract does not resolve the feelings between you and your teen. It is a working agreement that lowers the noise while you sort out the behavior.

Who Signs It

Every parent figure the teen has contact with should help create and enforce it. That includes biological parents, step-parents, adoptive parents, custodial and noncustodial adults who are responsible for the teen for any part of a day, and legal guardians.

If you are divorced or separated, this is the item to set your differences aside for. Kids will work the gap between two adults who disagree and will follow a united front far more readily. You do not have to agree about anything else — you do have to agree about this. When two households genuinely cannot get there, a family therapist or other neutral third party can help you build a version everyone will hold.

Include

• Every adult with a parenting role, across both households
• Every teen and preteen in the family, not only the one whose behavior prompted this
• Anyone who will be asked to enforce a consequence

Leave out

• Adults living in the home who are not involved in setting limits — a visiting aunt or uncle, for example
• Anyone who will not enforce what you have written, since inconsistent enforcement is what makes a contract collapse

Include all the kids even if only one is struggling. A contract aimed at a single child reads as unfair and gets refused. If a sibling who already follows the rules objects, tell them honestly that this should be easy for them, that you want their input, and that it is a family effort — which establishes that everyone in the household is accountable, at every age.

Who Writes It

Give a blank copy to every person who will sign, teens included, and ask each of them to fill in the rules, consequences and rewards they think belong in it. A teen who is genuinely heard in this process is far more likely to keep the agreement than one who is handed a list and told to comply.

What parents usually find: Teens often propose stricter punishments for themselves than their parents would have set, and many parents end up softening them. Teens also raise items the adults overlooked entirely. When a teen's contribution improves the contract, say so out loud.

Read your children's suggestions on your own before bringing them to the family, and cut anything written to take a swipe at a sibling. Then negotiate. The final contract should be a compromise that took everyone's ideas into account — with a few items that are simply not negotiable, such as a curfew later than the law in your area allows for that age. If your teen refuses to take part, let them know the contract goes ahead either way and will be followed to the letter — choosing not to write it means choosing not to shape it.

What Makes a Consequence Work

Consequences should be progressive. It is easy, in an effort to get tough, to ground a teen for weeks over a single incident — and weeks of grounding on a first offense mostly produces resentment. A consequence is meant to be an unpleasant learning experience that makes the behavior less appealing next time, nothing more. Make them natural and logical: wherever you can, tie the consequence to the behavior it follows. And only write down consequences you are genuinely willing and able to enforce — an unenforced consequence makes the whole document worthless.

The Five Steps

Building the contract

• 1. Pick a maximum of five behaviors to work on. Prioritize the ones causing the most trouble — legal, school, or medical, including medication that is not being taken as prescribed.
• 2. State the expectation for each one clearly and concretely, so there is no room for "I didn't understand what you meant."
• 3. State the consequence for breaking the rule and the privilege for keeping it, both specific enough to be unarguable.
• 4. Set a date when the contract can be revised or renegotiated, based on how things have gone. Tell your teen they can earn more or fewer privileges before then, and invite them to say what they would like to earn.
• 5. Confirm with every other parent figure that all of you agree and will enforce it exactly as written. If you do not agree, revise until you do.

A rule written all the way through: Expectation: attend all therapy sessions, weekly individual and weekly family, and take medication as prescribed. · Consequence: no privileges — car, phone, screens, going out with friends — until this is met. Not negotiable. · Privilege: earns your trust, and better tools for handling stress.

Behaviors Families Commonly Choose

Possible priorities

• Curfew
• Chores
• School behavior and grades
• Smoking or vaping
• Phone use
• Computer and screen use
• Use of the car
• Alcohol and drug use
• How anger is expressed, including profanity and violence
• Conflict resolution, which helps when two siblings are constantly at each other
• Running away
• Taking prescribed medication as directed
• Attendance at therapy sessions

These are starting points, not a template. Choose based on your own household. Other items worth considering are abusive language toward family members, homework where grades have slipped, and any physical violence toward family members, including pushing, shoving and slapping.

Violence is the one line with no home consequence: For everyone's safety, call the police for any violent episode intended to injure a family member or destroy their property. It sounds harsh to call the police on your own child. It is kinder than letting violence go unanswered until it escalates into something that lands them in court anyway — and it settles, once, that violence is never tolerated here.

A Sample Contract

Three worked examples

Example — Rule: No alcohol or drug use. · Consequence: Grounded for one week. Grounding means staying home, no friends as guests, no phone calls. Each later offense adds a week — a second time is two weeks, and so on. · Privilege: Continues going out with friends and using the car.

Example — Rule: Home right after school unless arrangements were made in advance. Tells a parent where they are going, and is home by 8:00 p.m. on school nights and 11:00 p.m. on other nights. · Consequence: For one week, comes home twice as early as they were late. Thirty minutes late means curfew is an hour earlier all week. · Privilege: Keeps the current curfew and builds trust. Some families let a teen work up to a later curfew — never later than the legal curfew where you live.

Example — Rule: Completes all assigned chores to the standard the parents set. A written list, on a whiteboard in the kitchen, removes the argument about what was assigned. · Consequence: No privileges until the chores are done — screens, having friends over, going out. · Privilege: Keeps full access to the privileges of the house, including screens, friends visiting, and going out.

Spell out what grounding means: "Grounded" on its own is an invitation to negotiate. Write down exactly what it includes so there is nothing left to argue about later.

The contract is the referee, not you: Most fights about rules are really fights about whether the rule exists. Once it is written down, agreed to, and signed by everyone, you stop being the person inventing a punishment in the heat of the moment and start being the person who keeps the agreement — which is a much easier role to hold on a bad night.

Go deeper

Ready for more? These lessons pick up where this worksheet leaves off.

• Parenting, from The Neurodiverse Couples Repair Program. The parenting session for neurodiverse couples: understand your child together, agree on what counts, share the load, and protect the couple.
• Your Parenting Style Under Pressure, from Parenting Autism. Why stress pushes good parents into laxness or over-reactivity, the short-fuse neuroscience, the Parenting Scale, and repair after you lose it.
• Your Family Operating Manual, from Parenting Autism. Pull the whole course into one living family manual, with a fridge-door page and a weekly huddle.